Websites for Contractors

Six things, and most trades sites are missing at least three of them. A phone number that is tappable and visible on every screen without scrolling, because the majority of your visitors are on a phone and half of them intend to call rather than read. A separate page for each service you sell, because search engines match specific pages to specific searches and one combined services page competes for nothing. Pages for the towns you actually drive to, since local results shift heavily with where the searcher is standing. A real gallery of your own work, because trades buying decisions are visual and stock photos are transparently not your jobs. Reviews pulled onto your own site rather than left only on Google. And your license, insurance, and bonding stated plainly, because a homeowner about to let a stranger into their house is looking for exactly that.

If you want to be found for those services, yes. Think about what somebody actually types. They do not search "plumbing services." They search "water heater replacement," "slab leak repair," "sewer line camera," or "tankless water heater install." A single services page mentioning all of those in a bulleted list is not really about any of them, so it competes weakly for all of them. A dedicated page for water heater replacement, with a few hundred words about what the job involves, what it typically costs, how long it takes, and photos of you doing it, has a genuine chance at that search. This is the single biggest structural difference between trades sites that produce calls and trades sites that sit there.

More than for almost any other kind of business, for a reason specific to your customers. Your visitors are frequently standing in a flooded utility room, sitting in a truck, or looking at a roof, on a phone, on cellular, sometimes with a weak signal in a rural area. They are not browsing, they are in a hurry, and they have three tabs open with your competitors in them. A site that takes six seconds to paint has already lost to the one that took two. That is why we build light on purpose: compressed and correctly sized images, minimal scripts, caching in front of every page, and the phone number in the first chunk of HTML so it renders before anything decorative does.

It should reach your phone as a text within seconds, not sit in an email inbox until you check it after supper. The research on this is unambiguous and it matches what every contractor we work with reports: the company that responds first wins a disproportionate share of the jobs, and the advantage decays fast. A form submitted at 8pm on a Saturday that gets answered Monday morning is usually a job that went to somebody else on Saturday night. Every form we build sends to your email and texts your phone at the same time, and we can route it to multiple people if you have a crew leader or an office manager who should also see it.

Our starter sites begin at $1,499 and business sites at $3,499, quoted as a fixed number in writing before we start. Most trades businesses want the business tier, and for a specific reason: the whole strategy above depends on having a page for each service and each town, which is more pages than the starter tier includes. A one-truck operation doing a single service in one town is genuinely well served by the starter site. A company doing plumbing, HVAC, and drain work across four counties is not, and squeezing that into five pages wastes the money rather than saving it. Hosting and the care plan start at $49 a month.

Show ranges, show what drives the number, and show a real starting figure where you honestly can. Most contractors resist this and the resistance is understandable, because every job is different and a number in isolation invites an argument. But refusing to say anything at all costs you more than it protects. Homeowners have been trained to expect at least a ballpark, and the company that gives one earns trust while the company that says "contact us for pricing" reads as evasive. The version that works is honest framing: what a typical job in this category runs, what pushes it higher, and what would need to be seen in person before anybody can be exact. That filters out the tire-kickers and warms up the serious calls.

They are the most persuasive content a trades website can have and almost nobody organizes them properly. The mistake is one giant gallery page with sixty unlabeled photos, which is a nice scrapbook and a poor sales tool. What works is putting the relevant photos on the relevant service page, captioned with what the job was, roughly where it was, and what was involved. A roof replacement in a specific neighborhood, with a before shot and an after shot and two sentences about the problem, does more work than forty unlabeled images. Take them on your phone. Quality matters far less than being real and being labeled.

Yes, and the two work together rather than substituting for each other. Your Google Business Profile is often where the first impression happens, and for emergency searches it may be where the call comes from. But the profile links to your website, and Google weighs what it finds there when deciding how to rank the profile. A profile pointing at a thin or broken site is working with one hand tied. More practically, the profile cannot hold service pages, cannot host a real gallery organized by job type, cannot run a quote form that texts you, and can be suspended without warning by a system with no phone number. Own the site, feed the profile, and let each do what it is good at.

It should, and it is easy to do if somebody is actually maintaining it. HVAC swings hard between cooling and heating, roofing and gutters spike after storms, concrete and excavation follow the weather, and landscaping and sod run on a season. Moving the relevant service to the front of the homepage, publishing a short seasonal page a few weeks before the demand arrives, and updating hours for the busy stretch all take minutes and all pay off. That kind of change is exactly what our $49 a month care plan covers, usually the same business day you ask. The sites that quietly outperform are almost always the ones somebody touches every month.