Who actually reads a contractor website
Three people, and none of them is browsing.
A buyer or quantity surveyor compiling a tender list, checking whether you are plausible for a job of this size before they spend an hour on you. A main contractor's supply chain team running pre-qualification, looking for accreditations and insurance before anything else. And, increasingly, a client's architect or project manager doing a quick sense-check on a name somebody suggested.
All three are doing the same thing: looking for a reason to stop. That is not cynicism, it is how a shortlist gets made — you start with twelve names and you need four, so you are looking for the eight disqualifications.
The disqualifications are almost always absences. No project values, so nobody can tell if you do £50k jobs or £5m ones. No dates, so the last visible job might be from 2019. No accreditation numbers, so the logos cannot be verified. No named people, so the firm might be one person with a van or forty people with a yard. A contact form and a generic address, so nobody can tell where you actually operate.
Every one of those is a content decision rather than a design one, and every one is fixable without a rebuild.
Projects, with the numbers on them
The project list is the single most load-bearing part of a construction website, and most of them are a photo gallery.
A photograph of a finished building tells a buyer almost nothing. What they need to know is whether you have done a job like theirs, and "like theirs" means a combination of value, sector, type and constraint.
A project page that works carries:
- The value, or a band if the client will not let you publish the figure. "£1.2m" or "£1m–£2m" is the single most useful line on the page, because it is the first filter a buyer applies.
- The sector and the client type. Education, healthcare, industrial, retail fit-out, residential — and whether the client was public sector, a main contractor, or direct.
- The dates. Started and completed. A project with no date is assumed to be old.
- The form of contract and your role. Principal contractor, subcontractor, design and build, JCT, NEC — a buyer reads that instantly and it tells them whether you are the right shape of firm.
- The constraint that made it difficult. Live site, occupied building, phased handover, restricted access, listed fabric, a programme that could not move. This is the part that proves competence rather than just activity.
- Photographs, including during the work rather than only the finished shot.
Ten projects described like that beat sixty photographs, and they beat them badly. They also give you sixty times the content for search, because each one is a page with real specifics on it rather than an image in a grid.
Accreditations that can actually be checked
Every construction website has a row of logos in the footer. Almost none of them is verifiable, which quietly defeats the purpose.
A logo on its own proves nothing — anybody can put an image on a page. What a pre-qualification team needs is the registration or certificate number, as selectable text, next to the scheme name, with the scope and the expiry where that applies.
So rather than six badges, a short table: scheme, number, scope, valid until. CHAS, Constructionline, SafeContractor, SMAS, ISO certifications, trade body membership, and whatever is specific to your discipline. The number is the part that matters, because it is the part somebody can type into the scheme's own register and confirm in thirty seconds.
The same applies to insurance. Stating that you carry public liability, employer's liability and professional indemnity, with the levels, saves an email in every single pre-qualification you go through. It is also the most common reason a contractor gets asked for more information before being listed, which is a delay you can simply remove.
One caution worth stating plainly: only publish what is current. An expired certificate on a live page is worse than no certificate, and a buyer who catches one stops trusting the rest of the page.
Say what you do not do
This is the recommendation that feels wrong and works best.
Most contractor websites describe capability in the broadest possible terms, on the reasoning that narrowing it might turn work away. The effect is the opposite. A buyer reading "we deliver projects across all sectors at all scales" learns nothing, cannot place you, and moves on to a firm they can categorise.
What converts is specificity: the value range you are set up for, the sectors you have genuine references in, the geography you will actually travel to, and the forms of contract you work under. "We take projects from £250,000 to £4 million, mostly education and healthcare fit-out, across the North West, usually as principal contractor under JCT" is a sentence that gets you on lists. It also, usefully, keeps you off the lists where you were going to lose anyway and spend forty hours finding out.
Ruling things out is the strongest credibility signal available to a construction firm, because only a business with enough work to be selective does it.
What a buyer actually checks before shortlisting you
A construction website is read sceptically, by somebody deciding whether to put you on a tender list. They are not browsing. They have a list of things to verify and they will leave the moment they cannot find one of them.
Accreditations with the registration number next to them, so they can be checked rather than taken on trust. Completed projects with values, sectors and dates — a gallery of photographs with no figures attached tells a buyer nothing about whether you can handle their job. A plain statement of the size and type of work you take, because half the enquiries you decline are people who could have worked that out from the site. Named people with real roles. And the compliance material they will ask for anyway: insurance, health and safety policy, quality procedures.
Almost none of that is a design problem, which is why spending the budget on visuals so often fails to produce enquiries. The firms that win tenders from their website are the ones that made it easy to verify them.
The build itself, briefly
Two things about the site rather than the content, and then back to the content, because that is where the work is.
First, it has to be editable by you. A construction website goes stale faster than almost any other kind, because the projects keep completing and the accreditations keep renewing. If adding a project means raising a ticket and waiting a fortnight, the project list will be two years out of date within two years. That is a procurement decision made at the start, not a design one.
Second, speed still matters even though your buyer is at a desk. For a measured reference point we publish our own: the Pro Pave homepage answers in 51 milliseconds, shows content in 0.56 seconds, loads completely in 0.68 seconds, from eleven requests, with zero layout shift — taken on the live site on 4 September 2026 using the browser's own timing APIs. Pro Pave is a paving and landscaping business rather than a main contractor, and it is cited here for the build discipline rather than as construction experience.
Eleven requests is the useful number. It is what a bespoke theme costs to render, against the hundred-plus a page-builder assembly pulls in. On a construction site with a large project gallery, that difference compounds badly.
What to check on your own site
- Does every project page carry a value or a band?
- Does it carry dates, sector, client type, your role and the form of contract?
- Is the most recent completed project from this year?
- Are your accreditation numbers on the site as selectable text, with scope and expiry, rather than as logos?
- Is every certificate shown actually current?
- Are insurance types and levels stated?
- Does the site say what size and type of work you take, and what you do not?
- Are there named people with real roles, or is it all "we"?
- Can you add a project yourself, today, without emailing anybody?
- Is the geography you actually travel to stated, rather than implied?
The first four are what gets you onto a tender list. The rest is what stops you being quietly taken off one.
