Websites for renovation companies
Websites for renovation companies: the finished house is the argument
A renovation firm's website wins or loses on whether the homeowner can see a house like theirs finished. A renovation is a long decision: weeks of research, a survey in hand, a budget that frightens them, and a fear of the builder who strips a Victorian house and puts it back wrong. The site that answers the consent question, the damp question and the price question, and shows three finished houses with the before photographs from the same spot, gets the walk-round. We build that site from £599 as a one-off, with a page for each kind of renovation you want more of.
The searches
What a renovation firm actually gets searched for
None of these is “builder”. Each is a different person at a different stage, and each one lands on the page written for it, or on a competitor's.
- “house renovation company near me”
- The map pack, decided by the profile. The category should be the renovation work, not general contractor, and the photos should be finished rooms.
- “full house renovation cost”
- A guide, not a job page. It explains what moves the price and hands the reader to the quote form. Firms that answer it get the enquiry; firms that hide it get the price-checker.
- “period property renovation”
- A page of its own. Lime plaster, sash windows, breathable walls, what you keep and what you replace. The buyer here is worried about the wrong builder ruining the house.
- “listed building renovation”
- The consent question, answered plainly: what listed building consent covers, that it is separate from planning, and that starting without it is an offence. Then your jobs on listed houses.
- “refurbishment contractors”
- Landlords, letting agents and small commercial. A different page with a different tone: programme, void periods, the standard you finish to.
- “HMO conversion”
- Licensing, fire doors, the room sizes, the council's standards. A page that knows these gets the landlord with four houses, not the one with a spare room.
What is different
A renovation is bought slowly, and the site has to be patient with the buyer
An extension buyer knows what they want and searches for it. A renovation buyer often has a survey full of words they do not understand, a house they have just bought or inherited, and no idea whether the job is forty thousand or a hundred and forty. They read for weeks. They come back to the same three sites. The site that is still teaching them something on the fourth visit is the one they ring.
That changes the order of the build. On a general builder's site the job pages come first and the projects support them. On a renovation firm's site the project pages are the sales tool and the job pages exist to get people to them. A homeowner with a 1900s terrace wants to see your 1900s terrace, from the same doorway, before and after, with what it cost and how long it took.
It also changes the words. Listed building consent, conservation area, breathable render, lime mortar, a structural opening, an RSJ, rising damp against penetrating damp against condensation: the buyer has met these in the survey and is testing whether you have. A page that uses them correctly is worth more than any strapline.
Sound familiar?
Why renovation firms come to us
- 01
The last three enquiries wanted a wall knocked through and a new kitchen, and the whole-house job you wanted went to a firm whose site showed a whole house finished.
- 02
You have twelve finished houses on your phone and the website has a stock photo of a paint roller.
- 03
Homeowners ask whether they need planning, whether the house is listed, whether the damp is structural, and the site says nothing, so they ask the firm whose site does.
- 04
The site says 'all aspects of building work undertaken', which is true, and which is why it wins none of the searches for the work you are best at.
The pages
Five pages, five buyers, one site
Each kind of renovation has its own search and its own worried buyer. The pages are split the way the searches are, and the homepage sends each reader to theirs.
| Page | Who reads it | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Full house renovation | The whole-house buyer with a wreck and a budget | The stages from strip-out to decoration, how you sequence trades, what a typical programme looks like, and three houses finished. |
| Period and listed property | The owner of a Victorian terrace or a listed farmhouse | Consent, conservation areas, breathable materials, what you refuse to do to an old house, and the jobs that prove it. |
| Kitchen and bathroom within a renovation | The homeowner who starts with a kitchen and ends with the ground floor | How the kitchen or bathroom sits inside a bigger job, the structural opening, the services, and why one firm doing all of it is cheaper than four. |
| Landlord refurbs and HMO conversions | Landlords with several houses, letting agents | Turnaround time, fixed scopes, the licensing standards for an HMO, and a way to send a floor plan and get a figure. |
| Structural and damp | The buyer with a survey in hand | Steels and openings, underpinning, damp diagnosed rather than injected, and what the survey terms mean. The page that turns a frightened homeowner into a customer. |
The project page
The page a homeowner reads four times
A renovation project page is longer than an extension's because the job was. It starts with the house as you found it and what the survey said. It shows what changed from the plan when the floor came up, because something always does, and how you handled it. It gives the programme in weeks and says which weeks the family could not live there. Then the photographs, from the same spots, before and after, room by room. Then the cost band and what moved it. Then the review, with its date.
Price logic, on the page
We do not invent prices for you and we do not hide yours. The site explains what decides the figure so the reader can place themselves.
- Size: rooms and square metres, and whether the roof and the ground floor are both in
- Structure: openings, steels, underpinning, a chimney out
- Services: a full rewire and replumb against partial
- The finish: the kitchen, the bathrooms, the joinery, the floors
- Consent: listed building work and the conservation officer's conditions
- Phasing: all at once against room by room over two years
After the site
“Renovation company” with a town on the end is earned one project at a time
The site gets you found by name and for the specific searches: listed, period, HMO. The town search is won over months, with a project page a month, a review at every handover, and the profile listing renovation first. That is the monthly work, and every package on the pricing page includes its first month free. What we have built so far is on the projects page, labelled honestly.
The cluster
Other trades we build for
Same builder site, different front door. The full site is described on website design for builders, and what we have built so far is on projects.
Questions builders ask us
Why is a renovation firm's site different from a general builder's?
Because the buyer takes longer and researches harder. A renovation is the biggest sum most homeowners will ever spend on a house they already own, and they want to see a house like theirs finished before they ring. A general builder's site can win on a phone number and a map position; a renovation firm's site wins on project pages, and that changes what gets built first.
Can the site show renovation prices?
It should show the logic of the price: what a whole-house renovation of a given size in your area tends to start from, what pushes it up (structure, services, the finish, listed consent, a basement), and what a phased job costs against doing it all at once. A from-figure filters the people with a fifth of the budget; a page that explains what decides the price does most of the same work if you would rather not publish one.
We do renovations and extensions. One site?
One site, with a page for each. The extension page and the renovation page target different searches and different buyers, and both link to the projects that show the work. Splitting into two sites splits the reviews and the authority for no gain.
How many project pages do we need?
Three good ones beat thirty thumbnails. A project page with the brief, the awkward part, the timeline, six to ten photographs from the same spots before and after, and the dated review is what the homeowner sends to their partner. Then one a month from the monthly work.
What about listed building and conservation area work?
If you do it, it gets its own page, because the search is its own search and the buyer is frightened of the wrong builder. Listed building consent is separate from planning permission and starting without it is a criminal offence, so the page says that plainly, describes how you handle the application with the conservation officer, and shows the listed houses you have finished.
Do landlords search for renovation firms?
Landlords and letting agents search for refurbishment contractors and HMO conversion, which are different words for a different buyer. A separate page in their language, with turnaround times and a way to send a floor plan, wins repeat work from a landlord with several houses. It would confuse a homeowner reading the full-house page, so the two are kept apart.
Get the whole-house jobs your finished houses deserve
Send your site, or say you have none, and your town. You get a review of what a homeowner with a survey in hand sees when they look you up, and a quote for the site that answers them.