A roofing website can be a great source of clients if you build it right and emphasize the important aspects. Throughout 2023 & beyond, I designed & developed a couple of websites for roofers & property maintenance businesses in North America.
During this development process, I learned a lot about this business and its main workflow. I saw how smart people are consistently grabbing customers. At the same time, I also saw some other people wasting their time & money on less important things.
Before you begin, see the topics in the table of contents below. It will give you a clear idea of whether this post is right for you or not.
What to expect from this post?
After closely working with roofing contractors, I will share my experience with you and tell you how you should build a perfect website in this niche. End of this post, you will have a rock-solid idea about the following:
- Structure of your website
- The most important aspects that you should focus on
- How to get leads for your business
- What assets you should create that your prospects are looking for
- Organic SEO, advertising & combination of these two
- Some other development factors such as domain, hosting, website builders, CMS, text content, photo, video, etc.
What you should not expect from this post
In this post, I will not teach you web development from the ground up. You will not learn how to write code, install WordPress, themes, plugins, or use website builders like Wix, Squarespace, etc.
There are numerous tutorials (paid & free), YouTube videos, and articles out there (including mine) that teach web development. I don’t want you to lose focus.
Instead, I will direct you so you can ask your developer to build those important features for your roofing website. Down the road, if you need help directly from me, you’re most welcome.
Alright, let’s get into the topic.
How to create a roofing website?
This is the main part of this post. Here I will walk you through the process & main aspects of building your roofing business website. Also, I will clarify a few myths you may have.
Choose a good domain for your business
In order to build a new website, your first step should be to choose a domain. There are numerous domain register companies out there and you can choose any one from them.
But if you’re not sure, go for either GoDaddy or Cloudflare. For choosing a good domain name, you can find some technics and inspirations in this post.
Either way, any register will work just fine.
Do You Need Help Putting Things Together? Roofing Web Design Service →
Choose a path to build your website
Not only roofing, there are several ways to create websites. Such as using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, etc. Website builders like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc. Writing code like PHP, Laravel, NodeJS, React, etc. You can learn more about them in this post.
If you contact different web designers & developers, you’ll get different suggestions which is obvious.
However, I highly recommend you use WordPress for your roofing website. Because you need to include some assets like roofing calculators, collect leads, monitor user behavior, etc. And WordPress makes them very easy and affordable.
When I say WordPress, it’s self-hosted WordPress (not wordpress.com). If you don’t know, it’s completely free and most websites in this world are powered by this WordPress CMS.
So you can use it with peace of mind. Also, you can combine other flavors with it. For example, in WordPress, you can use drag & drop builder, write code, and everything you can imagine (logically).
Hopefully, that’s enough to support my logic and advice to use WordPress.
Get an affordable hosting
I said affordable because at the beginning you don’t need VPS or a Dedicated server. Any shared hosting would be just fine. You can compare hosting prices in this post (I am not an affiliate, this is just to help you). And this post contains a list of cheap hosting.
Note that you can always migrate your WordPress website to a different hosting/server with a little effort.
Most of these hosting companies come with WordPress preinstalled. If it’s different in your case, you can install it with a few clicks. Just look for the option or contact your hosting support.
Start building the actual website for your roofing business
Until this point, you have a domain, hosting & a CMS (content management system – WordPress). Now it’s time to build the actual website.
Many website owners make a common mistake just after installing WordPress. They install a premade template and adjust the content based on the premade layout. And that is why many of the websites look the same and do not convey their own brand value. Apparently, the target audiences do not understand what actually you do. Or at least it becomes very hard for them.
To create a meaningful website, I prefer to build from scratch and I would suggest you do the same. It does not mean that it has to be super fancy. Just make it clear, concise, and easy to navigate.
However, if you can’t afford a professional web developer, I have a static template that you can download & use for free. I created it only for the roofing businesses. You can see the live preview here → and you can download & find more information about it in this post.
Important pages for your website
Not all roofers and roofing businesses do the same work. Depending on your expertise, you need to create the following pages:
- Home – This page will provide an overall idea about what you do and your business. It should also help the visitors to navigate through the important links and call to action.
- Services – The roofing business has a wide range of services and no one probably carries all of them. On this page, describe your business expertise such as residential & commercial roofing, working with asphalt shingles, roof replacement, metal roof installation, leaking roof repair, single or multi-level roofing, etc. Even you can create some sub-pages for the individual services.
- Portfolio – It should contain your past work samples (mostly photos, short descriptions & project locations).
- About page – This should clarify who you are, where you are located, photos of you and your team members, etc.
- Contact page – This will hold all sorts of contact methods such as your phone, email, etc. It may also contain a form that your prospect can fill out.
A blog will help you in the long run and to get organic traffic. If you don’t have time at the beginning, you can skip it for now.
Other important aspects of these pages
Photos: Make sure you use real photos of your projects throughout the website. Try to avoid using stock photos as much as possible. Even though stock photos may look good on human eyes. Your real photos will carry more weight than others.
