Construction website design for firms that want better projects, not more enquiries
A homeowner spending £60,000 on an extension will look at four construction firms' websites in one evening and cut the list to two. This is about being one of the two.
- Fixed £1,995, up to eight pages, no monthly fee
- Live in 3 to 4 weeks, two rounds of revisions
- Built around your finished projects, not stock photos
How a homeowner actually shortlists a construction firm
Picture the evening this decision gets made. Two people at a kitchen table with a laptop, a rough idea of a rear extension, a number in their head they are slightly frightened of, and six tabs open.
Every one of those tabs is a construction firm's website, and yours is being judged against five others in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. They are not reading your copy carefully. They are scanning for reasons to say no, because they have six firms and only time to meet three. It takes seconds. No photographs of finished work, out. Photographs that could be anyone's, out. A website that looks abandoned, out. No idea whether you cover their town, out. Nothing about the size of job you take, out, because they cannot tell whether a £70,000 extension is your bread and butter or the biggest thing you have ever attempted.
What survives the cut is the firm that shows work that looks like the job they are imagining, in houses that look like theirs, with enough detail that it reads as real. Then they check reviews to see whether you were pleasant to live with for four months, and whether you finished.
That is the whole brief here. Prove the work is yours, prove it was finished, prove people were glad they used you, and make it obvious what to do next.
Your portfolio carries more weight here than in any other trade
A roofer can win work with a decent service page and good reviews. A construction firm cannot. The job is too big, too disruptive and too personal for anyone to buy on words alone.
Most construction firm websites throw this advantage away with a gallery. Forty images, no captions, no order, no context. It tells a homeowner you have done some building, which they already assumed. It does not tell them you have done their building.
The fix is project pages. One page per job, treated like a small case study, and it is worth doing properly for eight or ten jobs rather than badly for forty.
Before, during and after is the structure that does the heavy lifting. Before earns trust because it shows you are not hiding the state you started with. During is the part almost nobody publishes, and the part that quietly answers the question homeowners are most anxious about, which is what it is like living with a building site. After is what they are buying.
Around those photos you want the scope in plain English, the timescale, and a short description of what the job involved and anything unusual that came up. The steel that had to go in as an RSJ over the new opening, the joists doubled up to carry it, the lintel above the bifolds, the screed that needed three days before anything could sit on it, the damp course that turned out to be missing once the render came off. Not a spec sheet. A paragraph a normal person can read.
Before, during and after
Three stages, in that order, on every job. The during photos are the ones that separate you from a firm posting other people's finished kitchens.
Scope in plain English
Six metre single storey rear extension, structural steel, bifold doors, underfloor heating, replastered kitchen. Enough that someone can recognise their own job in it.
Timescale, honestly
Fourteen weeks from kickoff to handover. Homeowners are desperate for this number and almost nobody publishes it. Being straight about it is a competitive advantage.
The short story of the job
What the clients wanted, what you found when you opened it up, how you solved it. One or two paragraphs. This is what makes the page read as real rather than staged.
Trust and compliance signals, presented accurately
Every construction website claims to be trusted, professional and reliable. None of those words mean anything. What a nervous homeowner is looking for is specific, checkable facts, and they need to be stated carefully rather than dressed up.
Trade association membership. The Federation of Master Builders is a trade association for building firms, with an application and vetting process for members. It is not a licence and it is not a legal requirement, and there is no single national register that every builder must join. If you are a member, say so plainly and let people verify it. If you are not, do not imply that you are.
Insurance. Public liability is what homeowners ask about most. Employers' liability is a legal requirement if you have employees. Contract works or contractors' all risk cover applies to the works in progress. State what you carry, in the right words, and be ready to show the certificate.
Warranties and guarantees. Be exact about what you offer, who stands behind it and for how long. A workmanship guarantee from your own firm is a different thing from an insurance backed guarantee provided through a third party. New build work commonly needs a structural warranty because mortgage lenders ask for one. Getting this language right protects you as much as it reassures the client.
Building control. Extensions, loft conversions and structural alterations generally need building regulations approval, handled through local authority building control or an approved inspector, and that is separate from planning permission. Explaining how you handle sign-off, and who is responsible for what, removes a genuine worry rather than adding another badge to the footer.
I write these sections with you and only claim what you can evidence. Nothing invented, nothing implied.
My clients are private and will not let me photograph their homes. What then?
It is more common than you would think, particularly on higher value work. Ask at the start of the job rather than the end, offer to keep the address off the page, and shoot the work rather than the family's belongings. Anonymised project pages with the area rather than the street still do most of the job.
The structure a construction website needs
Eight pages, used well, covers almost every building firm. The mistake is spending all of them on the company and none on the work.
You want a page for each type of job you want more of, and no pages for work you are trying to move away from. For most firms that is extensions, a loft conversion page, a garage conversion page, renovations, and whatever else you actually chase — groundwork and blockwork if you take it on, driveway and patio work if that is a real part of the business rather than something you do as a favour. Every service page has a job to do in search as well as on the site, so an extensions page that says nothing more than "we build extensions" is a wasted page.
Underneath that sit the project pages, which are the proof. Then service areas, so it is obvious where you work, especially if you travel further for larger jobs than you do for small ones.
Extensions
Usually the biggest single source of enquiries. Single storey, double storey, wrap around, side return. Say which you do and show one of each if you can.
Loft conversions
A distinct decision with its own worries: headroom, stairs, dormers, building regs. Homeowners search for it separately, so it deserves its own page.
Renovations and refurbishments
Whole house work, period property, structural alterations. The page that tells a homeowner you can handle a house that needs everything doing at once.
