What General Contractors Should Actually Put on Their Website

If you are still deciding whether a website is worth it at all, start with our piece on websites for contractors, which covers that question directly.

This is the next one down. You have decided to build. What actually goes on it?

The honest answer is less than most contractors expect, arranged more deliberately than most contractors bother with. A five page site that answers the right questions will outperform a fifteen page site that wanders.

The Home Page

One job: establish within a few seconds what you build, where, and roughly at what scale.

Most contractor home pages fail on scale. They say what the company does, remodeling, additions, custom homes, but nothing about size, so a homeowner with a $9,000 bathroom and a homeowner with a $400,000 addition both think you might be their contractor. One of them is wrong and you will find out on a phone call.

What belongs here:

• What you build, in specific terms
• The area you serve
• Two or three of your best project photos
• Some signal of typical project scale
• One clear next step

What does not: a welcome message, a mission statement, or a stock photo of a hard hat on blueprints.

The Project Gallery

For contractors this usually matters more than everything else combined, because it is the only real evidence available to someone who cannot inspect your work.

What makes a gallery work:

Your own projects, always. No stock, no supplier photography.

Before and after from the same angle. The pair proves the transformation in a way a single finished shot cannot. Homeowners look at the before photo longer than the after, because that is the one that resembles their situation.

Organised by project type. Someone planning a kitchen wants to see kitchens. Making them scroll through twenty bathrooms is a real cost.

A sentence or two of context each. What the project was, roughly when, roughly where, anything unusual you solved. Captions turn a photo album into evidence of judgment.

Phone photos are fine. They are often better, because they look like real jobs rather than a magazine spread.

The Services Page, Written as Boundaries

Most contractor services pages list everything the company could conceivably do, on the theory that more services means more leads. In practice it means more of the wrong leads.

The more useful version states what you take on and what you do not:

We handle full kitchen and bathroom remodels, additions, and whole-home renovations, typically between $40,000 and $250,000. We do not take on handyman work, single-fixture replacements, or commercial build-outs.

Contractors resist writing this. It feels like turning away money. What it actually turns away is estimates that were never going to close, which is the most expensive thing in a contracting business that is not a warranty claim.

The Process Page

This is the section most contractors leave off, and it is often the one that closes the job.

Homeowners are not primarily afraid of the price. They are afraid of the middle: the part after they have paid a deposit and before the work is finished, where they do not know what is happening, whether it is on schedule, or what to do if something is wrong.

Almost no contractor website explains that. Walking through it, from first call to consultation to estimate to contract to schedule to build to walkthrough to warranty, is genuinely reassuring, and it costs you one page.

While you are there: explain change orders. Every homeowner has heard the horror story. Explaining plainly why they happen and how you handle them defuses the single biggest source of distrust in the industry.

The About Page

Contractor about pages tend to be either three sentences or a company history nobody reads. What earns its place:

• Who actually runs the company, with a photo
• How long you have been doing this
• Licensing and insurance
• Why you do this work

A homeowner is choosing a person to have in their house for six weeks. Anonymity does not help you.

Service Areas

List the towns. Not "the Twin Cities metro and surrounding communities," which answers nothing, but the actual places you work. It stops calls from outside your radius and helps you show up in searches for the places you serve.

What You Can Skip

• A blog, unless you will maintain it. A dormant blog is worse than none.
• Testimonials with no name attached. They read as invented.
• A services list that includes work you would rather not do.
• Anything that requires a homeowner to phone you to learn basic information.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many pages does a contractor website need?

Five or six usually covers it: home, gallery, services, process, about, and contact, plus service area pages if you cover a wide radius. Beyond that you are usually adding pages that dilute rather than add. Depth on the right pages beats breadth.

Should contractors put pricing on their website?

Not fixed prices, but a range or a stated minimum project size. Contractors who publish a typical project range consistently report fewer, better-qualified enquiries. The estimates you lose were mostly ones you would have lost later, after doing the work of preparing them.

What if I do not have good photos of my projects?

Start photographing now, from today's jobs, and use what you have in the meantime. Phone photos taken from consistent angles at the start and end of each job build a strong gallery within a few months. Do not fill the gap with stock imagery; an honest small gallery beats a fake large one.

How much does a general contractor website cost?

Melsmark packages start at $1,200 with copywriting and local SEO included. Most contractors land between $2,200 and $3,200, since a project gallery and service area pages need the extra pages. Hosting and maintenance is $75 per month after launch.

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Melsmark builds contractor websites in Minnesota, designed by someone who spent a decade in home building. See our general contractor web design page, or get a free quote.