Contractor Website Checklist: 24 Items to Review

1. Service and sales clarity

The first six checks test whether a visitor can identify the service, location fit, and next action without decoding the company website.

State the primary contractor trade and service in the first screen.
Show the main phone or estimate action near the first decision point.
Give major services their own pages when buyer questions differ.
State the real service area without vague nationwide language for a local business.
Separate urgent services from planned high-value projects when the contact path differs.
Remove services the company no longer sells and claims the team cannot support.

2. Project proof and contact

The next six checks test whether the site can prove the work and convert interest into a usable inquiry.

Use real project photos where permission and business policy allow publication.
Label project type, scope, and useful location context instead of posting unlabeled image grids.
Keep renderings, stock photos, and completed work visually or verbally distinct.
Use customer reviews only when they are real and represented accurately. The FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect in 2024 and prohibits several deceptive review practices.
Ask only for form fields that change routing, qualification, or follow-up.
Test the form destination, confirmation message, reply address, and spam handling from a real browser.

3. Search and internal linking

These six checks test whether pages can be found and whether their relationships make sense to people and crawlers.

Use one descriptive title and one clear H1 for each indexable page.
Write a page-specific meta description rather than copying one description across the site.
Use crawlable HTML links with descriptive anchor text. Google recommends linking every page you care about from at least one other page.
Link service pages to relevant project, area, and guide pages instead of placing every link only in the footer.
Keep service-area pages useful and distinct. Do not build city-name swaps that funnel visitors to the same generic content.
Keep canonical URLs, sitemap entries, redirects, and index directives consistent after a redesign.

4. Mobile, images, performance, and measurement

The final six checks cover the interface and the feedback loop used after launch.

Test the first screen, menu, phone action, forms, and galleries at common mobile widths.
Set image width and height or aspect-ratio behavior so content does not jump while images load.
Use descriptive alt text for informative images and empty alt text for purely decorative images.
Compress large photos and use responsive image delivery where the stack supports it.
Check Core Web Vitals in field data when enough traffic exists. Google's current metrics are LCP, INP, and CLS.
Track the actions that represent leads, such as qualified form submissions and meaningful phone clicks, then compare results by landing page.

CWD note

run this checklist in order of lost business. Fix broken contact paths, wrong services, bad mobile layouts, and misleading claims before polishing minor visual details.

contractor website redesign ↗contractor website maintenance ↗contractor website design services ↗

Sources used for factual checks

Primary sources are listed for claims about Google Search, Google Business Profile, and U.S. advertising rules. CWD's page-structure recommendations are editorial guidance.