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Web Hosting for Builders
You are selling something the buyer cannot walk through yet. That single fact shapes every page on a builder's website, and it decides what web hosting for builders is really carrying: plans that most sites bury where search engines cannot read them.
You are selling a product that does not exist yet
Most trades sell something the customer can point at. A builder sells a set of drawings, a plot of ground and a promise about next spring. The website has to do the work that a showroom would do, and it has to do it for somebody sitting on a sofa at nine at night comparing you against two other builders.
So the pages that matter are the ones that make the unbuilt thing feel real. The plan, the specification, the price bracket, the timeline, and enough finished work to prove you have done this before. Everything else on the site is packaging.
The failure is almost always the same. All of that lives inside one brochure PDF, because the brochure already existed and putting it on the website felt like publishing it. The one thing a buyer wants to browse ends up being the one thing nothing can read.
Two neighbouring pages cover close ground. Hosting for home builders is about the buyer relationship on a single dwelling, the deposit-to-handover journey and the one-off custom job. Hosting for general contractors is about work won by bid and referral rather than by browsing. This page is about volume: multiple plans, repeated across sites, sold to people shopping.
Get the plans out of the PDF
Send us the brochure your plans live in and we will host the site that turns each one into its own page, findable by name and readable on a phone. If your current hosting already handles that, we will say so.
Floor plans as pages, not as a download
Take one plan. Give it its own address on your website, its own headline, and the details written out as ordinary text under the drawing. Square footage. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Garage. Ceiling heights. Whether the primary suite is on the first floor. Then do it again for every plan you offer.
What that changes
- The plan name becomes findable. People search plan names, and they search phrases like a first-floor primary in a specific town. A PDF answers neither.
- It can be shared. A buyer sending their spouse a link to one plan is a better lead than one sending a fifteen page catalogue.
- It reads on a phone. Plan PDFs are drawn for paper. On a phone the reader zooms, drags sideways and gives up.
- It can be updated. When a plan changes, you edit a page in a minute rather than finding whoever still has the source file.
Keep the drawing itself as an image on that page, sized properly, with the dimensions repeated in text nearby. Offer the PDF as a download if you want to. Just do not let it be the only version. A download is a nice extra and a terrible front door.
If your plans are rendered as one big image with all the text baked into it, that is the same problem in a different wrapper. Words inside a picture may as well not be on the site.
Standard specifications, and the upgrade conversation
The second question after the plan is always what comes with it. Buyers have learned to be careful here, usually because somebody they know found out late that the price they were quoted did not include the driveway.
Publishing your standard specification is uncomfortable and it is worth doing anyway. A written list of what is included at base price does three things. It filters out people whose budget was never going to work, which saves you appointments. It gives your sales conversation a document to sit on. And it separates you from builders who will not put it in writing, which is a real advantage even if nobody says so out loud.
How to write it so it stays true
- Describe categories rather than exact model numbers where you can. Suppliers change, and a spec full of discontinued part numbers ages badly.
- Say plainly what is not included. Landscaping, appliances, window treatments and site work are the usual gaps.
- Put upgrades on the same page or one click away. Somebody talking themselves into a bigger kitchen is doing your selling for you.
- Date the page. A specification with a date on it reads as honest. One with no date reads as old.
Avoid firm prices on the page unless you are prepared to maintain them. Lumber and labour move, and a stale number is worse than no number. Bands and starting points hold up better, and both should carry the same wording your contract uses. If your contract language and your website language disagree, that is a conversation with your own attorney, not something to settle from a web page.
Timelines, because every enquiry asks
How long does it take. It is in nearly every message you get, and most builder websites do not answer it anywhere, so the answer gets given by phone, one buyer at a time, slightly differently each time.
Write it once. Not as a promise with dates on it, as a shape of the process with honest ranges and the things that move them. A buyer who understands why permitting can add two months is a buyer who is not calling you angry in month three.
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Selection and contract
Plan chosen, lot chosen, selections locked. This stage runs on the buyer's speed more than yours, which is worth saying on the page. Buyers who take eight weeks to pick finishes should know that is eight weeks.
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Permits and approvals
The stage most likely to stretch, and the one least under your control. Say that it varies by municipality without naming a town as slow. You have to work there next year.
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Site work and foundation
Weather-dependent in a real way in this part of the country. A winter start and a spring start are different projects, and a buyer reading a generic timeline in January will assume the best case.
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Framing through rough-in
The fastest visible progress and the point where buyers want photographs. If you are going to send updates, this is where the habit forms.
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Finishes and walkthrough
Long, slow and full of small items. Setting the expectation here prevents most of the friction at the end.
