What a contractor website needs, page by page

The home page: say what you do and where

A visitor should know three things within a few seconds of landing: what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Put those in the first screen on a phone. Your trade and your area in the headline, a phone number that dials when tapped, and one clear button to request a quote.

Below that, the home page is a directory. Short blocks that link to each service, a line about your service area with links to area pages, a few recent reviews, and a reason to pick you that a competitor couldn't copy word for word. "Quality work at fair prices" says nothing. "Same crew from estimate to cleanup, and we send photos when the job is done" says something.

Skip the slider, the autoplay video and the stock photo of a smiling family. They slow the page and say nothing about your company.

Service pages: one per job you want more of

A single "Services" page with a bulleted list gives search engines and buyers very little to go on. Both need a page that is clearly about one thing. If you do roof replacement, roof repair and gutters, that is three pages.

A strong service page answers what a buyer would ask on the first call:

• What the service includes, and what it doesn't.
• Signs you need it, in plain words a homeowner would use.
• How the job works from first call to final walkthrough.
• How you price it (a range, a site visit, or a flat rate, whichever is true).
• Materials, warranties or guarantees you actually offer.
• Photos of your own work, labeled with what was done.
• A quote button and your phone number.

Write the page so a homeowner could forward it to a spouse and they'd understand the job. That same clarity is what helps search engines and AI assistants match the page to a question.

Service-area pages: only where you can be specific

Area pages can help you show up when someone searches a town name with your trade. They also carry risk. Google's spam policies give city or region pages that funnel visitors to a single page, and near-duplicate pages that look more like a list of search results than a site you can browse, as examples of doorway abuse. Twenty copies of the same page with only the town name swapped is the kind of page set that policy warns against.

Write an area page when you can say something true and useful about working there: the housing stock, the permit office, the jobs you do most often in that town, how quickly you can get there. If you can't, list the town on your main service-area page instead. We cover this in detail in our guide to service-area pages that rank.

About, reviews and FAQ pages

About. Buyers are letting you into their home. Show the owner's name and face, how long you've been at it, who is on the crew, and what you're insured for. Real photos beat polished ones.

Reviews. Link to your Google Business Profile reviews and quote a few with permission and first names. Don't edit them. The FTC's 2024 rule on consumer reviews bars fake reviews, rewards conditioned on a review being positive (or negative), and claiming the reviews you display are all or most of what customers wrote when you've held some back because of a low rating or negative sentiment. If your page shows a handful, don't call them all of your reviews. One technical note: Google says that if a business controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness structured data are ineligible for the star review feature. So don't add review markup to your own reviews page expecting stars in search results.

FAQ. Collect the questions your office answers every week. Do you need to be home? How long does it take? Do you pull permits? What happens if it rains? Write short, direct answers. This page saves phone time and gives search engines plain-language answers to match.

The quote form and contact paths

Each extra field is one more reason for a visitor on a phone to give up. Ask for name, phone, address or ZIP code, the service, and a short description with an optional photo upload. Everything else can wait for the call.

Then make sure the form goes somewhere. A form that emails an inbox nobody watches on weekends is a leak. Better setups create a lead record in your CRM, note the page the lead came from, alert whoever is on duty, and text the customer a confirmation. If a customer will need texts from you later, collect clear consent on the form.

Make the phone number tappable on every page, and put your hours next to it. If calls go unanswered after hours, a receptionist that answers every call or a missed-call text back closes that gap.

Speed and mobile: where the job is won or lost

Plenty of homeowners look for a contractor on a phone, sometimes on a weak signal. Google states that it uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking. If something exists only on your desktop layout, assume Google doesn't see it.

Google's Core Web Vitals give you concrete targets. A good page shows its main content (Largest Contentful Paint) within 2.5 seconds, responds to taps (Interaction to Next Paint) in 200 milliseconds or less, and keeps layout shift at 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for mobile and desktop. You can check your own pages with PageSpeed Insights.

Common causes of slow contractor sites are oversized photos, page builders that load code for features the page doesn't use, chat widgets, and too many tracking scripts. Start with those before anything else.

Schema markup and tracking

Structured data is code that tells search engines facts about your business in a format they can read without guessing. For a contractor, LocalBusiness markup with your name, address or service area, phone, hours and website is the base. Google says this markup can describe business hours, different departments within a business, and more, and it also says it doesn't guarantee that features using structured data will appear. Treat schema as clarity, not a ranking trick. Google's structured data guidelines say the markup must be a true representation of the page and shouldn't describe content readers can't see, so make sure it matches what the page visibly says.

For tracking, set up these before launch:

• Analytics to see which pages people land on and where they come from.
• Google Search Console to see which searches show your pages and whether Google has any indexing problems.
• Form tracking so each submission records its source page.
• Call tracking if you can do it without breaking your listings. Use a method that swaps numbers on the website only, and keep your main number on your Business Profile and directories.
• Lead source in the CRM so a job can be traced back to the page or listing that produced it.

Without tracking you can't tell whether the site is working. With it, you can see that the gutter page brings in calls and the about page doesn't, and spend your time accordingly.

What can you leave out?

Plenty of things show up on contractor sites because a template included them, not because a buyer needed them. A news page with one post from three years ago tells visitors nobody is minding the site. A gallery of stock photos makes you look like every other company. Pop-ups that cover the phone number on a small screen cost you calls. Live chat that nobody answers is worse than no chat.

Cut anything you can't keep current. A smaller site that is accurate beats a bigger one with dead pages, wrong hours and services you stopped offering.

A launch checklist

If you want to know how your current site stacks up against this list, our free system quote walks through it with you. For the build itself, see how we build contractor websites, and for budgeting, read what a contractor website costs.

Frequently asked questions