The page has to open on a dying phone in a house with no power
Your site is fast on office fiber and on your own laptop, which is the one place it does not matter.
Picture the actual visit. Somebody is standing in a warm house on a phone at fifteen percent, on mobile data, possibly because the power went out and Entergy has not restored the block yet. The hero video does not play. The web font never arrives. The number they needed was below three screens of animation.
Cut weight until the first screen is text, a phone number and one compressed image. Serve modern image formats, size them for the device, and lazy load anything below the fold. Self host the fonts or use system fonts.
Test on a mid range Android over a throttled connection rather than on a new iPhone over wifi. The gap between those two experiences is where most contractor sites lose calls they never learn about.
Make the phone number a tap target, keep it visible while scrolling, and do not hide it behind a chat widget. Chat is fine as an addition. It is a poor substitute for a number somebody can press with one thumb.
Settle the river and the lake in one line, before the visitor scrolls
A homeowner in Algiers or Slidell is asking one question, and the answer should not be buried in a footer.
Coverage here is not a radius, it is a set of crossings. Say which parishes you serve in plain words, and name places: Orleans, Jefferson, and whether you cross to the West Bank or over to the Northshore. Use parish, because county tells a local reader you are not from here.
Being specific about where you do not go is worth as much. A clear line saying you do not currently cover St. Tammany saves your dispatcher a conversation and saves the homeowner a wasted call, and it costs you nothing you were ever going to book.
Put it in the header area as a line of text rather than a map graphic. Maps are slow, hard to read on a phone and usually wrong about the edges.
If your coverage differs by service, say so. Plenty of shops will cross the river for a replacement and not for a diagnostic call, and stating that plainly filters inquiries in your favor.
The form should ask how much room there is under the house
Two or three trade specific questions decide which truck goes and whether it can do the job on the first visit.
Ask for the address early, because in this city the address is most of the answer. A raised house in the Bywater and a slab built home in Kenner are different visits, with different access, different equipment locations and different time on site.
Then ask the questions that actually change dispatch. Where does the equipment sit, under the floor, in the attic or outside at grade. How old is the system. Is the customer the owner or a tenant. Offer a photo upload and prompt for two: the outdoor unit and whatever is under the house.
Keep everything else out. Preferred contact method, how they heard about you, and a message box that nobody reads are fields that lower completion for information a dispatcher will never use. Every question should earn its place by changing what happens next.
Make the form work without a page reload, confirm on screen what happens next, and send an immediate email or text that repeats it. Silence after submission is where a good inquiry goes to shop for a second contractor.
One honest page about working in a review district beats a service menu
Old houses raise questions no service list answers, and the contractor who answers them wins the estimate.
Across much of the older city, what may change on a visible exterior can fall under historic district review. Homeowners in the French Quarter, the Garden District and similar areas already know this and are quietly wondering whether you have dealt with it before.
Write the page that says how you handle it. That placement is decided on site, that requirements vary by address and are worth confirming with the relevant commission or the city, and that you will not order equipment before the question is settled. Do not promise an approval or state a rule as fact.
Cover the practical side in the same place. Line set routing on an older exterior, condenser stands beside a raised house, condensate routing, working around drainage and access under a pier and beam floor. Where a question turns structural, say plainly that a licensed engineer should look at it.
Illustrate it with your own installs. One photograph of a tidy job on a raised Creole cottage does more for credibility than a page of adjectives, and it is the asset a competitor cannot copy.
The damp house visitor needs a different front door than the broken one
Two very different customers arrive, and one of them is not looking for a repair.
The emergency visitor wants a number, a coverage answer and an honest statement about today. Serve that in the first screen and get out of the way.
The other visitor has a system that works and a house that still feels wet. Give that person a separate page reached from the main navigation, written around the symptoms: sticky rooms, mildew smells, sweating registers, a system running all day. Explain what tends to cause it and what a visit involves.
The second page carries a different call to action. Not a rush booking, but a scheduled assessment, ideally with an option to send photographs first. The buying cycle is longer and the ticket is usually larger.
Site structure should reflect that both exist. A single contact us page serving both customers guarantees that one of them fills in the wrong form and gets the wrong response.
Your service agreement page is a contract page, so let your own counsel read it
Terms copied from a national template can be wrong in Louisiana rather than merely vague.
Louisiana uses a civil law system rather than the common law used in every other state. Marketing copy about agreements, warranties, renewals and cancellation that was drafted for somewhere else should not be pasted onto a Louisiana site. Have your own counsel review anything on the page that reads like a term.
The same care applies to claims. Publish your license number and the credentials you can document. Do not publish efficiency figures, savings estimates, rebate amounts or warranty periods you cannot source from the manufacturer or the program itself, since those change without telling you.
Keep the maintenance plan page factual: what is included, how often, what is excluded, how billing works. Vague benefit language performs worse than a plain list, and the plain list is also easier to keep accurate.
Review the whole site once a year for claims that have quietly gone stale. Old prices, retired equipment lines and superseded program names all undermine the credibility everything else on the site is working to build.
Questions we actually get
- Should we rebuild the site or fix the one we have?
- Usually fix first. Page weight, a phone number that stays visible, an inquiry form that asks the right three questions and a coverage line near the top can often be done on the existing site in days. Rebuild when the platform makes those changes impossible, or when the structure has no room for the pages you actually need.
- Do we need a separate site for Metairie or the Northshore?
- Almost never. Separate sites split your effort, duplicate your content and create a maintenance problem. Separate pages within one site, written with real specifics about each parish and the places inside it, achieve the same goal. A genuine second location with staff is a different conversation, and that is about listings more than about websites.
- Should we publish prices?
- Publish what you can stand behind, which is usually a diagnostic fee and how it is applied, plus the structure of any maintenance plan. Replacement pricing depends on equipment, access and the house, and a raised house with a tight crawl is not comparable to a slab home. Ranges you cannot honor cost you trust at the estimate.
- How fast does the site need to be?
- Fast enough to be usable on a mid range Android phone over mobile data with the battery low. Rather than chasing a score, test that scenario directly and keep cutting until the first screen appears quickly and the phone number is tappable. Video backgrounds and heavy image galleries are almost always what stands in the way.
- Can we use stock photography?
- Use as little as you can manage. Stock images of technicians shaking hands say nothing, and experienced homeowners discount them instantly. Photographs of your own installs on local houses, a unit on a stand beside a raised house or a clean line set run on an older exterior, are the most persuasive thing you can put on the page.
