Do you work in construction, remodeling, flooring, or restoration? Are you a local electrician, landscaper, roofer, or plumber? In short, are you a contractor?
If you are, did you know that optimizing your online presence—essentially, improving your website—can give you a much-needed edge in your industry? Generating traffic, leads, and sales in short order? Did you know you can do it at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing techniques like snail mail, newspaper ads, radio spots, and tv commercials? Or that it’s more effective too? (That even custom lawn signs can’t compare?)
We live in a digital age. One where your prospects, your customers, and your competitors are all online. Where digital marketing is important and where your website design can make or break your business. It’s no understatement to say that how your business shows up online—in search engines like Google, or (especially) your very own site—matters. Or that taking steps to optimize and improve it—to enhance your site where it counts—might be the most important marketing move you make all year.
Top Website Design Tips for Contractors
So what can you do to improve your site? To win customers and clients, to drive traffic and leads, and to skyrocket your sales in the process? Read up on the following top website design tips for contractors that we’ve collected—the very best we’ve pulled and sourced—to find out what you can do today to make a website more user-friendly, accessible, and useful tomorrow. And to fast-track your business success in the process.
1. Get A Custom-Made Site

Wix. Weebly. Squarespace. Strikingly. GoDaddy. What do these tools have in common? They’re web-builders, of course. They’re also a scam.
The problem with these tools is that—despite what their marketing would lead you to believe—they’re not effective platforms for creating, let alone hosting business sites by a long shot. Indeed, these platforms (known as WYSIWYG editors, because “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” when you use them to style your site) are kludgy, buggy, prone to break, and often hide important technical details that would otherwise make your site better for SEO. They also tend to create slower sites with below-average load times and less secure—creating an unsatisfactory experience for your users.
You can avoid these pitfalls simply and easily by hiring a professional web developer or marketing agency to custom-code your site. In addition to enabling a stellar online presence—with a visible, visually striking, and elegant website that’s up and running around the clock—having a custom site can accomplish many other great-to-have website goals as well. A custom site can make your site faster (often with 3-second load times), more secure (making it less prone to security breaches), and more user-friendly (since a developer can design it to serve your business interests and your customers).
2. Sell Your Services
Trick question: what’s the most effective marketing tool you can utilize online? No surprise there. It’s sales! How do you sell something on a website? Easy—with SEO-friendly, conversion-driven, sales copy and content on your site.
By creating both website copy (the words on your landing pages, product or service pages, about pages, and home page) as well as in-depth, well-informed content (the words on your blog, newsletter, and social media pages), you can create a content strategy that’s centered around selling your services and generating leads, as opposed to blindly creating copy that sounds good on paper (or doesn’t), but doesn’t serve any useful goal. In contrast, writing copy that’s SEO-driven (so that your ideal prospects will find it and want to read it) and conversion-focused (so that your readers will do something afterward) can ensure that your website copy effectively sells your readers on working with you.
3. Have a Portfolio
It’s true: an image really is worth a thousand words. And that’s as true for a website as it is for an art gallery. Having a portfolio of work—a means of showcasing the work you’ve done for past clients—both visually, through quality photos, and conceptually, by way of well-written case studies—can dramatically improve your prospects’ willingness to do business with you.
By working with a professional developer to create a custom site (tip #1), they can help create a custom portfolio page that presents all your best work, in the best way possible. They also work with you to create custom designs and interactive content that provide need-to-know information for website users, such as contact information, product or service specs, or your experiences and capabilities. Portfolio pages are great opportunities to impress potential clients by showing off all your best work in one place.
4. Make It Mobile-Friendly

Have you heard that your site needs to be mobile-friendly or responsive but don’t have the faintest clue why? Here’s a quick breakdown: as mentioned above, everyone is online—your customers, your prospects, even your competitors. What’s different about being online now than ever before is that many people—your customers included—are browsing the web on their mobile phones or tablets wayyy more than they used to. In fact, with anywhere from 40-60% of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s essential that your site is mobile-friendly, meaning that it looks as good and operates the same on mobile devices as it would on a desktop pc.
How do you make a site mobile-friendly? It’s tricky business, but here’s a rundown. Sites on mobile screens are condensed—they’ve got a much smaller, more narrow screen size, after all—so their layout needs to be scaled down, as well. This means taking steps to proactively move things around on the page, so that everything is easy to see and that nothing is hidden from view. It also means ensuring that the site layout is just as intuitive, functional, and readable as ever (no zooming required).
Pro tip: Working with a professional developer (our next tip) is a fantastic way to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly on all kinds of mobile devices, without incidentally doing something that crashes your site.
5. Work With A Professional to Design a Website for Your Contractor Business
Are you stuck implementing any of the above website design tips for contractors? Not sure how to get started or what to do once you have? No worries! There are many digital marketing agencies that employ dozens of pro copywriters, content strategists, web developers, and visual designers, who can help solve all your problems and more.
A professional marketing agency can help implement all of the aforementioned tips and techniques – including creating and coding a custom-made site, selling your services with first-rate sales copy, creating a stunning portfolio to showcase your best work, and making it mobile-friendly. They can also make recommendations to improve your website’s speed, legibility, usability, layout, and more—making it a better than fine investment for the long haul!
Contact Hercules SEO today to find out how our seasoned marketing and web development professionals can make you a site that stands out and that wins you clients!