Guides / Website Must-Haves
A pretty website is not the goal. A phone that rings is. Here is the exact checklist of what makes a homeowner call you instead of the next guy, what you can skip, and the handful of things that quietly cost you jobs. Print it and grade your own site.
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Most contractors judge their website the way they judge a freshly poured driveway: does it look clean and finished. That is the wrong test. A homeowner who lands on your site is scared of three things, getting ripped off, getting a no-show, and getting shoddy work, and they are deciding in about ten seconds whether you are the safe choice. Everything on the page either answers one of those fears or it is decoration. Decoration does not book jobs. The only honest grade for a website is whether more of the right people call you because of it, and you cannot know that unless you measure it.
This guide is a checklist, not a sales pitch. Twelve things make a contractor site book work, and most sites are missing half of them while spending effort on things that do not matter. None of this requires a big budget or a designer. A handy contractor on a cheap website builder can do every item here in a weekend, and we will say so plainly, because a site that hits these twelve points on a free template beats an expensive custom site that misses them. Read it with your own site open in another window and mark yourself honestly on each one.
One rule frames the whole list. Almost everyone who finds you will do it on a phone, often standing in their yard looking at the problem they want you to fix. That changes what matters. A giant hero photo that loads slowly, a phone number buried in a menu, a contact form with twelve fields, all of these are fine on a desktop and quietly fatal on a phone. Build for the person in the truck or the driveway, not for how the site looks on your office monitor, and most of the twelve items below stop being optional.
Items 1-6
These are the load-bearing ones. If your site is missing any of these, fix it before you touch anything else. They are listed in roughly the order a homeowner encounters them.
Put a phone number in the top right of every page and make it the loudest thing on the screen. Then use a tracking number that forwards to your real line, so you can see how many calls the website actually produced. Without tracking you are guessing whether the site works. With it you stop guessing and can prove, in dollars, whether the thing is paying for itself.
On a phone, the number must be a tap-to-dial link, not text someone has to memorize and retype. A homeowner standing over a busted water heater is not copying digits into a dialer; they tap once or they leave. Wire the header number, every call-to-action button, and the footer as click-to-call. This single fix recovers calls you are losing right now and costs nothing but ten minutes.
Do not cram every service onto one packed page. Give roofing repair, roof replacement, and gutter work their own pages, each answering the questions a homeowner has about that one job. Separate pages let you speak directly to each need and give Google a real reason to show you when someone searches that exact service, instead of a vague homepage that ranks for nothing in particular.
A homeowner in the next town wants to know you actually work there, and Google wants to know too. A dedicated page per town or county you cover, written for that area rather than copied and find-replaced, tells both. This is the single biggest lever for showing up in nearby places where you have no reviews yet. Cover the towns where the good jobs are, not every dot on the map.
Homeowners do not trust descriptions; they trust photographs of work you actually did. Show before-and-after shots of real jobs and label each with the town it was in. The location label does double duty: it proves you work in that area and it quietly reinforces the town pages above. A dozen honest jobsite photos beat any amount of polished marketing copy at convincing a stranger you are real.
If your trade and state require a license, put the number on the site, and say plainly that you carry liability insurance. Homeowners have been burned by uninsured guys and many now ask before they call. Answering it before they have to ask removes a reason to hesitate and screens you in as the safe choice. If you are bonded too, say that. This is free trust you are leaving on the table by staying quiet.
Items 7-9
Once a visitor believes you can do the work, they need to believe you are a real, reachable business run by a real person. These three close that gap.
Pull your Google reviews onto the site itself so a visitor sees them without leaving. A wall of recent, specific reviews with first names and towns is the most persuasive thing on any contractor site. Keep them honest and current; never write your own or pay for them, because fakes read as fake to homeowners and now carry real legal risk we cover in the questions below.
People hire people. An about page with a clear photo of you or your crew, how long you have been doing this, and why you do it well outperforms a faceless logo every time. If you would rather not put your face online, that is fine: tell the story instead, how the business started, what you stand behind, who you serve. Either way, prove a human is behind the truck.
Offer a simple form for people who hate calling, but keep it to name, phone, and a sentence about the job. Every extra field cuts the number of people who finish it. Then test it monthly by submitting it yourself, because the most expensive bug in this trade is a contact form that has silently stopped emailing you for weeks while you wonder why the phone went quiet.
Item 10
Speed is not a nicety; it is whether the call happens at all. Google's own data shows the chance a visitor bounces jumps sharply as a page slows down, and research widely cited across the industry finds that 53 percent of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Your customer is often on cellular signal in a driveway, not on office fiber. A heavy homepage that crawls on a phone is not a small flaw; it is a leak that empties before anyone ever sees your reviews or your phone number.
