Websites for painting contractors

You are fighting a race to the bottom on price

Homeowners collect painting quotes and the spread is often enormous, because the cheap bid and the careful bid are not describing the same job. One includes proper prep, patching, caulking, priming, two real coats and clean lines. The other includes as little as possible.

The homeowner usually cannot tell the difference from the quote alone. If your website says nothing about how you work, you get compared purely on the number, and the number always loses to someone working out of a pickup with no insurance.

Prep is the product, so put it on the site

The finished result of a good paint job and a bad one look similar for about eight months. Then the bad one starts peeling around the trim and bleeding through where nothing was primed.

Explaining your prep process in plain language is the single highest-leverage thing a painting site can do. What you do about surface preparation, patching, caulking, priming and how many coats. Not as a bullet list of jargon, but as an explanation of why the cheaper quote is cheaper. That is the argument that justifies your price, and it works far better in writing beforehand than delivered verbally at the kitchen table.

Interior and exterior are different businesses

Exterior work is weather-dependent, seasonal in North Jersey, higher-ticket, and often involves prep on older siding and trim. Interior work runs year round, is smaller per job, and involves a customer living in the house while you work, which makes cleanliness and daily tidiness part of the product.

Those customers have different worries, so they deserve different pages. The interior customer wants to know about dust, drop cloths, whether you move furniture and how long you will be in the house. The exterior customer wants to know about prep, weather scheduling, and how long the finish will last.

Photograph properly, and this is harder than it sounds

Paint photographs badly. A freshly painted room in a phone snapshot just looks like a room. Straight-on shots in even daylight, and detail shots of cut lines around trim, ceilings and window frames do more than wide room shots, because clean lines are the visible evidence of skill.

Before and after is powerful here specifically for exterior work and for anything that involved real repair. A rotted trim board replaced, primed and painted tells a story that a finished wall cannot.

What belongs on the site

• Your prep process, explained in plain language
• Separate interior and exterior pages
• Insurance and licensing stated clearly
• Detail photos showing cut lines and trim work, not just wide room shots
• What you do to protect furniture, floors and landscaping
• Any warranty you offer on workmanship
• Cabinet refinishing and specialty finishes, if you offer them, since those command far better margins

Related trades

Similar work for remodeling contractors, roofers and landscapers.