By Bilal Hashimi ·
You paid for a website. Maybe it was a few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand. It's live, it looks decent — and then silence. No new calls. No quote requests. The big question sits there: how to tell if your website is working, or if it's just an expensive online brochure nobody reads?
Here's the honest answer. A website for a contractor has exactly one job: turn searches into quote requests. Everything else is decoration. Below is the checklist I walk Ottawa contractors through when they ask me to take a look at their site.
The only metric that matters: quote requests
Forget traffic graphs, bounce rates, and "engagement." The number that counts is simple: how many times per month does someone contact you through the website — a form submission, a tap-to-call from the site, an email, a booked estimate?
If you can't answer that question, that itself is the first problem. You don't need fancy analytics. Open a notebook or a simple spreadsheet and start logging every inquiry that came through the website this month. Do it for four weeks. That number is your baseline, and every fix below is about moving it up.
Check 1: Can anyone find it?
Search the exact thing a customer would type — something like "roof repair Ottawa" — in a private or incognito browser window (so your own past visits don't skew the results). Does your business show up on the first page? Does your Google Business Profile appear in the map pack?
If the answer is no, the website isn't the bottleneck — nobody's reaching it in the first place. I covered the common reasons for this in a separate guide on why contractors don't show up on Google (opens in a new tab): missing or unclaimed Google Business Profile, a site that doesn't mention your service areas, and no reviews being the usual suspects. Fix visibility before you judge the website itself.
Check 2: Is the site asking for the business?
Pull up your homepage on your phone. Within five seconds, can a stranger see how to contact you? A working site has a phone number visible at the top, a clear "Get a quote" or "Call now" button, and some way to reach you on every single page — not buried on a contact page three clicks away.
Tapping the phone number should start a call directly. If a visitor has to pinch, zoom, scroll, and hunt for your number, most of them won't. Contractors lose more jobs to this one detail than to any design choice. Test every form on the site too — fill one out yourself. If submissions land nowhere, or you get no notification, you've been losing leads silently since launch.
Check 3: Does it load fast and read well on a phone?
More than half of your visitors are on a phone, standing in their kitchen with a leaking roof or a broken furnace. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, they're back on Google before it finishes. You can check this free with Google's PageSpeed Insights — paste in your URL and look at the mobile score. It's a real number you can act on, not a feeling.
While you're on your phone, read your own pages. Can you read the text without zooming? Are the buttons big enough to tap with a thumb? Does the layout break anywhere? Mobile-unfriendly sites quietly repel exactly the customers who are ready to hire someone right now.
Check 4: Does it answer the three questions every buyer asks?
A homeowner deciding whether to call you is asking three things: What do you do, where do you do it, and can I trust you?
- What: Your services stated plainly — "roof replacement, repairs, and inspections," not "exterior solutions."
- Where: The cities and neighborhoods you actually serve, named on the page. "Serving Ottawa and the surrounding areas" is vague; "Kanata, Barrhaven, Nepean, and Orléans" tells a customer you come to their street.
- Trust: Photos of real completed work, your Google reviews displayed on the site, how long you've been in business, whether you're licensed and insured. Stock photos of handshakes don't build trust; a photo of a finished roof in Barrhaven does.
If a page doesn't answer at least one of these three, it's not pulling its weight.
Check 5: Is it working month to month?
A website isn't a one-time project — it's a machine you check on. Once a month, spend fifteen minutes on this:
- Count quote requests from the site this month. Up, down, or flat versus last month?
- Check your Google Business Profile views and actions (calls, directions, website clicks) — Google gives you this free in your business profile dashboard.
- Glance at your search ranking for your main service + city in an incognito window. Are you holding position?
- Review every form submission and missed call. Respond to anything unanswered — a quote request answered in an hour wins work; answered in two days doesn't.
That's the whole monitoring system. No expensive software needed. A contractor who does this for three months knows more about their website than most agencies' dashboards will tell them.
If the answer is no — what to fix first
Be honest about which check failed, because the fix order matters. If nobody finds the site, fix visibility first (Google Business Profile, service-area pages, reviews). If people find it but never contact you, fix the ask (phone number up top, one clear call to action per page, working forms). If it's invisible on mobile, fix speed and layout before spending a dollar on ads — ads pointed at a broken site just buy you expensive bounces.
And if the site fails three or more of these checks, you're not looking at a tweak. You're looking at a site that needs to be rebuilt around booking jobs instead of looking pretty.
That's what we build at OneS Automation (opens in a new tab) — websites for Ottawa-area contractors designed around one thing: turning searches into booked jobs. If your site isn't doing that, it's worth a look.