The fix is mostly about restraint. Compress your photos so they are sharp but not enormous, skip the giant auto-playing background video, and do not stack five tracking scripts and a chat widget that each add a second of delay. A clean, light page that loads almost instantly will out-book a gorgeous, sluggish one, because the gorgeous one loses half its phone visitors before it finishes drawing. Test your real site on your own phone, on cell data with wifi off, and count the seconds. If you are tapping your foot, so is the homeowner, and they have your competitor's number open in the next tab.
This matters more than it used to because of where the jobs come from. People search for local trades on their phones, frequently the moment a problem appears, and a large share act fast: roughly 76 percent of people who run a near-me search on a smartphone visit a business within a day. That is a flood of ready-to-hire intent, but only for the sites that load before the visitor gives up. Speed is the price of admission to all that demand, and it is one of the few must-haves you can verify yourself in under a minute.
What to leave off
Adding the right things is half the job. The other half is removing the clutter that buries your phone number and makes you look like everyone else. These four are almost always a net loss for a contractor.
The rotating banner of photos at the top feels professional and converts terribly. Visitors do not wait for slide three, the motion pushes your phone number and your value down the page, and the extra weight slows the load on phones. Replace it with one strong photo of real work and a clear headline that says what you do and where. One good still beats five photos nobody watches.
The grinning model in a clean hard hat fools no one and signals that you had nothing real to show. Homeowners can spot a stock photo instantly, and it does the opposite of building trust. Every stock image is a slot you could have filled with a photo of your actual crew on an actual job. If you only have a phone camera and ten real photos, use those; they outperform the polished fakes.
Dense paragraphs of corporate filler about your commitment to quality get skimmed and skipped. A homeowner scans for the job they need, the town they live in, proof you are real, and a way to call. Write short, plain, specific lines that answer real questions. If a sentence does not help someone decide to call you, cut it. Clarity books jobs; volume of words does not.
The newsletter pop-up that covers the screen, the video that blasts audio, the chat box that demands your email before it says hello: each one is friction between a ready buyer and your phone number. On a phone they are infuriating and many people just close the tab. Strip them out. The fewer things standing between the visitor and the call, the more calls you get.
Items 11 and 12
The eleventh item is invisible to humans and important to search engines: structured data, often called schema. It is a small block of code that labels your business name, phone, service area, and the like in a format Google reads directly. Adding LocalBusiness markup reinforces the same facts your Google Business Profile carries, on your own site. Google is clear that it does not guarantee any special display even with correct markup, so treat schema as good hygiene that helps Google understand you, not as a magic ranking trick. Most modern site setups can add it without you touching code.
The twelfth item is not a feature; it is the habit of measuring. A website you cannot measure is a website you cannot improve or trust. The tracked number from item one is the core of it: it turns a vague sense that the site might be working into a hard count of calls per month that you can watch rise or fall. Pair that with a quick monthly test of your own form and a glance at which pages people land on, and you have everything you need to know whether the other eleven items are doing their job, and which town or service page to build next.
Put together, the checklist is simple to keep in your head. Tracked phone number, click-to-call header, one page per service, a page per town, photo proof with locations, license and insurance stated up front, reviews on the page, an about page with a face or a story, a short quote form that emails you, fast on a phone, schema in the background, and measurement so you know it works. Twelve things, no jargon. A site that nails these in plain clothes will out-book a fancy one that misses them, and you can grade yourself against this list today without spending a dollar.
Where we fit
Be honest about which group you are in. If you are handy, have a free evening or two, and your trade is not drowning in competition, you can build every one of these twelve items yourself on a website builder for a small monthly fee. Squarespace, for example, runs roughly 16 to 99 dollars a month on annual billing in 2026, and a clean do-it-yourself site that hits this checklist is genuinely good enough for many solo operators. We sell websites and we will still tell you that: if word of mouth keeps you busy, do not buy more than you need.
If you would rather hand the whole thing to someone and never think about it again, here is our number stated as plainly as we asked you to demand from everyone else. Pixie Builds builds and runs contractor websites that follow exactly this checklist, working remotely and over email. We charge 500 dollars to set up and 1,500 dollars a month, flat, billed quarterly at 4,500 dollars a quarter, and you can cancel at the end of any quarter. You own one hundred percent of every asset in writing from day one, the site, the content, the domain, all of it, transferable whenever you want, so there is no leash if you leave.
What we will not do is promise you a ranking or a lead count, because nobody honest can guarantee those. What we promise is the work, every item on this list built right, plus the call tracking from item one so you can see for yourself how many calls the site brought in and decide whether it is worth keeping. That is the twelfth item, measurement, baked in. If that fits, email [email protected] and we will tell you honestly whether it makes sense for your situation. If you are the handy, word-of-mouth type, take this checklist and build it yourself with our blessing.
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$500 to set up, $1,500 a month flat, billed quarterly, cancel any quarter, and you own everything from day one. Email [email protected].