Two paragraphs and a range per stage is plenty. The goal is a buyer who arrives at the first meeting already calibrated.
Your plan library, set up and looked after
We will move a builder site over, get the galleries and progress photos organised and sized so the pages stay quick, and settle in writing who handles the updates. Call 716-771-2536 if it is easier.
What this asks of web hosting for builders
Less than you would think. A plan library, a gallery of finished work, a specification page and a contact form is not a demanding website. It is text and photographs. Shared hosting handles it comfortably, and for most builders the entry tier is genuinely enough.
The one place builders do differ from other trades is photographs. You accumulate them relentlessly, and a site with twenty plans and a gallery per community will use more storage than a restaurant or a law firm ever will. That is still small by hosting standards. What it does mean is that uploading full-size camera files straight from the phone will make your site slow long before it makes it full.
- Resize photographs before they go up. A gallery of unresized images is the single most common reason a builder's site feels slow.
- Keep progress photos organised by community or plan from the start. Retrofitting that once you have two thousand of them is miserable.
- Keep backups running, and know where they are. Your photographic record of completed work is not easy to recreate.
- If you take enquiries through a form, that form is a lead pipeline. Test that it still arrives, from an outside address, a few times a year.
If you use WordPress, which most builders do, the relevant reading is WordPress hosting and settling plainly who is responsible for updates. That question, not the plan tier, is what determines whether the site is still healthy in two years.
Who should not spend more than the minimum
If you are a custom builder taking one commission a year, most of this page is not written for you.
That business runs on reputation, on the architect who recommends you and on the client who tells their neighbour. Your website is a credential, not a shopfront. It needs to prove the work is real and make you easy to reach, and that is the whole brief. Nobody is browsing your plans, because you do not have plans, you have clients.
- You do not need a plan library. You need a portfolio and a phone number that works.
- You do not need a bigger hosting plan. A handful of pages and a gallery sits happily on an entry tier.
- You do not need a lead capture funnel for a business that takes one project a year from people who already know your name.
- You probably do need good photography, which is not a hosting expense.
Where spending more starts to make sense: you are running several communities at once, your plan library is genuinely being browsed, you are advertising and need the site to convert, or you have enough people editing that you need somewhere sensible to manage it. Those are real reasons. The number of houses you put up is not one on its own.
It is also worth saying that if your current site is on somebody else's account and you cannot get into it, fixing that comes before spending anything. The page on taking over a website covers what to ask for.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. Builder sites with the entire plan library trapped in one brochure PDF are familiar work, and so is the version where the plans are on the site but each one is a photograph of a drawing. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and if the plan you are already paying for is the right one, we will tell you that.
If you are moving an existing site, the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change is on the website migration page. Otherwise call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on.
Common questions
Builder website questions
Should each floor plan have its own page?
Yes, and it is the highest-value change most builder websites can make. A plan with its own page can be found by name, shared as a link, read on a phone and updated in a minute. The same plan inside a brochure PDF does none of those. Keep the drawing as an image on the page and repeat the square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms and garage as ordinary text beside it.
Should I put prices on my plan pages?
Starting brackets, yes. Firm numbers, only if you are willing to maintain them. Materials and labour move enough that a price you set last year can be badly wrong now, and a stale number damages trust more than no number does. Whatever you publish should match the language your contract uses, and that wording is a question for your own attorney rather than a web page.
Do I need to publish my standard specification?
You do not have to, and doing it usually helps. It filters out buyers whose budget was never going to work, it gives your sales meeting a document to work from, and it separates you from builders who will not commit anything to writing. Describe categories rather than exact model numbers, say plainly what is excluded, and put a date on the page.
How much hosting does a builder with twenty plans need?
Usually an entry shared plan. Plan pages, a specification and galleries are text and photographs, which is light. Builders accumulate more images than most trades, but the practical limit you hit first is speed, not storage, and that comes from uploading full-size camera files. Resize them and the problem goes away without changing plans.
My progress photos make the site slow. Is that the hosting?
Almost never. It is nearly always unresized images loading at full camera resolution, sometimes dozens on one gallery page. Resize before uploading, load galleries in pages rather than all at once, and the site gets faster on the plan you already have. Buying a bigger tier does not make a large photograph smaller.
I take one custom commission a year. Does any of this apply?
Not much of it. That business runs on referral and reputation, so your site is a credential rather than a shopfront. A portfolio that proves the work is real, a clear way to reach you and a small hosting plan covers it. Spend the money on photography instead.
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Hero image: Jules Verne Times Two, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Get the plans out of the brochure
Tell us how many plans you offer and what your site runs on, and we will tell you whether the hosting you are paying for is the right size. If it already is, we will say so.
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Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.