Roofing website essentials: the seven things the site must do
Speed, tap-to-call, service and city pages, real job photos, license and financing, and why a roofing site is judged harder than any other trade's.
- 1. Load in under two seconds on a phone
- 2. Put the phone number where a thumb lands
- 3. A page for every service and every city
- 4. Real photos of your own roofs
- 5. License, insurance and proof you exist
- 6. Prices and financing in public
- 7. One short form and a follow-up that actually runs
- What to cut
- Build order if you are starting from nothing
- Frequently asked
A homeowner picking a plumber is choosing who fixes a $600 problem today. A homeowner picking a roofer is choosing who to hand $12,000 to and let strip the top off her house. She will look at your website, and she will look at it harder than she would for any other trade.
22.6% of roofing companies list no website on their Google profile. 77.4% do. The ones with a site carry a median of 21 reviews against 3 for the ones without. The website does not create the reviews; both are symptoms of a company that runs itself properly. But on a purchase this size, the comparison happens on the website, and if you are not in it you do not win it.
Here are the seven jobs the site has to do.
1. Load in under two seconds on a phone
Most of your traffic is a phone on cellular data, often standing in a driveway looking at a damaged roof. Every second of load time costs you visitors, and roofing sites are usually the slowest in the trade because they are stuffed with 6MB hero photos and a background video.
Compress every image to under 200KB, use WebP, drop the video from the homepage, cut the plugin count. Run your own URL through Google PageSpeed Insights and target a mobile score above 70. Most roofing sites score in the 20s.
2. Put the phone number where a thumb lands
The number goes at the top right of every page as a tap-to-call link, plus a sticky bar at the bottom of the screen on mobile. Not an image of a number. Not a contact page three clicks in.
Under the number, put the thing that makes calling feel safe: "Licensed and insured, [state] license #12345, answering 7am to 7pm."
3. A page for every service and every city
One page per service, one page per city you actually work, and combinations for the ones that matter. Roof replacement. Roof repair. Storm and hail damage. Metal roofing. Flat and commercial. Gutters. Siding. Skylights. Emergency tarping.
Each page needs a first paragraph that states plainly what you do, where, and what it typically runs. Each needs its own photos, its own three reviews, and its own call to action. A homepage with a services dropdown and nothing behind it ranks for nothing and answers nothing, which matters both for Google and for the AI engines described in the AI search guide.
Fifteen to thirty real pages beats a beautiful five-page site. Write them once and they work for years.
4. Real photos of your own roofs
The fastest way to lose a roofing prospect is a stock photo of a suburban house that is clearly not in your state. Homeowners spot it instantly.
Put up 30 or more of your own: before and after pairs from the same address and angle, crews on roofs in branded shirts, drone shots of finished jobs with the neighborhood visible, close-ups of the hail bruising or lifted shingles you found. Caption them with the city and the product. "Architectural shingle replacement, Edmond, two-day install."
If you already shoot drone inspection video for sales, embed a 60-second clip on the storm damage page. It does more selling than any paragraph you can write.
5. License, insurance and proof you exist
On a five-figure purchase the homeowner is quietly worried about one thing: whether you will disappear. Put the answer above the fold and repeat it in the footer.
State contractor license number. General liability and workers' compensation carrier confirmation. Years in business. Manufacturer certifications, with the actual badge and a link to your listing in the manufacturer's contractor locator. Physical address, not just a service area. The owner's name and a photo of him.
Storm chasers do not have any of that, which is exactly why publishing it separates you from them in a market that has just been flooded with out-of-state trucks.
6. Prices and financing in public
Almost every roofing site refuses to state a number. That refusal is why homeowners spend three weeks getting quotes and why the answer engines never quote you.
Publish a range and explain what moves it: "Most asphalt shingle replacements we do in this area run $9,000 to $18,000 depending on square footage, pitch, layers to tear off, and whether the decking needs replacing." Nobody is going to hold you to it, and the homeowner who was avoiding a phone call because she had no idea whether this was a $6,000 or a $30,000 problem now calls.
Then put the financing terms on their own page with real monthly ranges and the lender named. For a large share of retail replacement buyers, the roof is not a price decision, it is a monthly payment decision. Presenting it that way is covered in the pricing guide.
7. One short form and a follow-up that actually runs
One form, four fields: name, phone, address, what is going on. Every extra field costs you completions, and "how did you hear about us" costs you the most.
The form has to trigger an immediate text back and a task in whatever you use to track jobs. A form filled at 8 p.m. that gets read at 9 a.m. is usually a lost roof, because in the meantime she filled out two more. The full sequence, and what a missed contact costs you at roofing tickets, is in the follow-up guide and the calculator.
What to cut
- Sliders and carousels. Nobody clicks arrow two.
- Background video on the homepage.
- Live chat that nobody answers.
- "Free estimate" as your only call to action on every page.
- Stock imagery of any kind.
- A blog with three posts from 2022. Either publish or take the tab down.
Build order if you are starting from nothing
Week 1: homepage, roof replacement, roof repair, storm damage, about, contact. Real photos, license number, phone at the top, one form. Week 2: financing page, pricing page, three city pages for your best zip codes. Week 3: reviews embedded, structured data, PageSpeed pass, missed-call text-back connected. Week 4 onward: one city page or one service page a week until you have covered your footprint.
Frequently asked
Can I get away with a one-page site? For a repair-only operation, maybe. For replacement work, no. The comparison is too expensive and the homeowner needs more than one page of evidence.
Wix, WordPress or a custom build? It matters far less than speed and content. A fast, well-organized site on a cheap builder outperforms a slow custom one. Own the domain and the hosting login whoever builds it.
How much should a roofing website cost? $2,500 to $8,000 for a genuinely good 15 to 30 page site, or $150 to $400 a month if it includes hosting and ongoing updates. Above that you are paying for design awards, not calls. What is fair, and what the red flags are, is in the agency guide.
A rebuild is one of the services in the free 14-day trial: first draft in about a week, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.