5 Website Mistakes That Are Costing Custom Remodelers the Best Projects

Your website might look professional — but if it's making these five mistakes, the homeowners you want most are hiring someone else.

Most custom remodelers I talk to have the same frustration: they do exceptional work, their clients are happy, referrals come in steadily — but their website isn't pulling its weight. It's not generating inquiries from homeowners who don't already know them.

The irony is that these websites usually look fine. Clean layout, some project photos, a contact form. The problem isn't aesthetics. It's structure. And the structural mistakes that keep remodelers invisible on Google are surprisingly consistent.

Here are the five I see most often — and why they matter more than you might think.

Mistake #1: One "Services" Page Trying to Do Everything

This is the most common issue by far. A remodeler lists kitchen remodeling, bathroom renovation, whole-home renovation, additions, and aging-in-place modifications all on a single page. Maybe with a paragraph each, maybe just a bulleted list.

From Google's perspective, that page isn't about anything specific. When a homeowner searches "kitchen remodeler near me" or "whole-home renovation Raleigh," Google is looking for a page that's clearly and specifically about that service. A catch-all services page loses to a competitor who has a dedicated kitchen remodeling page every time.

The fix is straightforward but takes effort: build individual pages for each core service. A kitchen remodeling page that describes your approach, mentions the kinds of homes you typically work with, explains what the process looks like, and includes project examples. A bathroom renovation page that does the same. Each page gives Google a specific, rankable asset — and gives the homeowner exactly what they were searching for.

This isn't about creating content for its own sake. Each page should reflect work you actually do and want more of.

Mistake #2: No Story Behind the Work

Custom remodelers have an advantage most businesses don't: the work itself is visual, tangible, and emotionally resonant. A beautiful kitchen transformation or a thoughtfully restored historic home tells a powerful story.

But most remodeling websites reduce that story to a photo grid with no context.

Google can't read images. It can't evaluate the quality of your tile work or appreciate the complexity of a load-bearing wall removal. It can only index text. So a portfolio page with 40 beautiful photos and no written narrative is essentially invisible to search.

More importantly, homeowners planning a major renovation aren't just looking for pretty pictures. They want to understand your process. They want to know what the project involved, what challenges came up, how long it took, and what the homeowner's experience was like. That context is what builds trust before someone ever picks up the phone.

The fix: turn your best projects into short case studies. You don't need a thousand words per project — a few paragraphs that cover the scope, the approach, the challenges, and the outcome gives Google something to index and gives the homeowner a reason to believe you can handle their project.

Mistake #3: Your Site Is Slow, and It's Costing You More Than You Think

Homeowners researching a custom renovation aren't in emergency mode the way someone with a burst pipe would be. But they are comparing. They're opening three or four remodeler websites in separate tabs, scanning each one, and making quick judgments about who seems professional and who doesn't.

A slow-loading site gets closed before your portfolio even appears. The homeowner doesn't think "their site is slow" — they think "they don't seem as professional as the other two." It's a subconscious trust judgment, and it happens in seconds.

Google formalizes this through its Core Web Vitals metrics. Site speed, visual stability, and interactivity are all ranking factors. A slow site doesn't just lose visitors — it ranks lower, which means fewer visitors in the first place.

The culprit for remodeling sites is almost always oversized images. High-resolution project photos are important, but they need to be properly compressed and served in modern formats. A portfolio page with ten uncompressed 5MB images will crawl on mobile, no matter how good the hosting is.

If you're not sure where your site stands, run it through Google's PageSpeed Insights. The mobile score is what matters most — that's what Google uses to rank you.

Mistake #4: No Content That Helps Homeowners Make Decisions

This is the mistake that separates remodelers who get found on Google from those who don't: the ones who rank have content that addresses the questions homeowners are actually searching for.

Think about what someone types into Google when they're in the early stages of planning a renovation:

• "How much does a kitchen remodel cost?"

• "How long does a whole-home renovation take?"

• "What questions should I ask a remodeler before hiring?"

• "Is it worth remodeling or should I build new?"

• "How to choose a contractor for a high-end renovation"

If your website doesn't have content that addresses these kinds of questions, you're invisible during the entire research phase of the homeowner's decision — which is exactly when they're forming impressions and building shortlists.

You don't need to become a blogger. Two or three substantive articles per quarter, written from your actual experience, will outperform competitors who have nothing. And the content doesn't need to be polished or literary — it needs to be honest, specific, and grounded in what you actually know from doing this work.

Here's the compounding benefit: this kind of content also performs well in AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. When a homeowner asks an AI tool "How do I find a good remodeler in Raleigh?", the tool pulls from websites that have clear, experience-based answers. If that's your site, you get recommended. If your site is just photos and a contact form, there's nothing for these tools to reference.

Mistake #5: Ignoring Google Business Profile

For remodelers who serve a specific geography, your Google Business Profile is one of the highest-impact assets you have — and one of the most neglected.

When someone searches "custom remodeler near me" or "kitchen renovation Raleigh," Google shows the local map pack at the top of results: three businesses with reviews, photos, and contact information. If you're not in that map pack, you're below the fold and functionally invisible for that search.

Your Google Business Profile controls whether you appear there. And most remodelers either haven't claimed theirs, set it up once and forgot about it, or have a profile with four reviews from two years ago and no photos.

What an active, optimized profile looks like:

• Complete business information — services, hours, service area

• Recent project photos added regularly

• Consistent reviews (and responses to every one of them)

• Posts about completed projects or seasonal availability

• Accurate name, address, and phone number that matches your website exactly

The review piece deserves emphasis. A remodeler with 25 detailed, recent Google reviews will outrank one with 5 — and will convert more of the homeowners who see the listing. The reviews don't need to be perfect. They need to be specific and authentic. A review that says "They completely transformed our 1960s kitchen and managed the project seamlessly over 12 weeks" does more work than a generic five-star rating.

What These Mistakes Have in Common

Every one of these mistakes shares the same root cause: the website was built to exist, not to perform. Someone designed it to look presentable and check a box — "we have a website now" — without understanding what Google needs to rank it or what homeowners need to trust it.

That's not a criticism. Most remodelers aren't web strategists, and most web designers aren't thinking about how renovation clients actually search and decide. The gap is predictable.

But it means the remodelers who close that gap — who build a site with clear structure, specific content, and active local signals — end up with a significant advantage. Not because they gamed an algorithm, but because they made it easy for the right homeowners to find them and trust them before ever making a call.

Where to Start

If you're a custom remodeler and your website isn't generating the kind of inquiries you want, start with the highest-impact fixes first:

Build out service-specific pages for the work you want more of. Add written context to your best project photos. Claim and actively maintain your Google Business Profile. Check your site speed on mobile.

These aren't quick tricks. They're fundamentals — and most of your competitors haven't done them.

Worth a Conversation?

If your remodeling website looks solid but isn't working for you, the structure is likely the issue — not your reputation.

I build custom, SEO-first websites on Framer for reputation-driven businesses like custom remodelers and luxury builders. Every site is built to rank, load fast, and earn trust with the homeowners you actually want to work with.

Reach out for a conversation about what your site could be doing differently.