§01 Construction & contracting
Your website is already doing prequalification. It just isn't doing it on purpose.
The decisions that shape a contractor's next three years happen out of earshot — a project manager adding a name to a bid list, an owner's rep vetting three subs an architect mentioned, a superintendent deciding whether this is a step up. None of them fill in a contact form.
§02 How the decision happens
Three readers, none of whom will ever contact you
- 01
The project manager building a bid list
Wants scope, sector experience and delivery method inside thirty seconds. If the project list is a photo gallery, you are not on the list.
- 02
The owner's rep checking three names
Looking for bonding capacity, safety posture and evidence you have built this building type before. A missing EMR figure reads as an answer.
- 03
The superintendent deciding where to work
Fourteen years in the field, comparing you against the firm across town. Careers pages on contractor sites routinely out-traffic every marketing page.
§03 The pattern
What most contractor sites get wrong
Photos that punish the visitor
Jobsite photography straight off a phone, uncompressed, ten to a page. On mobile data at a site trailer it is unusable, and the gallery is the one thing the buyer actually came to see.
A project list with no facts
Twelve photographs and no delivery method, no owner type, no square footage, no value range, no year. A project manager building a bid list cannot use any of it.
Careers buried in the footer
Trades hiring is a live crisis and the careers page often outperforms every marketing page on a contractor site. It is usually a mailto link.
Licence and bonding invisible
The three facts a prequalifier is hunting for — licence numbers, bonding capacity, insurance — are either missing or in a PDF nobody can open on a phone.
§04 Structure
The pages a commercial contractor actually needs
Note what is missing: there is no "get a free quote" form anywhere in this structure. That belongs on a residential site and it actively undercuts a commercial firm.
- 01
Markets served
One page per sector you genuinely build in — healthcare, education, industrial, multifamily, institutional. Sector language is how owners and architects search.
- 02
Delivery methods
Design-build, CM at risk, lump sum. Naming these correctly signals more competence than any amount of design polish.
- 03
Project profiles
Owner type, delivery method, value range, duration, self-performed scope. Filterable by market. This is the page that gets forwarded.
- 04
Prequalification
Licences, bonding capacity, EMR, insurance certificates, safety programme. Downloadable, and gated is acceptable here — that is how this market works.
- 05
Careers
A real hub with a role template, not a mailto. Superintendents and foremen research employers the same way owners research contractors.
- 06
Preconstruction
Budgeting, phasing, constructability. It is where the relationship usually starts and it rarely gets its own page.
§05 Practical detail
Things that decide whether it works
Photography is the critical path
Not design. Project photos are the strongest asset a contractor owns and the slowest thing to collect. Every image goes through a proper pipeline — modern formats, correct dimensions, lazy loading below the fold — or the site is slow in exactly the place it must not be.
Credentials, displayed not filed
State licence numbers, bonding capacity, insurance certificates, EMR, and any AGC or ABC affiliation. Visible on a page, not zipped in a PDF. This is the single highest-value content change on most contractor sites.
Measure bid invitations, not leads
Form submissions are the wrong metric here. The signals that matter are invitations to bid, capability-statement downloads, careers applications, and the recruiter or owner's rep who forwards a project profile.
If you are a residential remodeler or a home-services contractor selling to homeowners, almost none of the above applies to you — you need speed to contact, financing, reviews and service-area coverage instead. Different structure, and worth saying so rather than selling you this one.
Get the structure before you commit to anything
Eight questions, about four minutes, and a page structure on screen at the end. Nothing is held back behind an email address.