The short version
- Check the site on your own phone on cellular. Tap the number, send a test quote request, and watch how long a page takes to load.
- Stock photos, a missing license number, and no reviews cost you the homeowner's trust before they call.
- No town pages and vague service pages keep you out of the searches that bring in jobs.
A contractor calls me and says the site gets visits but the phone stays quiet. Before I look at rankings or ads, I pick up my own phone, turn off wifi, and go through the site the way a homeowner would. I check the same eight things every time, and most of them take five minutes to find.
You can run the same test. You need your phone, the site's address, and the inbox where quote requests are supposed to land.
Run the test on your own phone
Do this on cellular, not on the shop wifi, and not on the computer where the site was built. A desktop hides the problems a phone shows.
| Mistake | The five minute check | What you want to see |
|---|---|---|
| Number hard to tap | Tap the phone number on three pages | The dialer opens with the number filled in |
| Form goes nowhere | Send a test request from your phone | It lands in your email within a minute, every answer on it |
| Slow on a phone | Open three pages on cellular | Each page shows its content without a wait |
| Stock photos | Scroll the home page and the gallery | Every photo is from your own jobs |
| No license number | Read the footer, the about page, and the form | Your L&I or CCB number in all three places |
| No reviews | Look for reviews with a name and a town | Real reviews next to the work |
| No town pages | Search your trade and a town you work | A page on your site written for that town |
| Vague services | Read your services page | A separate page for each job you want more of |
The first three stop a homeowner who already decided to call. The next three stop them from deciding. The last two keep them from finding you at all.
Mistakes that stop the call
These cost you the homeowners who were ready to hire. They found you, liked what they saw, and then the site got in the way.
The number is hard to tap
Tap the phone number in the header. On a phone, the dialer should open with your number already in it. Then open a service page, scroll to the middle, and look for the number again. If it only lives in the footer, a homeowner has to hunt for it.
I see three versions of this mistake. The number is part of an image, so it cannot be tapped. The number is plain text that does nothing when tapped. Or the number is only on the contact page. The fix is a tap to call link in the header of every page, and a call button that stays on screen as the homeowner scrolls on a phone.
The form goes nowhere
Fill out your own quote form from your phone, with a made up job and your real email. Then wait. The request should land in the inbox you check every day, within a minute, with every answer on it. Look in the spam folder too.
If nothing arrives, the form is decoration. A form can send to a Gmail account nobody opens anymore, to a web designer who stopped answering years ago, or to nowhere at all. The homeowner who filled it out thinks you ignored them. You never knew they asked. Test the form after every change to the site, and see how a quote form should work when it is set up right.
The site is slow on a phone
Open three pages on cellular and count. If you are waiting on a blank screen or watching photos crawl in, the homeowner is too, and some of them tap back to the search results and call the next name.
For a second opinion, run the home page and a town page through Google's PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab). It tests the page on mobile and desktop and lists what slows it down. On contractor sites the cause I find most often is photos straight off a phone, uploaded at full size. The fix is photos resized for the screen and compressed, on a host that answers fast. My hosting and SSL check shows the response time for any address.
Mistakes that cost you trust
These do not stop a homeowner from calling. They stop the homeowner from choosing you over the next contractor on the list.
Stock photos
Scroll your home page and your gallery. Count the photos from your own jobs and the photos somebody else took. A spotless kitchen with nobody's tools in it, a smiling model in a clean hard hat, a roof in a place that has never seen moss. Homeowners have seen those photos on other contractor sites.
Your own jobs, shot on your own phone, beat any stock photo. They show the real crew, real houses, and real towns. Label each one with the job and the town, and a homeowner in Lakewood sees a finished roof in Lakewood.
No license number
Scroll to the footer of any page and look for your Washington L&I registration number or your Oregon CCB number. Then check the about page and the space next to the quote form.
This one is more than trust. In Washington, RCW 18.27.100 (opens in a new tab) says advertising that shows your name or address has to show your current registration number. In Oregon, OAR 812-003-0120 (opens in a new tab) says internet advertising, including website advertising, has to show the CCB license number. Homeowners also look the number up before they call. I wrote a separate guide on where the license number goes and how to write it.
No reviews
Open your Google Business Profile and count your reviews. Then open your site and count the reviews there. A contractor with dozens of reviews on Google and none on the site is hiding the best thing they have.
Put the Google reviews on the site with the first name and the town, next to the jobs they describe. A review from a customer in Kent, on the page about the job you did in Kent, answers the question a Kent homeowner has before they call.
Mistakes that keep you out of search
These two do not lose a homeowner on the site. They keep the homeowner from reaching the site in the first place.
No town pages
Search your trade and a town you work on your phone, like deck builder Bothell or water heater Beaverton. Then open your site's menu and look for a page named for that town. If the only mention of Bothell on your whole site is a list of towns on a service area page, the site is asking one page to rank in every town at once.
The fix is a page for each town you work, written for that town, with a job and a review from there. I wrote about the pages every contractor website needs, and the town pages are the biggest part of it.
Vague services
Read your services page out loud. If it says you do residential, commercial, new construction, remodels, and repairs, and none of those words links to a page, the site is vague.
A homeowner looking for a heat pump install wants to read about heat pump installs, not about HVAC in general. Give each job you want more of its own page, with what the job includes, how long it takes, photos of it, and a review from a customer who had it done. An electrician with separate pages for panel upgrades, EV chargers, and generators answers three searches. One page called Services answers none of them well.
What to fix first
Fix them in the order they cost you money.
- The form and the phone number. These lose homeowners who already chose you. They are also the fastest fixes, often the same day.
- The license number. It is a legal requirement in both states and a trust signal. Adding it to the footer is a small change.
- Speed on a phone. Start with the photo sizes, because that fix helps every page at once.
- Photos and reviews. Send a before and an after from each finished job, and ask every customer for a review.
- Town pages and service pages. These take the most writing, and they bring in the searches that grow the business.
After each fix, run the test again on your phone. A fix that looks right on a desktop can still fail on cellular.
How I build around these
Every site I build is set up to pass the checks above. The number taps to call on every page. Quote requests arrive in your email with the job details on them. The license number sits at the top of the site, in the footer, and next to the quote form. Your Google reviews sit next to the work.
A Site is $1,500, with $750 to start and $750 at launch, and there is no monthly fee on the site. It has a page for each service and 20 town pages. A Site with Tools is $4,000 and adds project pages with before and after sliders. Every site also has a stats dashboard that counts visits, quote requests by source, phone taps, and review clicks, so you can see whether the phone taps went up after a change.
