What a Tampa contractor's website actually needs (and what it doesn't)
Most websites sold to local contractors are too big. Not badly made — too big. Five pages of copy nobody reads, a slider nobody waits for, a blog with two posts from 2019. It costs more, takes longer, and converts worse than a single page that answers the four questions every customer has.
Here's what we put on these, and what we leave off.
The nine that earn their place
1. A phone number in the top right, tappable. More than half your visitors are on a phone, and a good number of them intend to call before they've read a word. Making them hunt for the number is the single most expensive mistake on a trade website.
2. What you do, in their words. "Residential re-roofs and storm damage repair" beats "comprehensive roofing solutions". People search for the first one. Nobody has ever typed the second one.
3. Where you work — the actual towns. Brandon, Riverview, Valrico, Plant City. Not "the greater Tampa Bay area". Someone in Ruskin wants to know whether you'll drive to Ruskin, and a list answers that in a second. It also gives search engines something concrete to match against.
4. Photos of your own work. This is the one that matters most and the one people skip. A slightly crooked phone photo of a roof you did beats a professional stock photo of a roof someone else did, every time. Nobody is fooled by the stock photo and everybody knows what it means.
5. Hours, honestly. Including whether you take after-hours calls, and what that costs. A plumber who says "emergency callouts, nights and weekends, $X callout fee" gets the 11pm call. One whose site says nothing gets it from someone else.
6. Proof you're real. Your licence number, how long you've been going, the fact you're insured, the association you belong to. Only the true ones — a number a customer can look up is worth more than three badges they can't.
7. Reviews, quoted. Two or three, with the person's first name and their town. Not a wall of them. Not a widget that takes two seconds to load.
8. A form that goes to a real inbox. Name, phone, and a box for "what's the problem". Every extra field costs you submissions. Nobody has ever abandoned a form because it was too short.
9. It has to load fast on a phone in a driveway. On a middling signal, on a five-year-old Android. If it doesn't, none of the other eight matter.
The six we leave off
Sliders and hero carousels. People see slide one and scroll. Slides two through five are work you paid for that nobody will ever see.
A blog you'll never write. Two posts from three years ago says "this business may not exist any more" more loudly than having no blog at all.
A mission statement. Nobody choosing a plumber has ever been swayed by a mission statement.
Stock photos of people in hard hats. See point 4. They read as "we had no photos", which is worse than having no photos.
A chat widget nobody's watching. A chat box that nobody answers for six hours is worse than a phone number, because it invited a conversation and then didn't turn up.
Five pages when one will do. Separate About, Services, Areas, Gallery and Contact pages made sense when people browsed. They don't now. One page they scroll, with the phone number pinned, beats five pages they navigate.
The test
Show it to someone who doesn't know your trade, on their phone, and ask three questions:
- What does this business do?
- Do they cover my town?
- How do I get hold of them?
If they can answer all three in under ten seconds, the site works. If they scroll and squint, no amount of design fixes it.
That's the bar we build to. If you'd like to see what it looks like for your business specifically, we'll build the whole thing and send you the link before you pay anything — it's easier to judge the finished thing than a description of it.