Q.01
What is wrong with most contractor websites?
Four things, in this order: the phone number is hard to tap, the homepage is slow on a phone, the service pages say nothing a homeowner can use, and the form lands in an inbox nobody watches. None of that is a design problem. All of it costs you calls.
We open a lot of these. The pattern is remarkably consistent, and it has almost nothing to do with how the site looks. Most of the sites we tear down were built by somebody competent at design and nobody at all who thought about the ten seconds where a homeowner on a phone decides whether to tap your number or go back to the search results.
What follows is the order we check things in. Where there is a published standard, we cite it. You can run most of it on your own site in fifteen minutes with nothing but your phone.
October is a reasonable month to do it. The Atlantic hurricane season runs through November 30 and the National Hurricane Center puts most activity between mid-August and mid-October, so storm-driven searching is not finished. Seasonal residents arriving over the next two months are people in your service area with no contractor they already trust.
Q.02
Can a homeowner tap your phone number in one move?
That is the first thing we check and it fails often. The number has to be live text inside a tel link, visible in the header without scrolling, and repeated in the footer of every page. If it is baked into a logo image or sitting only on the contact page, you are asking a person on a phone to work for it.
The failures are boring and they are everywhere. A number set as part of a header graphic, so it cannot be tapped or copied. A number that only appears once a slow hero image finishes loading. A number in the footer and nowhere else. A chat bubble parked on top of it on a small screen.
There is a worse version, which is a number that taps fine and rings somewhere nobody picks up. That is a different problem and our guide on why missed calls cost home-service companies real jobs covers it. The website's only job here is to make the call easy to start.
While you are in there, confirm the number on the site matches your Google Business Profile exactly. Google says local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, and that complete, accurate information helps it match your business to what someone is searching for. Two numbers in two places is the opposite of that.
- Phone number as live text in a tel link, never inside an image
- Visible in the header on a phone without scrolling
- Repeated in the footer of every page
- Identical, digit for digit, to the number on your Google Business Profile
- Ringing a person or a system that actually answers
Q.03
How slow is too slow on a phone?
Google publishes the line. A page should reach Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, keep Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less, and hold Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits. Google states that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems.
In plain terms: the main thing on screen should show up inside two and a half seconds, taps should respond almost instantly, and nothing should jump while the page is still loading. The 75th percentile part is the one owners miss. Your slowest quarter of visitors is what counts, not the fast load you get on office wifi.
What breaks it on contractor sites is a short and repetitive list. Uncompressed job photos straight off a phone camera. A page builder loading a dozen scripts. Two chat widgets, three tracking tags and a review carousel. A video background. Web fonts that arrive late and shove the text down after somebody has started reading.
Do not over-read the scores, though. Google is specific that there is no single page experience signal, and that good results in a Core Web Vitals report do not guarantee your pages will rank at the top. Speed is a floor, not a strategy. A fast page with nothing useful on it still loses the job.
Q.04
Why do the service pages say nothing?
Because they were written as a list instead of an answer. The typical site has one Services page naming eight trades in bullet points, no page for any single job, and no mention of the towns the crew drives to. A homeowner searching for one specific thing finds nothing on it that matches.
Think about what the search actually was. Nobody types services. They type tile roof leak repair in Stuart, or AC blowing warm air in Port St. Lucie. A page that lists roofing, HVAC, plumbing and remodeling in one breath matches none of those.
The fix is one page per thing you want to be called about, written the way you would explain it standing in a driveway: what the job involves, what moves the price, how long it takes, what you need before you can quote. Our guide on whether you need a separate page for every city your crew serves covers how far to push that before you are just making junk pages.
Two things are missing more often than not. Your license number, which Florida requires in your advertising and which our guide on whether your contractor license number has to be on your website walks through. And local business structured data, which hands Google your name, address and phone in a format it reads directly. Google requires only name and address there, recommends telephone, url, hours and coordinates, and states plainly that it does not guarantee those features will show up.
- One page per service you want calls about, not one page listing all of them
- Plain answers: what the job involves, what moves the price, how long it takes
- Real photos of your own crews and your own finished work
- Your license number where your advertising shows it
- Local business structured data with name and address at minimum
Q.05
What happens after somebody fills out your form?
Usually not enough, and not fast enough. The form on a typical contractor site asks for too much, then emails one inbox that gets checked at the end of the day. By then the homeowner has filled out two more forms somewhere else. Whoever replies first tends to get the walkthrough.
Count the fields on your own form. Name, phone and what is going on is enough to call somebody back. Address, a preferred time window, how did you hear about us, a dropdown of eight services and a message box with a minimum length are all reasons to abandon it on a phone with one thumb free.
Then check what fires on submit. If the only thing that happens is an email to one address, you have a lead sitting in an inbox instead of a conversation. An instant text from your business number buys you the next few minutes of that homeowner's attention, while they are still looking at their screen. Our posts on speed to lead and on what to say in a missed-call text-back cover the wording.
Then check the unglamorous thing: that the form still works. Submit it from your phone right now and time the reply. We find forms sending to an address nobody owns anymore, forms whose notifications a spam filter has eaten for months, and forms that error out on a mobile browser.
Q.06
What should you fix first, and what does it cost?
Fix the phone number and the form this week, because they cost nothing and they are leaking calls today. Fix speed next. Rewrite the service pages after that, because it is the slowest work. If you would rather not do it yourself, our published rates start at $147 a month with setup included.
The order matters because the first two are free and take an afternoon. A tappable number in the header, a three field form, and a text that fires the moment somebody submits it can all be done before Friday. Everything after that is a project with a timeline.
Run the four checks yourself first, and run them on your phone on cell data rather than office wifi, because that is how a homeowner actually arrives. Do it on a service page too, not just the homepage. That is where a search usually lands, and it is almost always slower and thinner than the front door.
If you would rather hand it over, our prices are published rather than quoted after a sales call, and our free audit will walk your site the same way and tell you which of the four failures is costing you the most. What each line covers:
- Website, hosting, maintenance, local SEO foundation and Google Business Profile setup: $147 a month, setup included
- That plus a unified inbox with drafted replies, the review engine and customer reactivation: $297 a month
- Instant text back on missed calls and new form fills: $147 a month plus $297 setup
- AI front desk that answers live when your team cannot: $197 a month plus $497 setup
- One-time Google Business Profile cleanup: $499
- Pay any plan a year in full and two months are free
Next step
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