Website Design for Construction Companies

Most advice about contractor websites covers layout, photos and calls to action. Useful, and incomplete. Two federal requirements apply to a construction company’s website and rarely come up in a design conversation: how customer testimonials and reviews have to be handled, and whether a person using a screen reader can use the site at all. Both carry real exposure, and neither is expensive to get right at build time.

What should a construction company website contain?

The facts an owner would otherwise have to phone and ask for: trades performed, counties served, typical project size, whether the company self-performs or subcontracts, license and registration numbers, insurance and bonding, and completed projects described in writing rather than shown as photographs alone.

That list is short and most contractor sites miss most of it. The information sits in the estimator’s head, the certificate folder and the project manager’s phone, and never makes the journey onto a page. Every item left off is a question a buyer answers by moving on.

The photographs are the clearest example. A jobsite album is genuine proof of capability and carries no meaning without written scope beside it: square footage, the system installed, the schedule, the condition found when the deck came off. That is what gets quoted back in a prequalification conversation.

Are there rules about testimonials on a contractor website?

Yes. The Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides apply to any business using customer reviews or testimonials in advertising, and a website is advertising. Testimonials must reflect the endorser’s honest opinion, connections such as employment or family must be disclosed, and reviews cannot be selectively published.

The FTC’s guidance for businesses, updated 15 July 2025, is specific in ways that catch ordinary contractor practice. A few that apply directly:

Incentives cannot be conditioned on a positive review. Offering a discount in exchange for a good review is not allowed. Inviting every customer to leave an honest review, positive or negative, is fine, and if something of value changes hands the customer should disclose it.

Negative reviews cannot be delayed or suppressed selectively. Holding back negative reviews while responding to them, even briefly, creates a biased picture. If reviews are delayed for a response window, all of them should be delayed equally.

Sorting matters. Ordering reviews so that every five-star entry appears first, regardless of date, can be deceptive even if a visitor is given the option to re-sort.

Customers told in advance they might be featured should be disclosed as such. The FTC’s example wording is simply that customers were told in advance they might appear in an ad. The reasoning is that the prospect of appearing has value and may shape what someone says.

Old testimonials go stale. If a site implies the endorser is still a client, the company needs reason to believe that is true. On a contractor site carrying quotes from a job finished six years ago, that is worth a check.

There is also a trap in the exceptional-result testimonial. A quote describing an outcome well above typical will be read as what others can expect, and a disclaimer saying results vary does not cure it. Either hold proof the result is typical or state what the general outcome is.

Does a contractor website have to be accessible?

The Department of Justice has consistently taken the position that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the goods and services a business offers online, including its website. There is no detailed federal technical standard for private businesses, and DOJ guidance points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Section 508 standards.

The DOJ web accessibility guidance lists the barriers that come up most, and the list reads like a description of a typical contractor site: poor colour contrast, colour used alone to carry meaning, images with no alt text, video with no captions, forms without labels a screen reader can announce, and pages that cannot be operated with a keyboard.

The fixes are build-time decisions rather than expensive retrofits. Contrast that holds up, alt text on project photos, captions on jobsite video, labelled contact forms with clear error messages, real heading structure, and keyboard navigation that works. Several of those improve search visibility at the same time, since alt text and heading structure are read by engines as well as by screen readers.

One caution from the guidance itself: automated accessibility checkers and overlays help, and a clean automated report does not mean a site is accessible. The DOJ recommends pairing automated checks with a manual one.

What makes a contractor website convert?

Specificity and friction removal. A visitor deciding whether to call is checking whether the company does this kind of work, in this place, at this size. Pages that answer those three questions quickly, with a phone link that works on a phone, convert better than any redesign of the layout.

The broken mobile phone link deserves its own mention because it is so common and so quiet. A number displayed correctly on screen can sit behind a link with a digit missing, with nothing visible to indicate a problem. Every mobile tap fails silently, and testing it takes ten seconds. Empty sections do similar damage: a heading promising client feedback with nothing beneath it reads as an abandoned site on the exact page where credibility is being judged.

How does website design connect to getting found?

The design decides whether traffic does anything once it arrives. Search work brings an owner to a page, and the page either answers what they came to check or it does not. The two are usually sold separately and fail together.

Heading structure, alt text, page speed and clear service area copy are design decisions and ranking factors at the same time. A site built with those in place gives search work something to build on rather than something to fight.

Paid search, social profiles and listings all send people to the same pages, which is why the website is the first fix rather than the last.

Rebuild the site or repair the one you have?

Repair when the structure works and the content is thin, which describes most contractor sites. Rebuild when the platform blocks accessibility fixes, the site cannot be edited without a developer, or the business has changed categories since it was built. The cost difference is large and the decision is usually clearer than it feels.

Repair is the right call when the pages load, the site is indexed, and what is missing is written content: service areas never named, project photos with no scope, licensing not shown, a testimonial section sitting empty. None of that needs a new template. It needs a month of writing and someone to put it on the page. A contractor who rebuilds instead buys a new design wrapped around the same empty content and sees the same results.

Rebuild is the right call when the underlying platform fights the work. Themes that generate pages a keyboard cannot navigate, contact forms whose labels cannot be edited, galleries that will not accept alt text, and page builders that require a developer for every change all cap how far repair can go. The same applies when the company has moved into a different category of work, since a residential template cannot be rewritten into a commercial prequalification site.

Agencies have an incentive to recommend the rebuild and contractors have an incentive to believe repair will be enough. The five checks below settle it with evidence, and plenty of sites come out needing writing rather than rebuilding.

What should a contractor check on their current site?

Run these five checks before commissioning anything new. Tap the phone link on a mobile device. Read the footer as a stranger. Count how many owner-facing facts appear in writing. Look at whether testimonials carry the disclosures the FTC describes. Try navigating the site using only the keyboard.

Most contractors find enough in those five checks to occupy a month, and none of it requires a redesign. A footer that describes the business accurately, a phone link with the right number of digits, written scope beside the project photos and a testimonial section that is either populated or removed will outperform a new template on the same empty content.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Design for Construction Companies