Should You Let a Friend Build Your Contractor Website?

Almost every contractor has a nephew, a neighbour or a mate from school who does websites. The offer is usually cheap or free, and turning it down feels ungrateful. So this is worth thinking about properly rather than being talked out of.

Sometimes it is genuinely the right call. It depends on what you need the site to do.

When it works fine

If you need a site so referrals can check you are real, somebody capable can build that in a weekend and it will be perfectly good. You are buying a business card at a URL, and paying an agency for a business card is a waste of money.

If your friend does this professionally and takes on the ongoing work as an actual arrangement, that is also fine. That is just hiring somebody you happen to know.

Where it usually goes wrong

The trouble is almost never the build. It is everything after.

A website is not finished when it launches. Ranking takes months of small adjustments, and things break: a form stops sending, a plugin update takes a page down, hosting expires. Somebody has to notice and fix it.

A favour has no mechanism for that. You cannot chase a favour. Six months in, when your contact form has been silently dropping enquiries for three weeks, you find yourself deciding whether it is worth a slightly awkward text message, and mostly it does not get sent.

The part nobody mentions

Most people who build websites as a favour do not do local SEO, because it is a different job. They will make you something that looks good and does nothing to help a homeowner in your area find you.

You end up with a site that satisfies the referral check and does not bring in a single new customer. Then you conclude that websites do not work for your trade, which is the wrong lesson from the wrong experiment.

Three questions to ask before you say yes

Ask what happens when something breaks, and get a real answer rather than of course I will sort it.

Ask what terms the site is meant to rank for. If there is no answer, you are getting a brochure. That may be all you want, but decide it on purpose.

Ask whether they will still be doing this in a year. People stop.

What we would say

If somebody you trust will build it and stay involved, take the offer. Genuinely.

If the honest answer is that they will build it and then it is yours to worry about, work out whether you want the thing you would be getting. If the answer is that you want customers rather than a URL, that is a different job.

You can see the four trades we build for on who we build for, and we will send you a free preview of your site so you have something concrete to compare against.