That makes a contractor site a different problem from a typical small business site: the gallery is doing most of the selling, and it is also the most common reason these sites are slow.
Contractor Website Design
Contractors sell visible, physical work, and the website is where most homeowners decide whether yours looks like the work they want in their house.
Contractor website design is the build of a site for a trade business — fast, clear about which services and areas are covered, and built so an enquiry reaches you while the visitor is still interested. A&B Consulting Group designs and builds these from Burr Ridge, Illinois, serving Chicago and the western suburbs, and remotely for clients in 17 states.
The gallery is the sales pitch
Before-and-after photography of real projects does more convincing than any amount of copy, and it is the page visitors spend longest on. Label projects by location and service type so they double as local content.
Use your own work. Stock images of someone else's kitchen are identifiable and they undermine everything else on the page.
The warning that comes with this: galleries are the single most common cause of slow contractor sites. Photos straight off a phone at full resolution will destroy your load times. Properly sized and compressed, they look identical and load in a fraction of the time.
Pages that have to exist
Most underperforming contractor sites are not missing polish, they are missing whole pages that homeowners and search engines both expect.
- A page per service, not one page listing all of them
- Service area pages for the towns that matter commercially
- A project gallery, labelled by location and type
- Reviews and testimonials collected somewhere on your own site
- An about page with real people and real licensing detail
- Contact, with a short form and a tappable number
Built for a phone, because that is where it is read
Over half of contractor traffic is mobile, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site as the primary one — so mobile problems are ranking problems, not just usability problems.
In practice that means tap targets that work with a thumb, text that does not need pinch-zooming, a form short enough to finish one-handed, and a phone number that is a link rather than an image.
Content and photography, which set the timeline
The thing that delays contractor websites is almost never development. It is waiting on content and photographs, which is why we ask for both in the first week rather than the fourth.
You know your business better than we ever will, so we interview you and write from that rather than inventing copy. If you would rather write it yourself that reduces the cost, but be honest about whether it will actually get done — unwritten content is the single most common reason a build stalls for months.
Photography matters more here than in most trades, because the work is the product. A half day with a photographer on two or three recent jobs produces a gallery that will sell for years. Stock images of someone else's kitchen are identifiable to homeowners and they quietly undermine everything else on the page.
What happens after launch
A website is not finished at launch, it just stops being a project. Hosting, SSL, security updates and backups are ongoing, and so is the content: new projects added, services updated as what you sell changes, seasonal messaging adjusted.
Nothing signals a dormant business more clearly than a gallery whose newest project is three years old. Freshness also carries genuine SEO weight, so a site nobody touches slowly loses ground to competitors who update theirs.
The Bigger Picture
Where this fits.
The service
Website Design
Sites built to be found and to get the phone ringing.
Learn more →The industryContractors
Roofing, siding, exterior, and general.
Learn more →Work with contractors across every trade? See contractor marketing.
Service Areas
Where we work.
In person across Chicago and the western suburbs, remotely for clients in 17 states.
Burr RidgeOak BrookOakbrook TerraceHinsdaleDowners GroveNapervilleLemontWillowbrookDarienWestmontLombardElmhurstLa GrangeWestern SpringsBolingbrookOrland ParkJolietChicago
FAQs
Contractor Website Design — questions we get asked
How much does a contractor website cost?
Ours start at $3,500 with maintenance from $150 a month. Page count, number of service areas, whether we write the content and what has to integrate are what move it. Below roughly $2,000 you are buying a template with your logo on it — fine as an address on the internet, but it will not bring you work.
How long will it take?
Four to five weeks from kickoff to launch for a typical build. Content and photography on your side usually set the pace, which is why we ask for both in week one. Your current site stays live throughout.
Do I need a page for every town I serve?
For the towns that matter commercially, yes — that is how homeowners search. But they have to be genuinely different pages with real local content. Spinning up thirty near-identical pages with the name swapped is a pattern Google treats as thin content and it can hurt the whole site.
What makes a contractor website slow?
Usually photography. A gallery of full-resolution phone photos can push a page past ten megabytes. After that it is page-builder bloat, sliders nobody clicks, and embedded review widgets that wait on a third-party server before rendering.
Should I use WordPress?
Only if you publish often enough to need the editor. For a contractor with twenty pages updated a few times a year, WordPress charges you speed, security and maintenance for flexibility you will not use. A custom build loads in under two seconds, has no plugin surface to patch, and will not break overnight because something updated itself.
Will I own the website?
Yes — the domain, the hosting account and the code. We build in accounts that can be transferred to you, so if you leave you take a working site with you.
Let's talk about your contractor website design.
Tell us where you are now. We'll tell you what we'd do first — and if you don't need us yet, we'll say so.
Get Started