The Boxes WordPress Left Empty on Your Roofing Site

I once spent two days rebuilding a roofer’s website so that he could have a photo gallery.

He’d had one the entire time. It was a setting, three clicks in from the screen he logged into every week, and I found it a month later while doing an ordinary job for a different client.

I gave him the money back. I still think about it whenever an owner asks me for a quote, which is the useful part of the story and the reason I’m telling it on my own website.

So before you pay anybody for anything, find out what your site already does on its own. It takes about five minutes, you can do all of it tonight from the chair you’re in, and none of it needs me.

Step one: what is it running on (two minutes)

Nearly every WordPress site keeps its staff entrance in the same spot. Put your own address into a browser with /wp-admin after it, and knock.

If a login box appears, your site runs WordPress. If you get a page saying there’s nothing there, it doesn’t. Or someone has moved the door on you. Either answer is worth having before you talk to anyone about money. A fair few roofers land on the simpler drag-and-drop builders instead, and the choice between those and WordPress is mostly about how much you want to be able to change without phoning anyone.

Go on, try it. I’ll wait.

The odds are good that you got the login box, because 48.4% of the roofing sites I audited run WordPress where 36.4% of small business sites do, which makes your trade one of the heavier users of it anywhere I looked.

Don’t add the platform shares up, by the way, because a site can leave the fingerprints of two tools at once and my check comes back with nothing it recognizes on a fair number of them. You needn’t take my word for the share either. The report page carries a market explorer, and setting the trade to roofers while leaving the city menu on all prints the platform mix and every rate I quote here, each with the number of sites behind it. I’d rather you argued with the numbers than with me.

What that answer buys you

WordPress is the software your website sits on. What matters about it is the price of a change. Adding a page turns into a Tuesday afternoon for whoever answers your phone, rather than a quote from a developer and a wait of three weeks.

It also does a stack of dull work without being asked, and none of it has ever shown up on an invoice. Page names. The map search engines follow around your site. The housekeeping that stops one page from answering to four different addresses.

It misses one of those more often than it should. Carrying a visitor from the plain address over to the locked copy is the door I keep finding open on roofing sites, and the software gets blamed for it either way.

Nobody in your office chose any of that, which is why page titles in this trade come back at 99.3% and 12 of 47, on a check most owners I meet have never heard of.

You paid for that work in a roundabout way and never saw a bill. Fine by me.

What the software never does is the half with a person in it. It can’t tell a search engine what your photos show, it won’t decide who reads the emails, and it has no opinion whatsoever about whether anyone is counting. Plumbing sites run on the same thing, and walking that audit in order taught me where the software finishes its half and stops dead.

The trouble starts when an owner assumes the same is quietly true of everything else on his site.

Most of the roofing sites I build sit on the same software as yours, which means most of what I’d change on yours isn’t a rebuild, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise in meetings. An interior designer called me last year wanting to move platforms and I spent an hour talking her out of it, which is the least profitable hour I worked that month.

Step two: can you get in (one minute)

If the login box turned up, do you know the password?

Not your web guy. Not your nephew. You.

Every fix below takes ten minutes for a person who is already logged in. It takes a month if your only login lives on the phone of an employee who left in 2019.

Stuck here? Stop reading and go and sort it out. Nothing else on this list is worth doing until someone in your building can get through that door.

Step three: is anything counting (one minute)

Search your email for the words Google Analytics.

Not your website. Your inbox. Everyone who has ever set this up for a client sent an invitation to an email address, and that address is usually yours.

If nothing comes back at all, from any year, then nobody set it up in your name, and last month’s visitors are gone for good.

Analytics is a short piece of code that gets pasted in once, ten minutes of work for whoever holds the login, and from then on a free dashboard answers questions you’re currently answering with a feeling. Was March busier than April? Which page did the people who called you read first, and how long did they sit on it before they picked up the phone?

55.3% of roofing sites are running it, which leaves a lot of this trade deciding next spring’s advertising out of memory.

Memory is generous about the ads you liked. It’s silent about the ones that quietly worked.

Step four: the photos (one minute)

Open your gallery, look at your before and afters, and then ask the person who uploads them what they type into the box beside each picture.

When someone drags a photo of a finished roof into the site, the screen puts an empty field next to it and waits. Ten seconds of typing fills it, and the right person to do that is whoever stood on the job, because only they know it was a hip roof on Maple Street with the ridge redone.

Whoever built your site calls that field the alt text. The software itself usually just calls it Description.

Across the roofing sites I audited, 53.7% of the pictures carry that line, and the empty ones bother me more than they should. Your finished roofs are the strongest thing you own. They’re the only proof most strangers will ever bother to look at.

An empty field means a search engine has no idea what any of your best work is a picture of.

The bill you don’t get

Add those four checks up and the honest total is one evening, no invoice, and two conversations with people you already employ.

I’m aware of how that reads coming from a man who builds websites for a living. It’s still true, and the alternative is you paying me two days for a gallery you already had.

If it were my roofing company, I’d start with the inbox search tonight and let the rest of it wait a week.