In Connecticut the contracting year has a shape. Inquiries for spring work start in February, pick up hard in March, and by May the good companies from Greenwich to Glastonbury are booked through summer. The website does its heaviest lifting in those three months, and it does it on a phone, from a homeowner who found you through a neighbor and is now checking whether you are real.
So the time to fix the site is January, not April. Here is the website development checklist we run for contractors across the state, in the order that tends to matter.
1. Does it load in under three seconds on a phone?
Open your own site on your phone, on cell data, not the office wifi. Count. If you got past three, that is where the homeowners are leaving. Most of the sites we take over are slow for boring reasons: oversized photos, a page builder loading forty scripts, a slider nobody asked for. Fixing this is usually the single biggest improvement available, and it costs nothing in new content.
2. Is there a page for each town you actually work in?
A remodeler in Cheshire who serves Wallingford, Southington, Hamden, and the New Haven suburbs should have a page for each one. Not a list of towns in the footer. A page, with the town in the title, two or three projects you did there, the neighborhoods you know, and a sentence about the building department or the historic district rules if that town has them.
This is what local search runs on. A homeowner in Madison types “kitchen remodel Madison CT” and Google wants to show a page about kitchen remodels in Madison, not a homepage that mentions Connecticut once. We build town pages for our own service area for the same reason.
Keep each page honest. If you have never worked in Litchfield, do not build a Litchfield page. A thin page with nothing on it hurts more than no page.
3. Is the phone number tappable, and does it go somewhere?
On a phone, the number at the top of the page should be a link that dials. The contact form should be three fields, not twelve. And whatever comes in should reach a human within a business day, in February, when you are not expecting it yet. A homeowner who fills out a form and hears nothing for a week has already called someone else.
4. Is the work from this year, or from the year you started?
Homeowners can tell. If the gallery is six photos from your first season, the site says you have not done anything since. Pull the last three or four finished projects, get them on the site before the season, and add a short video if you have one. A phone clip of the owner walking through a finished basement in Danbury or a new deck in Old Saybrook does more than twenty photos.
If there is no video yet, this is the season to plan it. A local shoot day covers 100 miles from our Ridgefield office, which reaches most of the state, and the drone is included.
5. Is there a person on it?
The about page is one of the most visited pages on almost every contractor site, and on most of them it is a paragraph of stock copy and a logo. Put the owner’s name and face on it. Put the crew on it. Say how long you have been in the state and what you will not do. In towns this size, the homeowner is going to meet you anyway; let them meet you on the site first.
6. Does the site say what things cost, or at least how you price?
You do not have to publish a price list. You do have to say something. “Kitchens start around a number” or “we quote a fixed price after a site visit” both work. A site that says nothing about money sends the homeowner to the one that does.
7. Do you own it?
This is the one most contractors cannot answer, and it is the one that matters most when something goes wrong. Who owns the domain? Whose name is on the hosting account? If the company that built the site disappeared tomorrow, could you log in?
Our rule is that the domain is registered in the client’s name, always. For the site itself, there are two ways to pay. A custom website from $2,500 is yours on day one. The subscription website at $150/mo has no upfront cost, covers hosting, edits, and maintenance, can be cancelled any time, and ownership transfers to you after 12 consecutive paid months, which works out to $1,800 by then, with nothing further owed. Many subscription arrangements in this industry never transfer ownership at all, and that is the question to ask before signing anything; our terms spell it out.
The web development page has the two options side by side and the pricing page has every number.
8. Is your Google Business Profile telling the same story?
The site and the profile should match: same name, same phone, same address, same hours, same towns. If the profile says Danbury and the site says Bethel, Google trusts neither. Add the last few projects as photos there too. In a state where a lot of searches end on the map rather than on a website, the profile is half the site.
9. Is there one clear thing to do?
Every page should have one obvious next step. For most contractors that is a button to book a call or request an estimate, visible without scrolling, on every page. Not three buttons. Not a chatbot. One.
What to do with the Website development list
Go through the nine items on your own site this week. Most contractors find three or four that need work, and two of those, speed and the phone number, can usually be fixed in a day. Town pages and fresh work take longer, which is why the time to start is now, with the ground still frozen.
If you would rather we go through it with you, the free marketing audit is a written review of the site, its speed, the Google listing, and your video presence, with no pitch attached. Or book a call and we will go through the list on the phone. We are based in Ridgefield and work with contractors from Stamford to Hartford to the shoreline.