What a General Contractor's Website Needs to Win Work

People rarely choose a general contractor because the website was beautiful. They choose the company that feels least likely to disappear halfway through the job.

That’s the whole test. Everything on your site should help a stranger answer one question: are these people real, and will they finish?

Here is what does that, with sites that do it well. Open them. They’re worth five minutes each.

1. Real projects, with details

Stock photos tell a buyer you may not have work worth showing. Real photos with a name, a place, and a scope tell them you do.

Olson & Jones lists about 30 projects, many named for the neighborhood or town, like Laurelhurst, Irvington and Lake Oswego. Summit Design + Build sorts its work into more than a dozen market categories, so a restaurant developer sees restaurants, not data centers. BEC Austin does the same with eight. Either way, the visitor finds work that looks like theirs in seconds.

2. Names and faces

Buyers want to know who will show up at the job. Gaspar’s lists its whole team by first name and role, more than 40 people, from the owner to the carpenters and project leads. You don’t need 40. You need the owner, the project managers, and a real photo of each.

3. Testimonials with a full name

“Great work!” from nobody is noise. A quote with a name, a title, and a company is evidence.

G. Creek Construction puts client quotes on its homepage, each with a name and an organization. Crain Construction puts a quote from Hilton Worldwide there. A buyer reading those can picture calling that person.

If you have no big names yet, a named quote from a smaller client works. Ask for it when the job closes, while they’re still happy.

4. A phone number people can actually find

In Colorlib’s review of 27 general contractor sites, only 8 showed a phone number in the first screen. A small sample, but a telling one: contractors lead with their buildings and make you hunt for the number.

Put a tappable number in the header of every page. On a phone, one tap should call you. Allstate General Contractors does this: “Call Today” and the number sit in the header on every page.

5. Your license and insurance

In the same review, only 5 of 27 stated a license. It’s the largest purchase most of these companies sell, and the thing that answers “are they legitimate” is missing. NOVO Construction publishes its contractor license number in the footer. Do that.

6. Where you build

Name your towns. Allstate puts three towns in its headline: Albuquerque, Rio Rancho and Corrales. That is exactly what a local search rewards and what a local buyer wants to see.

7. An honest word on price

You don’t need a price list. But Domus Custom Builders says plainly that on a custom home or addition there’s no such thing as an average price, which answers the question every visitor arrives with. Saying that builds more trust than dodging it.

What you can skip

• Autoplay hero videos that slow the page
• Long mission statements nobody reads
• A blog you don’t plan to keep up. A page with three old posts does you no favors, though a small resource section with real substance, like Hammer & Hand’s, helps.

Does it need to be custom?

Everything above is about what a visitor sees, and on that question the build doesn’t settle the outcome. Olson & Jones, NOVO, Allstate and Domus all run on Squarespace, and each one shows its work, its people and its credentials plainly. A template can carry all of it.

But what a visitor sees and how the site is built are separate questions. A page can read well and still load slowly on a phone with weak signal at a job site. It can be hard to keep current, or hard for search engines to read. A visitor never tells you any of that. They just leave.

That’s why I build custom sites for contractors, and why I wouldn’t tell one that custom is optional. A custom site is built around how you work. I build mine so an owner can update the site by voice from the field, or have a blog draft waiting for review when they get back to the office. A site nobody has time to update ends up looking like a company that has stopped working.

The quick self-check

Open your own site on your phone. Try to find the first five in under 30 seconds, then answer the sixth honestly:

1. A finished project like the one you’re bidding
2. A named testimonial
3. A phone number you can tap
4. Your license
5. The towns you serve
6. Can you update your website quickly and easily, so it stays current?

Any “no” is the next thing to fix.

The first five are mostly a one-time job. The sixth is the one that gets neglected, and it decides whether the other five are still true next year. A project gallery that stops two years ago, a team page with people who left, a phone number that changed: a stranger reads all of it as a company that may have stopped working. Most owners know this and still don’t update, because updating means finding the login, finding the time, and finding someone to do it. That’s the part worth fixing first.

Want a second opinion?

If you’d like a second set of eyes on your own site, Book a free one-on-one marketing session and bring it with you. I’ll tell you honestly what I’d fix first, and how you could keep it current.

Benjamin