Mobile Responsiveness: The second thing is you have to make sure that it’s responsive. The majority of your prospects/clients may come through mobile devices and that is why responsiveness is important.
Unique Content: When you write the text content for the pages, make sure it’s unique, written by humans & proofread by you. Lastly, always avoid AI-generated content, and don’t take content from other websites that do the same thing as you do. For more information, see how to create copywriting for your roofing website.
How can you get leads & clients from your website?
Building a website may seem easy. But serving its purpose or making it work in the way you want is hard. And this is where you have to spend most of your time to come up with unique ideas & angels.
Let’s do some brainstorming together. First, think about why people will contact you or why they should give their contact information.
Well, there are many reasons. But one is common which is value exchange.
But how?
Well, you can achieve this goal in a couple of different ways such as offering free guides, digital assets, downloadable PDF, etc.
But from my practical experience, I saw that roofing cost calculators work the best to get leads, prospects & clients. Especially in this vertical.
How do roofing calculators help you to get leads and make more sales?
When people are in need of roofing help, they generally try to figure out the cost. This is the first thing most people want to know because they need to start working with a specific budget. And you’re the person who can help with this in the first place. Because you know what involves, right?
To serve this purpose and to achieve your goal, you can build a calculator. It does not necessarily need to be super complex. Make it simple, easy to understand & use.
For example, based on total square feet and roofing material, the calculator will generate an estimated cost after the user’s input. See the following screenshot of a simple calculator below.
But do not immediately show the cost to the users. Instead, ask the users to input their email/phone and send the estimated cost to their email. Using this approach, the user/prospect gets their estimated cost and you get a lead (email/phone). After that, you can call or email the prospect if they wish to work with you. Also, you can negotiate the price and offer them an exact price.
If you need help creating such a calculator or the whole website, you can contact me.
If your calculator shows the price upfront, you may lose the client forever. So follow the method that I mentioned above. Again, this process works which I saw in my practical experience.
How can you send target customers to your roofing website?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid advertisements are the two main routes you can go for.
However, getting traffic from organic search results (SEO) takes a huge time, effort, and content publishing. So you need to start paid promotion to get some momentum at the early stage.
This sound may seem expensive to some of you but it’s actually not. No matter which platforms you choose to promote your business, there is an option to limit the budget for ad expenses.
To drive potential traffic to your business/website, you can try advertising on different platforms such as PPC (Google Ads), Facebook, etc. You should target the proper people based on their interests, locations, demographics, etc. Otherwise, you may end up bringing unnecessary traffic/visitors to your website who will never convert or become a customer.
This is how you can get some momentum at the early stage.
Is there any guarantee to get customers by advertising
There is no guarantee of getting actual clients but there is a huge chance. You don’t know what works until you try. So you have to experiment with the advertising process from different angles.
When you experimenting with ads, make sure you do not put a huge budget. I would prefer to make a budget within the $30 to $70 range when experimenting. So I can test the process several times, learn from it, and pick the right strategy that works best for me.
When you start to ad campaign, you’ll find a traffic spike in your Analytics. But when you stop the campaign, the traffic will fall down to zero which is very obvious. On the other hand, SEO traffic comes to your website every day and it never goes to zero. This is what I showed you in the above chart. Also, SEO/organic traffic is free.
When you find a proper ad targeting and working campaign, stick to it and repeat.
Which is the best advertising platform for the roofing business
While working with my clients, I saw that PPC (Google Ads – pay per click) works the best and brings the most ROI.
Many ad networks & platforms will charge you based on impressions. Some of them have both options such as cost per click & impressions.
However, in PPC, they will charge based on clicks. Most importantly, your target customers are searching on Google when they have a roofing problem or need help in this vertical. And probably they are not searching on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
That’s why I like this approach. But you can try different platforms and methods.
What about SEO?
As I mentioned, SEO is great but it needs time, a huge effort and ultimately creating a wide range of content. So if you already have a decent client base, you keep working on it.
Also, you can do both at the same time (SEO and ad campaigns). When you have time & scope, go ahead and create helpful content for your target customers. And when you need quick momentum, run ad campaigns.
Let me clarify one myth about SEO. Many people think that they need to deal with super complex technical stuff and get huge links. That’s why many of them put their highest effort into outreach and unnecessary things like meta keywords. SEO is not like that.
Whatever you do, if you are entitled & promising to get customers from organic search results, keep creating valuable content. There is no alternative to it.
That’s a lot of information. Let’s wrap up.
Conclusion
In this post, I explained the most important aspects you need to know before creating a roofing website. I briefly describe the proper & effective way to get leads & customers for your business.
This post was written after completing several projects and working very closely with roofing business owners. It’s packed with at least one year of practical experience.
I tried to make you understand the main workflow in the easiest way possible. Therefore if you have any confusion or feedback, please let me know.
If you need help building a perfect roofing business website along with calculators & everything you need to go live, you can contact me.
