Web Hosting for Contractors

The site is being read as a background check

Homeowners do not browse contractor websites for pleasure. They arrive with a specific worry. Somebody is going to be in their house, or on their roof, or digging up their driveway, and they want to know whether that person is who they say they are.

So the visit is short and it has a checklist behind it. Are you licensed where I live. Are you insured. Have you done a job like mine. Can I see it. Will you answer the phone.

The most common failure in this trade is a site that answers none of those and says twenty years experience instead. Twenty years experience is on every competing site in the results, written in the same words, next to the same stock photograph of a smiling man with a clipboard. It proves nothing, so it changes nothing.

If a sentence on your site could be pasted onto a competitor's site without anybody noticing, it is not doing any work. Cut it or replace it with something only you can say.

Proof of work: the photographs that change a decision

This is the part most contractors underinvest in, and it is the part that actually converts. A homeowner deciding between three bids is looking for the job that resembles theirs. A ranch house with the same roof pitch. A kitchen the same awkward shape. A basement with the same water problem.

A gallery of forty beautiful, unlabelled finished shots is worth less than eight jobs described properly.

What a useful project entry looks like

• Where it was, at town level. Specific enough to be local, general enough not to expose a customer.
• What the problem was in the homeowner's words, not trade shorthand.
• What you did, including the thing that was harder than expected.
• Before, during and after. The during photograph is the one that proves it was you.
• Roughly how long it took, if you are willing to say.

Phone photographs are fine. Straight, well lit and honest beats professionally staged. What is not fine is uploading them straight off the phone at full size. Twenty untouched photos will make the page crawl on a phone connection, which is where most of your visitors are, sometimes standing in the driveway of the house in question.

Resize photographs before they go up. This is the single biggest speed problem on trade websites, and it is a habit rather than a hosting upgrade.

What web hosting for contractors has to do, and what it does not

Almost nothing, and it is worth saying that clearly before somebody sells you otherwise. A contractor site is a handful of pages, a project gallery and a form. That is one of the lightest things you can put on a server.

Shared hosting is the right product for it and the entry tier is usually enough. The things that matter are unglamorous. An SSL certificate, because a browser marking your estimate form as not secure will cost you enquiries. Backups, because the site is your portfolio and re-photographing finished work is impossible. And a domain that stays renewed, which is the most common way a small trade business loses a website entirely.

Seasonality does not change the calculation. Yes, a March storm can send a week of roofing traffic at you in an afternoon. Static pages absorb that. What falls over is a homepage carrying forty full-size photographs, and the fix for that is the photographs, not a bigger plan.

If your site runs on WordPress, the real cost is maintenance rather than capacity. Plugins go stale, and an abandoned gallery plugin is the usual way a trade site gets defaced. The WordPress security page covers what needs doing and how often.

Who should not spend more than the minimum

If every job you take comes from one builder you have worked with for a decade, a public website is a formality. Keep it small and honest. A page that says who you are, what you do, your licence and a phone number is enough, and there is nothing embarrassing about that. Money spent on a bigger plan or a marketing site buys you nothing while the work keeps arriving from one relationship.

• You do not need a large hosting tier for a site of eight pages and a gallery.
• You do not need extra storage. Resized job photographs take up very little.
• You do not need a managed plan to run a site that has no logins and takes no payments.
• You probably do need the domain and the email at that domain, because those outlast the website.

Be honest about the risk, though. One relationship is one phone call away from ending, and rebuilding a public presence from nothing takes a season you may not have. Keeping a small site current, with a few recent jobs on it, is cheap insurance against that.

Spending more genuinely makes sense in three cases. You run multiple crews under separate service pages. You are hiring, and the careers page is doing actual recruiting work. Or you take deposits and schedule online, which puts payment and login handling on your own site and changes the security picture entirely.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and contractor sites are familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, which means we have no reason to talk you into a tier you do not need. If the plan you are on is already right, we will say so.

If you have inherited a site and nobody knows who controls the domain, start with taking over a website. For current pricing on plans, see web hosting, or call 716-771-2536 and describe what you have.