Planning
Contractor Website Checklist: What Your Site Needs Before Launch
A contractor website is ready to launch when a stranger can tell what you do, confirm you work in their area, see evidence you have done the job before, and reach you in one step. Everything below is a way of checking one of those four things.
Essential Pages for a Contractor Website
Most contractors need five to seven pages. More than that usually means the same information split across more URLs than anyone will read.
The temptation is to add pages because a site with twenty of them feels more substantial. It is not. A visitor who lands on a services page and cannot work out whether you cover their town has been failed by structure, not by page count.
Work out which of these you actually need before anything gets designed. A plumbing company that does only residential work does not need a commercial page, and building one so the navigation looks fuller is how a site ends up with a page nobody visits.
- A home page that says what you do and where, above the fold
- One page per major service line, not one page listing all of them
- A projects or gallery page, if you have photographs of finished work
- An about page with the people, the history and the credentials
- A service area page, or the service area stated clearly on the home page
- A contact page with every way of reaching you
A blog is not on this list. It is a commitment, not a page, and a contractor site with three posts from two years ago looks worse than one with none.
Service Areas, Credentials and Trust Signals
Two questions decide whether a visitor keeps reading: do you come out here, and are you a real licensed business. Both should be answerable without scrolling.
Service area is the one most often handled badly. A map graphic with a shaded blob does not tell somebody in a specific suburb whether they are inside it, and it gives a search engine nothing to work with. Write the counties, the metro area and the main towns out as text.
Credentials are the other half. What counts varies by trade and by state, so the rule is simply to publish what you hold and nothing you do not.
Where you work
- Counties or metro area written out as text, not only drawn on a map
- The main towns or neighbourhoods named
- Any travel limits or minimum job sizes stated for outlying areas
Who you are
- License number where your trade and state require one
- Insurance and bonding status, stated plainly
- Manufacturer or trade certifications you actually hold
- How long the business has been operating, if you want to say
- A real address or at least a real city, not a stock skyline
Evidence
- Photographs of your own finished work
- Reviews from the platforms you already use, presented as they are
- Project details that a competitor could not have written
Nothing in the evidence group can be borrowed. A photograph of somebody else's roof, or a testimonial nobody wrote, is worth less than an empty section and considerably more dangerous.
Contact Options and Quote Requests
Give people at least two ways to reach you, and make the one your trade actually converts on the most prominent.
For urgent trades, that is the phone. For project work with a long consideration period, it is usually a form. Most contractors need both, but they do not need them with equal weight, and treating them as equal is a decision by default rather than a decision.
The mechanics matter more than the design here. A phone number that is not a link costs you calls on mobile. A form that goes to an address nobody checks costs you the lead entirely.
- Phone number marked up as a link so a tap starts the call
- The number visible in the header, not only on a contact page
- A form that reaches an inbox somebody actually opens
- A confirmation message that appears only after the message is sent
- Business hours, and what happens outside them
- An email address, for the people who will not use either
What the form should ask is a separate question, and a longer one. There is a full guide to it linked at the end of this article.
Mobile Usability and Website Performance
Check the site on a real phone, on cellular data, in daylight. Most contractor traffic arrives that way and almost nobody tests it that way.
A desktop browser window narrowed to phone width is not the same test. It does not have a slow connection, a thumb, a fingerprint-smeared screen or the impatience of someone standing in a flooded utility room.
Performance is part of usability rather than a separate concern. A gallery of unoptimised photographs straight off a phone camera will be slow enough on cellular that people leave before it renders, and the photographs were the point.
On a real phone
- Nothing scrolls sideways on any page
- Text is readable without pinching
- Buttons and links are large enough to hit accurately
- The phone number works with one tap
- The form can be completed one-handed
Speed
- Images sized for the web rather than uploaded at camera resolution
- Modern image formats where the host supports them
- The largest thing on screen loads first
- Nothing jumps around as the page finishes loading
SEO and Measurement Basics
You do not need an SEO campaign to launch. You do need the technical fundamentals in place, because retrofitting them later is more work than doing them once.
The fundamentals are unglamorous and largely invisible. Every page needs its own title and description, one heading that says what the page is, and a URL that reads like the thing it contains. Search engines need a sitemap and permission to crawl.
Measurement is worth setting up on day one even if you do not look at it for six months, because analytics cannot tell you about traffic that arrived before it was installed.
- A unique page title and meta description on every page
- One h1 per page, describing that page rather than the company
- URLs that read as words, not as identifiers
- A sitemap, submitted to Google Search Console
- A robots file that does not accidentally block the site
- Analytics installed and confirmed to be recording
- Your Google Business Profile claimed and matching the site
Your Google Business Profile is separate from your website and often matters more for local work. It is worth claiming before launch, not after.
Your Final Pre-Launch Checklist
Run these in order on the day. Most of them take under a minute and each one catches a failure that is embarrassing to discover from a customer.
- Open every page from the navigation and confirm none of them 404.
- Click every link, including the ones in the footer.
- Submit the form yourself and confirm the message arrives in the inbox.
- Reply to that test message to check the reply address works.
- Tap the phone number on a phone and confirm it dials the right line.
- Read every page for the wrong company name, placeholder text or a leftover date.
- Check the site on a phone, a tablet and a desktop.
- Confirm the domain resolves with and without www, and that it is on HTTPS.
- Confirm analytics is recording your own visit.
- Search your business name and check what a stranger sees.
The form test is the one people skip and the one that fails most often. Do it from an address that is not yours, on a device that is not on your office network.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages does a contractor website need?
Most contractors need five to seven pages: a home page, a page for each main service, an about page, a project or gallery page and a contact page.
The number matters less than the split. One page trying to cover roofing repair and full replacement serves neither search, because they are different questions asked by people in different situations.
Do I need a separate page for every service area?
No. A single, well-written service area section listing the towns you cover in text does the job for most contractors.
Separate pages per town are worth it only when you have genuinely different content for each one. A page built by swapping a town name into the same paragraphs is thin content, and it tends to compete with your own home page rather than help it.
What should be above the fold on a contractor website?
What you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Nothing else has to be there.
That is three facts, and a visitor who found you thirty seconds ago is checking all three before anything else. Awards, history and a mission statement can wait until the second screen.
How do I know if my current website is the problem?
Open it on your phone, on cellular data, and try to request a quote in under a minute. If you cannot, neither can your customers.
The usual failures are slow loading, a phone number that is an image rather than a link, no clear service area and a contact form that asks for more than it needs.
Want the checklist built in rather than checked afterwards?
Every contractor site we build starts from this list: the services split properly, the service area in text, and the estimate request wired to your inbox before launch.