New builds
Only if you genuinely want it. Different buyer, different questions, different warranty position. If you do not want new build work, leaving it off is a feature.
Project pages
One per finished job. Eight to twelve to start with. They are the pages people actually spend time on, and they earn their own search traffic over time.
Service areas
Real pages for the places you genuinely work, not a list of forty towns. Be honest about the radius for a small job versus a full renovation.
The enquiry journey for a job this size
A homeowner is not going to fill in a fifteen field form to enquire about a job they have not fully decided on. Asking for budget, postcode, planning status, drawings, timescale and preferred start date in one go tells them they are about to be sold to, and most of them will close the tab.
The point of the first contact is not to qualify. It is to start a conversation with someone who will not decide for another two months. Name, contact, a rough idea of the job and the area. That is enough. You qualify on the phone and on site, where you are good at it.
It also helps to give people something to do other than enquire, because a lot of them are not ready. A clear phone number for the ones who want to talk now, and honest content that answers the questions they are stuck on, keeps you in the frame while they think. Setting expectations helps too. Telling someone you will come back within a working day, and that a site visit usually follows before any figures, makes enquiring feel less like stepping onto a sales conveyor belt.
One quiet thing that matters more than it should: make it obvious you are a real firm with a real address and a real person. On jobs this size, the fear of being taken for a ride is doing as much work as the desire for a nice kitchen.
What website development you get for £1,995
One fixed price, paid once. No monthly licence, no platform fee, no rebuild charge in eighteen months.
Up to eight pages, designed and written around your work, live in three to four weeks from the point I have your content. Two rounds of revisions so you can actually change your mind. Thirty days of support after launch for the things you only spot once it is live.
The site is built to be fast on a phone, because a good share of your visitors will be looking at it in the evening on a sofa, and it is set up correctly for search from day one rather than retrofitted later. Every page is structured so it can rank for the thing it is about.
You own it outright. The domain, the content, the files. If you decide in two years that you would rather work with someone else, you take it with you and nothing stops working.
What I do not do is invent your proof. I will not write a fake testimonial, stage a job you did not do, or put stock photos of someone else's extension on your website. If the photographs are thin, we plan around what you have and I tell you what to capture on the next job.
What the website does all day while you build
A construction website works the hours you cannot. While the firm is on site, the website is answering the questions every homeowner asks in the same order: is this construction company real, is the work good, do they handle my kind of job, what happens next. A website that answers all four keeps the enquiry; a website that answers two loses it to the next website on the shortlist. That is the entire logic of the design — every page of the website exists to move a serious enquiry one step closer to a conversation.
It is worth being clear about what this website is not, because the comparison comes up weekly. A website builder — the drag-and-drop kind — will produce a website in an afternoon, and for some businesses that is genuinely enough. For a construction business it rarely is: the website builder template cannot photograph your scaffolding, write your services in your voice, or structure a website so Google connects the company to the towns it builds in. The difference shows up not in how the websites look but in what they return: a bespoke build is website design and web design working as one job — structure, words, speed and proof — while a template is a business card wearing a website costume.
The build itself covers everything the company needs to own outright: website design, development, copywriting, photography guidance, hosting setup, and the website structure that search services build on later. Websites for this trade earn their keep across years, not weeks — the marketing arithmetic is that one decent project won by the website pays for the website several times over, and every project after that is margin. Company owners who think of the website as plant rather than paperwork make the right call almost every time.
Why not just use a website builder template and do it myself?
You can, and for some firms that is a reasonable call. The two things that usually go wrong are structure and follow-through. Templates push you towards a pretty homepage and a gallery, which is exactly the format that loses shortlists, and most builders who start one finish it eight months later at eleven at night. If you would genuinely do it, do it.
I have hardly any decent photos of finished jobs. Can you still build it?
Yes, but be realistic about what it will do. I build the structure so project pages slot in as you get them, and I will tell you exactly what to photograph on your next three jobs and at which stages. A website with two strong projects beats one with twenty blurry phone shots taken in the rain at four o'clock.
When I would tell a construction business not to buy this
If you have no photographs of finished work at all and no way to get any, a new website will not fix your problem. Get two or three jobs documented properly first, even if that means photographing a mate's kitchen you finished last year.
If you are a sole trader doing small works and repairs rather than projects, most of this page does not apply to you and a simpler site will do the job for less effort.
And if you already have a decent, fast website with real project pages and your problem is that nobody sees it, buying another website is the wrong purchase. That is a search problem, and it costs less to fix.
What builders ask before a rebuild.
Scope, mainly. It is up to eight pages, built to a proven structure rather than designed from a blank page, and it is one person with low overheads instead of an agency with a studio to pay for. What is not missing is ownership, speed, or the search setup. If you want twenty pages, custom illustration or an e-commerce build, I am not the right person and I will say so.
You own it. The domain is in your name, the content is yours, and you can move it elsewhere whenever you like. I do not hold websites hostage. There is no monthly fee attached to the website itself and no penalty for leaving, because there is nothing to leave.
It cannot create demand that is not there. What it can do is change which jobs you get shortlisted for, because the work you put in front of people sets the expectation of what you do. If everything on your website is a £15,000 bathroom, you will keep getting £15,000 enquiries. That much is within your control.
More on marketing a building business.
A new website earns its keep faster when the rest of the picture is in place. These are the next things worth reading.
Find out where your website is losing trust and enquiries.
Request a free website audit. I'll tell you honestly what's holding the current site back, what's worth keeping, and whether a rebuild is justified at all.
Get a free auditFree · reviewed personally by James · within 3 working days · no sales call