How to make a general contractor website that wins bigger jobs

TL;DR: How to make a general contractor website

This guide covers the build first: a domain that matches your work, a construction template, and the pages a homeowner opens, which are your services, your finished work, your process and one obvious way to reach you. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services, Pricing and Galleries blocks, so a kitchen remodel that wrapped on Friday can be on the site on Sunday without anyone else touching it. It also covers how to write the services list in a homeowner's words, kitchen remodel and addition rather than interior alterations, and how to publish ranges for the work that repeats while quoting the rest.

The second half is where the shortlist gets decided. You show each job as a set of photographs rather than loose shots, add a quote request form asking for the scope, the address, whether there are drawings, a budget range and a start month, and put your license class and number, your bond, your liability limit and your workers compensation where a homeowner sees them. A current projects page says what you are building right now and where, a Google Business Profile under "General contractor" and a page per town cover local search, and a launch check on a real phone finishes it. Work through the ten steps and a homeowner with drawings and a budget has everything they need to put you on the list of three.

What to include

Top features of a general contractor website

How to make a general contractor
website in 10 steps

Your domain is the name a homeowner writes on the back of your estimate so they can look you up that evening. Use the name on the truck and on your permit applications, spelled exactly the way it reads there, and take the .com while it is free, because that is still what people type first and what reads as a real company to somebody about to let a crew into their house. If you work one metro and have no plans to leave it, putting the city on the end helps, though it gets awkward the day you take on a job two counties over.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. A contractor's name gets repeated over a fence and across a job site, and both of those get dropped on the way. Whatever you register, spell it the same on your Google Business Profile, on your license record, on your yard signs and on the estimates you leave behind, since a homeowner checking one against the other should never have to wonder whether it is the same company.

You can search for and register the name inside the Yola website builder while you put the site together, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

None of this needs code and none of it needs a developer. Yola lets you edit text, swap photographs and move sections yourself, which matters more for a contractor than for most trades, because the site changes every time a job wraps and you are the one who will be changing it, usually at night after the crew has gone home.

Answer a few questions about the work you take on and the towns you cover, and Yola's AI Website Builder hands back a first draft to edit rather than a blank page. The free plan has basic AI and the full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, so read whatever comes back line by line and correct anything it guessed about your services, your service area or your license. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a construction template means the services list, the project gallery and the contact form are already laid out, so your job is putting your own work into them.

Start from a template

General contractor website templates

Six pages carry a contractor site, and they answer the questions a homeowner works through in order. Do you do this kind of job. Have you done one like mine. Who actually shows up, and who pulls the permit. What did the last people say. How do I get you out here.

Keep the set tight. Every extra page is one more thing going out of date while you are on a roof, and the six below are the ones that get opened. Your service areas can live at the bottom of the Contact page until you have enough towns to justify a page each.

Build these first and add the rest once the site is live:

Name every service the way a homeowner searching for it names it, not the way it appears on a schedule of values. Somebody planning to take a wall out types kitchen remodel, not interior alterations. Somebody adding a bedroom over the garage types addition. Write the list in their words and keep your own terms for the contract.

Prices work differently for a contractor than for a trade. Nobody can post a figure for an addition, because the number moves with the footprint, the span, the finishes and whatever the inspector finds when the siding comes off. What you can publish is a range for the work that repeats, a bathroom remodel for instance, and a plain line saying everything else is quoted after a walk-through. A homeowner who sees a range and the reason it moves keeps reading. One who sees nothing at all assumes the worst and calls somebody else.

Where a service carries real search demand of its own, and kitchen and bathroom remodels nearly always do, give it a page rather than a line in a list. Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks put the name, a short description and the figure together, so moving a range next spring is an edit rather than a project.

The gallery is the page a homeowner opens first and the one they read your quote against, so treat it as the main job of the site rather than a section near the bottom. What gets a contractor shortlisted is not one pretty room. It is a project shown as a project: six to ten frames of the same job, with a line saying what the scope was, roughly how long it ran and whether it was permitted. Somebody holding drawings is looking for a build the size and shape of theirs, and one complete set of a kitchen gut does more for you than thirty loose photographs of thirty different jobs.

Shoot the finished rooms empty and clean, straight on from a corner, with the blinds open and the lights on. Wide beats close here, because a homeowner is reading the whole space rather than the faucet. Take the same frame at the start of the job before anything comes out, then put the two next to each other in the gallery, which is all a before and after really needs to be. Daylight, a phone held level and a steady hand in the dark rooms will get you most of the way, and the week the job wraps is the window: after the trim is on, before the furniture arrives.

Keep the middle of the job too, because that part is yours alone. The framing with the new beam in, the rough-in before the drywall goes up, the footings poured, the inspection sticker on the panel. Those frames prove you built it rather than bought a photograph of it, and they answer something a homeowner with plans is quietly checking, which is whether the parts nobody ever sees get done properly. Two or three per job is plenty. They also give a job that ran nine months something to show while it is still running.

Name the files for what is in them, kitchen-remodel-full-gut-maple-grove.jpg rather than IMG_2210.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text, which gives the photos a chance in a local image search. Get the homeowner's approval in writing before their house goes on a public page, and keep street numbers out of the captions, since the neighborhood is enough for anybody who is judging whether you work nearby. Yola does not host video, so a walk-through clip goes on your usual video platform and gets embedded on the page.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds the sets, and on a paid plan you can lay out a custom gallery with the Custom code block if you want each job on its own row with its own caption. Paid plans also come with 10M premium stock images and 1M premium icons, which are worth using for section headers and backgrounds while your own photography catches up. Never for the project gallery itself. A stock kitchen sitting in your portfolio is the one thing a homeowner will spot and never quite forget.

