Contractor website checklist: what it needs and what is decoration
A contractor website needs four things: your trade and city stated plainly at the top, proof you are a real licensed company, an easy way to reach you that gets answered, and a page for each service you sell. Almost everything else on the average contractor site is decoration, and some of it actively costs you jobs.
What the site is actually for
By the time a homeowner lands on your website, they usually already have your name. They got it from the map pack, a referral, a yard sign, or an AI assistant. They come to check you out rather than to browse. The site has one job: confirm you are legitimate and make contacting you easy, before they hit the back button and check the next name on their list. If an assistant is the thing that sent them, how to tell if ChatGPT is sending you customers covers how much of that you can actually measure.
That framing settles most design arguments. Any element that helps a checking customer say yes stays. Anything that exists because a web designer thought the page looked empty goes.
The four things that earn their place
When we audit contractor sites, the same gaps show up over and over. Measured against what a checking customer needs, the list is short:
- Trade and city in the first heading, in plain words. "Painting company in Bellingham" beats any clever tagline, because it is what the customer typed and what search engines and AI assistants match against.
- Proof: license number, insurance, real photos of your crew and your jobs, and reviews pulled from Google. Stock photos of models in clean hard hats read as fake because they are. In several states the number in the footer is not optional, which is the whole subject of the Oregon CCB advertising rules.
- A phone number that gets answered and a short form that gets a fast reply. One or two fields beyond name and contact info. Every extra field loses people.
- A page for each service, written the way customers talk. These pages are also what backs up your Google Business Profile categories, which we covered in how contractors get into the map pack.
What the top of the page should say
The first item on that list is the one site owners argue with, so here is the concrete version. Written out with brackets where the specifics go, the top of the page says this and nothing else:
[Trade] company in [city], [state]
[Residential and commercial], licensed and insured, [license number]
Serving [city] and [the towns around it] since [year]
Call or text [number] · Request a price
Four lines, no tagline, and no slider running behind them. A customer who got the name from a neighbor reads that and knows they are in the right place, and an assistant quoting the page has the trade, the city, and the license in the first thing it reads. The button says what happens next in the words the customer would use. "Request a price" is a thing people want. "Request a consultation" sounds like a meeting they have to prepare for.
The form behind that button holds four fields: name, phone, the address or at least the city, and one open box for what the job is. Email can stay optional as long as the phone number is required, because a customer who wants a call back will give the number and a customer who prefers email will type it into the box. Every field past those four is a question the estimator could have asked on the phone, and it is being asked at the moment the customer is most likely to close the tab.
What is decoration
Sliders and video backgrounds slow the page down and nobody watches them. Long mission statements go unread, because customers care about their kitchen and not your journey. Badge walls of associations no customer has heard of add clutter without trust. A blog with three posts from 2022 signals neglect worse than no blog at all. And "request a consultation" language makes a simple thing sound like a sales appointment, when the customer just wants a price.
None of these things are fatal on their own. The damage is that they push the four things that matter below the fold, and they burn budget that should have gone into the plumbing behind the site.
What happens after the click
The best contractor website in a county still loses to a mediocre one if the mediocre company answers first. A submitted form is the start of the job rather than the end of it, and what decides the job is how fast a human, or a system a human set up, answers it. We wrote about the window in how fast should a contractor send an estimate, and speed wins jobs that polish cannot. A website should be judged as the front door of that response system, which is the part we install for clients.
How the Bellingham companies run it
Our painting and flooring companies in Bellingham run on sites built exactly this way. Trade and city in the first heading, license and insurance stated, real job photos, and a short form wired straight into the response system so the reply goes out fast instead of sitting in an inbox. There are no sliders or stock photos on any of them. When we redo a client site, the first work is usually deleting things, and the second is connecting the form to something that answers. The third is checking what the site claims, because the advertising rules apply to a website the same as they apply to a truck door.
A free look at whether the site is a dead end
The free audit covers your site, local search, response time, quoting, and follow-up, then ranks what is worth fixing first. Joshua replies within one business day, and the written findings usually follow within a week.