Websites for
Builders & Trades
Websites for builders, bricklayers and construction firms. Show the work, get the enquiry to your phone, stop paying monthly for a site you cannot edit.
Sound familiar?
- Your best proof is photographs of finished jobs, and the site makes them a pain to add.
- Enquiries arrive by email while you are on site and get lost by the evening.
- The site says "construction services" where it should say what you actually do and where.
- You are paying for a platform you cannot leave without losing everything.
What I do about it
Portfolio that gets used
Adding a finished job takes minutes, so it actually happens.
Service pages
Written around what customers search for, not industry language.
Enquiries to your phone
Because you are on site, not at a desk.
Cheap, boring hosting
A few pounds a month. Nothing to update, nothing to break.
A job I actually did
Anonymised. Sector, size and region only, never a client name. The work and the numbers are real.
Who: A bricklaying and construction firm, and separately a building and refurbishment contractor, both UK, both under ten people.
Before: Portfolio pages that had not been updated in over a year because adding a job meant emailing photos to an agency and waiting. Both were paying monthly for the privilege.
- A gallery structure where a finished job is a folder of photos and three lines of text, not a support ticket.
- Service pages written around what they actually get asked for: extensions, groundworks, refurbishments.
- An enquiry form that reaches a phone, because nobody in this trade is at a desk.
- Static hosting, so the site costs a few pounds a month to run and does not go down when a plugin updates.
After: The portfolio gets updated because updating it takes minutes. That is the entire mechanism: a site that is easy to update stays current, and a current portfolio is what convinces someone to call.
What went wrong: I over-engineered the first gallery. It had filtering, tags and a lightbox nobody used, and it made adding a job slower, which defeated the point. I stripped it back to a simple grid. The lesson was that the feature list is not the product, the habit is.
Questions
What does a website for a building firm cost?
A one-off build fee, then a few pounds a month for hosting and a domain. The variable is scope, not the trade. The thing to check in any quote is the ongoing monthly cost and whether you keep the site if you stop paying it.
Can I add photos of jobs myself?
Yes, that is the main thing I optimise for in this trade. If adding a job is hard, the portfolio goes stale, and a stale portfolio is worse than a small one.
Do I need a blog?
Almost certainly not. For a local building firm, a current portfolio and a Google Business Profile will do far more than a blog nobody writes.
How long does it take?
Weeks rather than months for a site this size. The slow part is usually getting photographs and deciding what services to list, not the build.
What if I already have a site?
If you are happy with it and can edit it, keep it. If you are paying monthly and cannot change it, that is the thing worth fixing first.
Worth reading
Tell me what you need
No pitch deck, no discovery call to book another discovery call. Describe the job and I will tell you what it takes, or tell you that you do not need me.
Or see what I have built and the free tooling.