The seven things a remodeling website has to do

By Steve Meitler · 2026-08-04 · 5 min read

Project pages, published ranges, license display, budget-qualified forms and speed: what a remodeler's site must do to turn a browser into a booked site visit.

23.8% of general contractors on Google link no website at all. In a trade that sells finished photographs of expensive rooms, one in four competitors has nowhere to put them.

The contractors who do have a site usually have the wrong one: a slideshow of anonymous kitchens, a page called Our Process, a contact form with three fields, and no prices anywhere. It looks professional and it converts almost nobody, because it answers none of the four questions a homeowner has before she calls. Have you done my project, in my town, at my number, and are you legitimate.

Here is what the site has to do. Seven things, in order of what they are worth.

1. Prove the work with organized projects, not a gallery

A gallery is a pile. A project page is evidence.

Each completed job gets its own page: town, year, room, scope in sentences, timeline, price band, one wide before, six to twelve afters shot from the before angles, and two paragraphs on what was difficult. "This 1954 split level in Lombard needed the load-bearing wall between kitchen and dining removed. We carried a flush LVL beam, relocated the range wall plumbing, and finished in 11 weeks at $68,000."

Twenty of those pages will out-produce a hundred photo tiles. They rank for town-plus-room searches, they give AI answer engines something quotable as described in the AI search guide, and they answer the question the buyer is actually asking, which is whether you have done her house before.

2. Publish a range

Every remodeler resists this and every remodeler who does it books better site visits.

Put a range on every service page and one page with all of them. "Full kitchen remodels we complete run $45,000 to $95,000. A cosmetic update in the existing layout runs $22,000 to $38,000. Our minimum project is $20,000."

You lose the callers who had $8,000. That is not a cost, that is the return. A stated minimum saves you two hours of driving per week, and the arguments for it are laid out in the pricing guide.

3. Qualify the form by budget and timeline

The standard contractor form asks for name, email, phone and "how can we help". It produces leads you cannot rank and a site visit calendar full of people who wanted a handyman.

Six fields:

• Name, phone, email
• What room or project
• What range have you set aside: under $15,000, $15,000 to $35,000, $35,000 to $75,000, $75,000 and up, not sure yet
• When would you like work to start: now, 3 months, 6 months, next year
• Upload photos, optional, and used more than you would expect

Add one line under the budget field, in plain text: "We ask because it saves us both a visit. Most of our projects fall between $35,000 and $90,000." Almost nobody drops off, and the ones who do were never going to sign.

4. Show the license, the insurance and the numbers

Homeowners spending $50,000 check, and state boards publish searchable license lookups.

Put your license number, in text, in the footer of every page, along with insurance status and years in business. Not in a badge image from 2019, because a badge image is invisible to search and to AI answers. Add a short trust block on the contact page: license number and state, general liability carrier and coverage amount, workers compensation status, and whether you carry a written warranty and for how long.

This costs nothing and it separates you from a large share of the field. The benchmark data shows how much of the field is not doing basic things: 14.3% of contractor listings have no reviews at all.

5. Load fast and be usable with one thumb

Remodeling sites are heavy because they are photographs. Half the visits are on a phone, frequently on a mediocre connection while she is standing in the room she wants changed.

• Compress every image to under 200 KB and serve WebP. A 4 MB camera JPEG on a project page is the most common speed problem in this trade.
• Lazy load everything below the fold.
• Target three seconds to a usable page on a phone.
• Phone number tap-to-call in the header on every page, not just contact.
• Buttons at least 44 pixels tall, text at 16 pixels or larger.
• No pop-up before the visitor has seen a project.

6. One page per service, and one per town you want

A single "Services" page listing eight things ranks for none of them.

Build one page per service: kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, basement finishing, whole home renovation. Each with its own range, its own projects, its own FAQ.

Then add a page for each town you genuinely work, with real projects completed there. Three real town pages beat thirty templated ones with the name swapped, which Google has treated as spam for years. If you have not worked in a town yet, do not make the page.

7. Make follow-up automatic

The site's last job is to not lose the lead in the eleven days after the form fill.

Form submissions should text you and the client within seconds, land in a CRM tagged by budget band and timeline, and enter a sequence rather than an inbox. On a 60 to 180 day sales cycle, the difference between an organized follow-up and a good intention is most of your revenue. The missed calls and follow-up guide covers the sequence, and the calculator prices what the leaks cost you at your own average project value.

What you can skip

• A blog you will not write. Two updated project pages a month beat twelve abandoned articles.
• Chat widgets nobody staffs. An unanswered chat is worse than none.
• Stock photography of kitchens you did not build. Buyers spot it and you lose the credibility the page existed to build.
• Awards badges from 2016.
• Autoplaying video headers, which slow the page and get muted anyway.

Frequently asked

How much should a remodeling website cost? $3,000 to $9,000 for a well-built custom site with project pages, or $150 to $400 a month for a managed one. Under $1,000 you are usually getting a template with your logo dropped in and no project structure, which is the part that does the work.

Should I use Houzz instead of a website? Keep the Houzz profile current, because it ranks and homeowners browse it. But it is rented ground: it lists your competitors alongside you and you cannot control the form. Own the site, feed Houzz the same photos.

Do I need a blog? No, but you need pages that answer questions: what a kitchen costs in your county, how long permits take there, what a change order is and how you handle them. Those are the pages that get cited in AI answers and read before the first call.

If you want the site built, project pages, ranges, qualified forms and all, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.