What a homeowner is checking before they ring you
A £40,000 extension is a big decision, and people research it the way they would a car. They are not looking for clever design. They are looking for proof you are real, local, competent and safe to hand a deposit to. Your website has about eight seconds to answer those questions before they go back to the search results.
That means your name, the areas you cover, the type of work you do and a phone number should all be visible without scrolling on a mobile. Around three quarters of visits to trade websites now come from phones, usually in the evening after the couple have had the conversation about the kitchen. If your site is fiddly on a small screen, you are losing enquiries you never knew you had.
- Company name, trading address and Companies House number if you are a limited company
- Public liability insurance stated plainly, with the cover amount if you are happy to share it
- Memberships you genuinely hold, such as FMB or TrustMark, with nothing invented
- A clear list of the towns and postcodes you actually travel to
- A real photo of you or the team, not stock images of models in hard hats
The pages that turn visitors into enquiries
You do not need twenty pages. A small firm doing extensions, loft conversions and renovations typically needs a home page, one page per main service, a projects gallery, an about page and a contact page. Each service page should describe the job in the words a customer would use, give a rough indication of timescale and price bracket, and end with a way to get in touch.
The projects gallery is where most builders win or lose the job. Before and after photos, taken on a decent phone in daylight, with two sentences on what the brief was and what you did, are worth more than any amount of copywriting. Aim for at least ten completed jobs, and keep adding. A gallery that stops in 2021 makes people wonder whether you are still trading.
Reviews matter, but pull them from Google or Checkatrade rather than typing them in yourself. Embedding a live feed means the dates are visible and the reviews are verifiable, which is exactly what a cautious homeowner wants.
Getting found locally without paying for ads
For a builder, ranking nationally is pointless. You want to appear when someone in your patch searches for an extension builder or a loft conversion in their town. The single most important step is a properly completed Google Business Profile with your service area set, regular photo uploads and a steady flow of reviews. Your website then backs that up.
On the site itself, create a page for each main service and mention the specific towns you cover in the text, naturally rather than as a list stuffed into the footer. A firm in Reading doing loft conversions in Wokingham, Bracknell and Henley will do far better with a page that talks about those jobs than a generic page that could belong to any builder in the country.
Speed also counts. Google measures how quickly your pages load, and large uncompressed site photos are the usual culprit. Keep images under about 300 kilobytes each and your site should load in under three seconds on a 4G connection.
What it realistically costs and what to avoid
A straightforward five to eight page site for a builder, built properly and mobile first, typically costs somewhere between £800 and £2,500 in the UK depending on how much content and photography you need help with. Ongoing hosting, security updates and a domain usually run £15 to £50 a month. Anything quoting £99 all in is usually a template with your logo dropped on it, and anything above £5,000 for a small firm needs a very good explanation.
Be wary of long contracts where you never own the site. If you stop paying and the whole thing disappears, you have rented a website rather than bought one. Ask who owns the domain, who holds the hosting login and whether you can move the site elsewhere. A reputable designer will answer all three without hesitation.
The other common trap is chasing a beautiful site and forgetting to keep it alive. Ten minutes a month adding a finished job and asking the customer for a Google review will do more for your enquiries than any redesign.
- Do you own the domain name and can you take it with you?
- Is the site built to work on a phone first, not just shrunk down from desktop?
- Can you add a new project yourself without paying every time?
- Does the contact form send enquiries to your phone as well as email?
- Is there a written quote with everything included, not a monthly figure with extras?