The contractor website checklist:what to look for on the site you have.
Eleven things worth checking on your own site before anyone quotes you for a new one. Most take a phone and five minutes.
How to use this
On a phone, as a stranger.
Open your own site on your phone, on cellular data, and go through the list below as if you had never seen the business before. Most contractor sites fail three or four of these, and the failures are usually cheap to fix once you can name them.
Check it as a stranger, not as the owner. You know what you do and where you work; the visitor deciding between you and two other numbers does not.
What the visitor needs immediately
The first fifteen seconds.
- 1It says what you actually do, in words people search Water heater replacement, drain cleaning, water damage restoration. Not “quality workmanship since 2009”. If a stranger cannot name your trade from the top of the homepage, nothing below matters.
- 2It says where you work, with real place names A phrase like “and surrounding areas” leaves a homeowner in Clayton to work out for themselves whether that includes them. A competitor who wrote the word Clayton has already answered it.
- 3Calling takes one tap The number is real text, not part of an image, and it dials when tapped. Test it. A number that does not dial is one of the most common and most expensive faults on trades sites.
- 4The form is short enough to finish one-handed Name, number, what happened. A form asking for budget range and project timeline before a name is a form for someone who is not in a hurry, and your buyer usually is.
What makes a stranger believe you
Referrals arrive trusting you. Search traffic does not.
- 5Photographs of your own finished work Not stock photography. Most trades are judged on before and after, and a page of purchased images says nothing about the standard of your work, because it is not your work.
- 6A real business identity The legal name, a real address or a stated service-area policy, and a way to tell a person is behind it. Anonymous sites lose to named ones.
- 7Licensing and insurance where you hold them Stated plainly, in the trades where a customer expects it. Never claimed where it is not held.
- 8Consistent presentation One logo, one set of colors, one way the business describes itself. A site assembled from three eras of the business reads as neglected, which costs credibility a good business has earned.
What decides whether anyone arrives
The part that is invisible from the homepage.
- 9A page for each service you want more of Not everything gathered onto a single Services page. A page of its own is something you can send to a customer asking about that one job, and something a search can land on; a line in a list is neither. How many service pages your website actually needs works out the number.
- 10The site and the Google listing agree Same services, same area, same hours, same number. Check both side by side; disagreements are common and cost nothing but attention to fix.
- 11You can tell whether any of it is working Something recording calls and form submissions, so a decision about next year is made on evidence. What to actually track covers the short version.
Items 9 to 11 are the ones owners skip, because unlike a broken phone link they are invisible until you go looking.
If you would rather have it checked
Most of this list, automatically.
The Free Website Audit reads your site and reports on most of the above, with the evidence behind each judgment: whether the services are clear, whether the contact path exists, whether service and location pages are there, whether the local signals are present and whether anything is recording conversions.
It reads your public website only. It cannot open your Google Business Profile, so item 10 still needs you to compare the two yourself, and it does not see your analytics. The result says which things it did not inspect.
If the list turns up more than you want to fix
What Kreated has built for trades.
Web design for contractors is the page for that. It sets out how a trades site is built to answer this list, with a contractor site shown before and after.