Answer the address question in the header: city, county, St. Charles or Illinois
The first thing a homeowner wants to know is whether you cross the county line for their street.
Put the service area where the rotating hero image usually goes. Not a vague sentence about serving the greater metro, but the actual list: City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and the Illinois side if you serve it.
Naming city and county separately is not pedantry here. They are different governments and locals treat them as different places. A site that writes only "St. Louis" reads like it was built somewhere else, and buyers notice.
If you cross the river, name Belleville, Edwardsville and the counties you cover. If you do not, say so plainly. A clear no saves your office a dozen calls a month and costs you nothing you were going to serve.
Service area pages should follow the same rule and go to municipality level, because the person reading them thinks of themselves as living in Kirkwood or Florissant, not in a metro area.
Roof covering, parapet and alley access decide which crew you send
The inquiry form should ask exactly what your estimator asks in the first minute of a call, and nothing else.
The short list for this trade: address, what the roof is made of with a "not sure" option, whether water is coming in right now, roughly how old it is, how many stories, and a photo upload. Six fields, most of them taps.
Access belongs on the form. Alley, gangway, gate, dog, tight side yard, overhead lines. Those answers decide which truck and which crew go out, and finding out on arrival costs a half day.
Photo upload does more work than any other field. A homeowner standing in the yard can send three pictures in fifteen seconds, and a photo of a parapet or a slate slope tells you more than a paragraph of description.
Do not ask for budget. Asking a stranger what they plan to spend before you have looked at the roof is the fastest way to lose an inquiry that was ready to book.
Test the site on a phone in Dogtown at four in the afternoon, not on office fiber
Speed has to be measured where the visit actually happens, which is a handheld phone on cellular service.
The office connection lies to you. Load the site on a real phone, on cellular, in the middle of the afternoon, from somewhere in the middle of your service area. Count the seconds before the phone number is tappable.
The usual weight is easy to name: autoplaying drone video, a full resolution gallery, a review carousel, a chat widget, and three tracking scripts nobody remembers adding. Each one arrived for a good reason and none of them were budgeted together.
Compress every photograph, load the gallery only when someone scrolls to it, and be ruthless about third party scripts. If a widget cannot justify its weight in booked jobs, remove it.
Speed is not a vanity metric on a roofing site. The visitor is comparing three companies and the slowest tab loses before anyone reads a word.
Publish how you handle permits in each municipality and let the department rule
In a county made of many small municipalities, saying plainly that you handle the paperwork is a real differentiator.
Write a page that says who pulls the permit, what the homeowner has to sign, and what happens at inspection. Say clearly that practice varies by municipality and that the local building department is the authority on any specific requirement.
Do not publish rules as if they were universal. They differ across the county line, they differ again in St. Charles County, and they differ by state on the Illinois side. Generally is a useful word and it is also the accurate one.
Keep a license and insurance page you can send as a link from a phone. Homeowners ask for it, and a page beats hunting for a PDF while somebody waits on the porch.
The same page reassures the buyer who has been burned by an unpermitted job on their block, which in older neighborhoods is a surprising number of them.
The leak tonight and the roof budgeted for spring need different front doors
Two very different buyers land on the same homepage, usually at different hours, and one of them cannot wait for a form.
The urgent path is short: a tappable phone number, what happens after they call, real hours, and an honest statement about after hours. If nobody answers at ten at night, say what does happen instead of implying somebody will.
The planned path is longer and should be. What an inspection covers, what your proposal includes, warranty terms, financing if you offer it, and photographs of work in progress rather than only finished roofs.
Do not funnel emergency traffic through a long form. Do not funnel a planned replacement into a phone call before they have read anything. The homepage should visibly offer both.
Freeze-thaw traffic tends to arrive at odd hours, after a thaw or during a hard rain. Whatever the site promises at eleven at night is a promise your office has to keep the next morning.
Landlords with brick two-families read your site for scope, not for craftsmanship
Investor buyers want a scope, a schedule and a number, and most roofing sites are written only for the owner occupant.
If you work the older brick two and four family stock, some of your best repeat buyers own several of them. Their questions are different: turnaround, tenant coordination, invoicing, whether you handle flat roofs and gutters as well as slopes.
Give them a page of their own. Different photographs too. Rear parapets, decking, tear-off in progress and cleanup say more to that reader than a drone shot of a finished ridge.
Write it to be forwarded. Investor buyers pass pages to a partner or a property manager, so the page should stand alone and print cleanly.
Include a straightforward way to ask about multiple properties at once. Making somebody submit the same form four times is a good way to lose all four roofs.
Questions we actually get
- Do we need a full rebuild or can the current site be fixed?
- Often it can be fixed. If the site loads reasonably, is editable and is not built on something abandoned, the higher return usually comes from rewriting the first screen, rebuilding the form, cutting page weight and adding service area pages. A rebuild makes sense when the platform blocks those changes or the site cannot be edited without a developer for every line.
- How many pages does a roofing site actually need?
- Fewer than most agencies sell and more than most contractors have. A homepage that answers the address question, a page per service you genuinely perform, a page per roof problem you want to be found for, municipality pages where your crews already work, and the proof pages: license and insurance, warranty, permits, and real project photographs.
- Should we show prices on the website?
- Publishing a fixed price for a roof is risky, since the deck, the covering and the details are unknown until somebody looks. What does work is explaining what drives the price, what your proposal includes line by line, and what happens if bad decking turns up after tear-off. Buyers are looking for predictability more than a number.
- Is a chat widget worth adding?
- Only if a person answers it. An unanswered chat bubble costs page speed and creates an expectation you then break. If nobody is monitoring it during working hours, an automatic text back from the form does the same job at a fraction of the weight.
- What should the site say about insurance claims?
- Describe what you do: inspect, document with photographs, provide a written scope, and meet the adjuster on site if the homeowner asks. Do not describe what an insurer will decide, and do not imply an outcome. Coverage questions belong with the homeowner's own carrier, and it is worth saying so on the page.
