Website design for contractors, judged on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a contractor web design agency

1. Decide who owns the domain, the hosting and the content. Before anything else, establish that you will own the domain registration, the hosting account and the finished content. A surprising number of trade-focused website deals are effectively rentals where leaving means starting from scratch. Ask directly what you keep if you cancel, and get the answer in the contract rather than in an email.
2. Insist on real job photography. Stock images of unfamiliar houses undermine the exact thing the site is supposed to prove. Agree who supplies photographs of your finished work, how they get collected from crews, and how many jobs are needed before launch. If an agency has no process for this, the site will launch on stock and stay that way.
3. Check speed and mobile behaviour on a real phone. Most contractor traffic arrives on a phone, often on a weak connection, and often mid-emergency. Ask candidates for two live sites they built, then open them on your own phone away from wifi and time how long it takes before you can tap a call button. Google publishes its Core Web Vitals metrics for exactly this kind of check.
4. Fix how enquiries reach you before launch. Decide whether leads arrive by phone, form, text or all three, where form submissions land, who answers them and how fast. Test the form yourself after launch and again a month later. Broken contact forms are the single most expensive defect in this category and they are silent by nature.

What a contractor site actually needs

The pages that earn money are unglamorous: one page per service, one page per town or borough you genuinely serve, a page of finished work with real photographs, a page carrying licence numbers, insurance and accreditations, and a fast route to contact from every one of them. Service area pages are worth building properly, with specifics about the area and jobs you have completed there, because thin duplicated town pages are exactly what Google's spam policies describe as scaled content abuse.

Marking the business up with local business structured data helps search engines associate the site with your address, service area, hours and phone number. It is a small technical job that many contractor sites skip. Ask whether it is included, along with a properly claimed and verified business profile, because the map result is often where the enquiry actually starts.

What we record about each agency, and what we ignore

Our index carries what each agency states publicly: build prices or starting fees, ongoing care plan costs, disclosed minimums, which disciplines run in house, and the trade clients they name. Entries are dated. Where an agency publishes no price, we record the absence rather than inventing a figure, because an unpublished price is a fact about how the agency sells, not a gap in our data.

We do not accept payment for placement and we do not rank on design awards. For contractors specifically, the more useful signal is whether an agency can name clients in your trade and whether those sites are still live and still fast. Two names, checked on your own phone, tell you more than a portfolio page of screenshots.

Questions people actually ask

How much should a contractor website cost?

Prices range from a template build with a monthly care plan up to a bespoke design with custom photography and content, and the honest answer depends almost entirely on how much of the content and imagery you supply. Ask every candidate to quote the same page count and the same content responsibility split, then compare.

Do I need a new site or a rebuild of the one I have?

If the current site loads fast, works on a phone and has your services and service areas covered, the money is usually better spent on content and photographs than on a redesign. Redesign when the structure is wrong or the site is unmaintainable, not when it looks dated.

Should the same agency do the website and the SEO?

It is convenient and often sensible, but only if search work is genuinely in house. Ask who writes the content and who does technical work. Splitting the two is workable as long as one party has clear responsibility for the site's technical health.

What should I get at handover?

Admin access to the site and hosting, the domain in your own registrar account, ownership of the analytics and Search Console properties, and a copy of the content. Create those accounts yourself and grant the agency access rather than the other way round, so your history survives a change of supplier.

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