The quote request form is where the site pays for itself, because it does the first ten minutes of the walk-through before you get in the truck. A homeowner with drawings and a budget is contacting three contractors in the same week, and the one who comes back with sensible questions and a date gets further than the one who took two days to say hello.

Five fields do the work. What the project is, in their own words. The address, or at least the neighborhood, so you know whether it is in your area and which permit office you will be dealing with. Whether they have drawings, a full plan set, an architect or nothing yet, which tells you more about the job than any other question on the form. A budget range rather than a figure, because a range gets answered and a figure gets skipped. And a timeline, meaning the month they want to start. Name and phone at the bottom and nothing else, since every extra box costs you a submission from somebody filling this in on a phone.

You choose those fields yourself, since Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through setting one up. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed. Write that confirmation properly: say when you will come back to them, and give a phone number for anybody whose roof is currently open.

Say plainly on the page what a submission is. It is an inquiry and a request for a quote, not a booked walk-through and not a slot in your schedule, and no date is theirs until you have both signed something. Then answer inside a day, even if the answer is another question. Of the three contractors called that week, one will have replied by the next morning, and being that one is worth more than anything else on this page.

Contractor licensing is set state by state, and in places city by city, and the rules are nowhere near uniform. Some states license and classify general contractors and set a dollar threshold above which you have to hold one. Others leave it to the county, or license only the trades working under you. So write this section as what you genuinely hold and where you hold it, in the words the issuing board uses, and leave out anything that does not apply where you work.

Put it where a homeowner will actually see it, which is the home page and the area around the quote request button, not an About page three clicks down. Somebody comparing three quotes is working off a short mental checklist, and license, bond and insurance sit on it. Every one of those they have to email you about is a day of delay and a chance for somebody else to answer first.

The bond and the insurance carry the most weight on a large job, because they are what answers the question of what happens if it goes wrong. Where your state or city requires a contractor license bond, give the amount and name the surety. If you carry general liability cover, publish the limit, since a homeowner borrowing against the house will be asked for that figure by a lender or an insurer and would rather find it than request it. Workers compensation for your crew belongs on the same line, and it is a fair question from somebody about to have six people they did not hire working on their property.

One thing belongs here that no single-trade page needs. Say that you pull the permits, and say that your subcontractors carry their own license and insurance and how you verify it before they set foot on site. Running the framer, the electrician, the plumber and the roofer is the job a general contractor is hired for, and a homeowner who has been through a bad build knows that an uninsured sub on an unpermitted job becomes their problem too. Two honest sentences on how you handle it do more than another badge.

Two things a services page can never tell a homeowner are whether you are busy and whether you are local. A current projects page answers both at once. Put the jobs you have running on it, one line each, with the type of work, the town or neighborhood, the stage it has reached and the month it started. A full-gut kitchen in Maple Grove, framing done, started in March. That is enough. No street numbers and no client names.

Your lead time belongs in the same place, because it is the question every spring brings. Say which month you are quoting for now and how far out the schedule runs, and put the date you last changed it at the top so nobody reads February's answer in June. A homeowner who can see you are booked into the fall either waits for you or moves on, and either way you get your evening back.

Leave finished jobs on the page instead of clearing them out. A year of real projects with towns and dates against them is the evidence that the company has been running steadily, and it is what somebody scrolls through before they get in touch. It is also the raw material for the town pages in the next step.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand, and for this job that is the right shape anyway. Jobs slip, permits take longer than the office said they would, and a page you edit yourself moves with that. Once the first few lines are laid out, adding a project means copying a line and changing four words. The discipline is when you do it, and the end of the month is a habit that sticks. A page still listing last year's work as current does more damage than no page at all, because it reads as a company that stopped.

Almost all of a contractor's demand starts with a town name in the search box. Two sets of results matter: the map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top, and the ordinary blue links underneath, where a page you wrote can rank for a remodel type and a town. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability handles the technical side of your pages. The wording is yours, and the map pack is work you do on Google rather than inside the site.

Before you tell anybody the site is live, open it on a phone the way a homeowner will and do what they will do. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself a quote request and read the confirmation that comes back. Open the gallery on cellular and see how long the first project takes to appear. Then hand the phone to somebody who does not build for a living and watch where they get stuck.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts between phone and laptop on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are the home page, the gallery and your main service pages. Full-size project photographs are nearly always what slows a contractor site down, so resize them before they go up rather than after somebody complains.

After that the upkeep is small and regular. A finished job goes into the gallery the week it wraps, while the rooms are still empty and clean. The current projects page gets a pass at the end of each month. License renewals, bond amounts and insurance limits get corrected the week they change, because those are the lines a homeowner will read against the certificate you send them. Twenty minutes a month covers it, and a site that keeps moving holds its ranking better than one left alone since the job that paid for it.

Common general contractor website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of things go wrong on contractor sites, and every one of them costs you a place on somebody's list of three.

How much does a general contractor website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Set against a single bathroom remodel, the site costs less than a month of dumpster rental.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on how much design and photography goes into it, and changes afterwards usually carry a fee of their own.

That second figure is the one that decides it for a contractor, because this site is never finished. Every job that wraps is a new set of photographs, every renewal is a new date, and the current projects page wants a few minutes a month. If each of those edits is an email to a designer, you either pay every time or you stop asking, and the site slowly turns into a record of what you were doing two years ago. Doing it yourself means the kitchen you finished on Friday is on the site by Sunday.