A contractor's website that produces quote requests fits into six pages: one page per type of work — three to five, depending on your trades — a projects page, an about page with real faces, and a contact page. No blog at launch, no carousel, no ambient video at the top of the home page. Allow three to six weeks of production if your job photos already exist. And it is the photography, not the code, that delays almost every project of this kind.
This piece covers what the site should contain and what to refuse to put on it. It deals with one lever out of three: if you are looking for the full order of work — profile, site, advertising — it is in our marketing plan for a construction company.
One page per type of work, not a services page
This is the structural decision with the most impact, and the one most often got wrong. A contractor doing bathrooms, kitchens and basements is talking to three different customers, who are looking for three different things and share neither budget nor worries. A single page that adds them together answers none of the three well, and it has no chance of ranking for a specific job type followed by a city name.
Three to five pages are enough. Beyond that you manufacture thin pages that end up competing with each other. Each page uses the same skeleton: exactly what you do, three or four real projects with before and after, some indication of price range, the process in steps, and the form. It is the principle behind our own trade pages, including the renovation page.
The photos are the project
In this trade the site does not sell text, it sells proof. A visitor choosing between three contractors looks at the photos first, and often last as well. A stock image is spotted in a second and costs you credibility: it says the exact opposite of what you meant to say.
What you need is your own jobs, shot from the same spot before and after, phone held at eye level, daylight. Six to eight projects are enough to launch. The discipline lies elsewhere: taking the before photo before you start, which nobody does spontaneously. Without it the after is worth nothing, because the customer cannot measure the distance travelled.
Two details that matter more than they look: name the neighbourhood or municipality under each project, which helps the visitor picture themselves there and helps local search at the same time; and show at least one photo of the crew at work. A customer about to let strangers into their home for three weeks is buying faces as much as a result.
What has to be readable without scrolling
Four things, on every page, in the first screen: what you do in one sentence somebody outside the trade would understand, the area you serve, a tappable phone number, and immediate proof — a review score, a number of years, a number of jobs. Nothing else.
The service area deserves to be written in plain sight, not guessed from the address in the footer. It removes out-of-territory requests before they cost you a call, and it reassures the ones inside the radius. The full first-screen structure is broken down in our piece on the seven sections of a home page.
The customer is not looking for the best-looking site. He is working out whether you are real, whether you come to his street, and whether you will answer.
The form, and the button that really gets used
Three or four fields: name, phone, postal code, type of work. The postal code and the type of work are the only two worth defending, because they turn an anonymous contact into something you can qualify before the first call. Everything else — full address, budget, preferred date, ten-line description — takes two minutes on the phone and is not worth the requests it costs you.
But the most used button on a contractor's site is not the form: it is the phone number. In renovation, a large share of visitors arrive on a mobile and call directly. A number that is not tappable, or that only appears in the footer, loses those requests without leaving any trace in your statistics. The rest of the tuning — targeting, landing page, follow-up — is covered in our method for generating renovation quote requests.
What not to put on it
The carousel at the top of the page: the visitor only sees the first image and the rest cost loading time for nothing. The ambient video that plays by itself: it delays display on an ordinary mobile connection, which is to say for half your visitors. The paragraph about your passion for craftsmanship: every one of your competitors writes the same sentence, and it separates nobody from anybody.
The blog too, not at launch. Writing articles pays off once the trade pages exist, rank and convert — not before. A contractor publishing one article a month on a site whose service pages are empty is investing in the upper floor of a house with no foundation.
Speed, because it all happens on a phone
Job photos come off phones at several megabytes each. Dropped into a page as they are, they produce a site that takes eight seconds to appear at the kerbside. That is the number one cause of slowness on contractor websites, ahead of plugins and ahead of hosting. Resizing and compressing before uploading is not a technical detail: it is half the performance work.
The rest is upkeep. A construction site accumulates photos, gallery plugins and forms, and degrades quietly — which is exactly what a maintenance plan is for, as much for speed as for security.
What happens after launch
A new site produces nothing on its own. It has to be connected to your Google Business Profile, checked to make sure the trade pages surface on local searches — the mechanism is in the piece on local search — and above all set up so requests land on a phone rather than in an inbox read in the evening. Answering within five minutes still changes a site's return more than its appearance does.
Add to it, later only, city pages if you cover several municipalities, and written answers to the questions your customers actually ask — those get picked up both by search engines and by the assistants that summarise the web, a field where contractors are still barely present.
If you are torn between rebuilding the site and fixing what you have, book the diagnostic call: we look at your trade pages, your photos and your mobile speed, and you leave knowing which of the two is justified. Our approach to building websites always starts from that question.
Brand identity for a small business — the promise the site has to hold up.
When to redesign your website — the six signals that justify a rebuild.