Why I Won’t Move a Roofer’s Contact Form Off the Homepage

About twice a year a roofer asks me to take the contact form off his homepage and move it onto a page called Contact.

I always say no. I’ve lost work over it and I’d do it again tomorrow.

The ask is a fair one, which is what makes it awkward, because the form does look like clutter on a page he paid real money for and the photos do look better without it. Every other roofer in town has a clean menu with the word Contact sitting politely on the end of it.

But I’ve watched both versions of the same page now, and I know what the clean one costs.

Roofers already do this better than they do anything else, which surprised me when I counted. 37.6% of the roofing homepages I opened have a form on the page a stranger lands on, and no other check I run comes back this far in front for them.

The page as I found it

A roofer I worked with two summers ago had a homepage I’d have been proud of in 2016.

One big photo filled the whole first screen, his crew on a steep grey roof in low evening sun with one of them waving at the camera, and his slogan sat over the picture in a script font that said Quality Workmanship Since 1994.

Under the photo were three tiles for repairs, replacement and gutters, then a row of badges from the shingle brands he buys, a gallery of finished jobs, and a footer with the office number in it.

His phone number was up in the top right corner as well, in grey, at about the size you’d print a warranty note.

Nothing on that page was wrong. Nothing on it was a way in, either.

The woman who was reading it

She had a stain on her bedroom ceiling the size of a dinner plate, and it was wider than it had been on Sunday.

It was twenty past nine at night, her husband was already asleep because he starts at five, and she had opened two other roofers before this one and closed them both.

She’s not calling anyone at that hour. When did you last phone a stranger’s business at twenty past nine on a weeknight?

Maybe she rings in the morning, if the morning doesn’t get away from her, and if she can find him again.

What she wanted was to hand the problem to a stranger and go to bed.

A form is the only piece of a website that lets her do that, and when you take those boxes off the page she lands on, you’re open to her only in the hours when she happens to be free, awake and willing to talk out loud to a stranger, all three at once.

That’s a narrow window for a working adult. Her Tuesday evening was never going to be inside it.

The page after

We changed three things and left the photo alone.

The biggest line of type stopped being his slogan and started saying what he does and what town he does it in.

The phone number came out of the corner, got large, and turned into something a thumb can press.

Under it went a form. Her name, her number, and a box big enough to describe a stain, with photos welcome, because everyone has already taken one by the time they go looking for a roofer.

That was all of it. The gallery stayed, the badges stayed, and the sun stayed on the roof.

Nothing on your page has to die for this either, which is the part owners never believe until they see it.

Why so few boxes? Because every extra field is another reason to give up halfway, and I’ve watched people quit at the line asking for their home address, which isn’t something I’d earned the right to ask for yet.

You can find out where the house is once she’s talking to you. You can’t phone a woman who left.

What his trade already gets right

Did you expect your own trade to be at the front of anything I count? I didn’t expect this one, because roofing gets talked about as a business that runs on the yard sign and the phone, and a fair amount of it still does.

Across every small business site I audit the number is 28%, so in most trades your customer is left holding a phone with nothing on the screen to press.

Lawyers land just above roofers and financial services just below, which puts the trade 7 of 47.

Then there’s my favorite thing about the roofing numbers, and it takes a second to spot. 37.6% of these sites publish a blog as well, and that one lands 24 of 47.

Same number, same trade, same week of counting, and one of them is the best thing they do while the other is a shrug, because a rate on its own tells you nothing at all until you know what everybody else managed to do with it.

Being found was never the hard part

95.2% of the roofers I sampled hold at least one Google review, so people are finding these companies late at night and reading about them before they decide anything.

She arrives half sold. Your stars did that, and your stars cost you years of climbing off a ladder at the end of a job to ask for them.

Then your homepage decides what becomes of all that work. What does yours ask her to do once she’s made up her mind about you?

Two businesses in the same trade in Calgary both had a website, both looked fine, and only one of them got the call.

Why the tidy version loses

Moving your form onto its own page doesn’t delete it. It asks for one more decision from a woman who has already made the only decision that mattered.

She has to spot the menu. She has to believe there’s something behind it worth her time. She has to still want you after the page reloads.

How many strangers finish that, one-handed, in bed, at half past nine?

Every extra step is another way out, and the list of reasons people leave a page seconds after landing on it is longer than any owner wants to read.

No owner has ever been able to name me a job he lost that way, and that’s the trouble with the argument I get every time, because nothing about the tidy page looks broken from where he happens to be standing.

If the page feels full, cut something else

I understand the instinct. A homepage fills up fast and something has to go.

So what’s sitting on your first screen tonight, and how much of it is there for you rather than for her?

Cut the row of badges. Cut the second gallery. Cut the paragraph about your family values, which every roofer in your town also has, in nearly the same words, under a different photo of a truck.

Not one of those has ever started a conversation at nine at night.

When I build a site for a roofer, the form goes on the first screen before we’ve agreed on a single color, and then I fill it in from my own phone standing in my kitchen, because I won’t hand a site over until a message from it lands somewhere a person will actually read on a Saturday.

If it doesn’t do that, everything else on the page is decoration.

My own form was dead for most of a year once, and a man in Dallas had to tell me he’d written to me twice.

One question, and it’s yours

His messages mostly arrive between eight and eleven at night, and most of them come in with a photo attached, which means he can price a few of them without getting into the truck at all. Your evenings could look like that too.

He hasn’t asked me to tidy the page since.

So work this one out for yourself, because I can’t do it for you and neither can your website.

On the nights last month when your phone was face down on the counter, how many people finished reading about you and found nothing in front of them to press?