We Audited a Contractor's Site and Found an 18% Health Score. Here's What We Rebuilt.

The Number That Started This Project: 18%

Before we touched a line of code on Terracotta Construction's new site, we ran their existing one through a site health audit. The score came back at 18%, with 17 pages missing entirely, pages that should have existed (service pages, location pages, likely an about page) but returned nothing when a visitor or Google tried to load them.

An 18% health score doesn't mean a website "looks a little dated." It means the site is actively broken in ways most visitors never consciously notice, they just bounce, and Google quietly stops sending traffic to pages that don't resolve. For a general contractor, where a single lost lead can be worth tens of thousands of dollars, that's not a cosmetic problem. It's a foundation problem, which is a strange thing for a construction company's own website to have.

Why This Happens More to Contractors Than You'd Expect

Contractors are usually excellent at making sure an actual building doesn't have a cracked foundation, and much less likely to notice when their website does, for an understandable reason: nobody walks through a website with a level and a checklist the way they'd walk a job site. A site can degrade for years, broken links, missing pages, an old plugin nobody updates, without a single alarm going off, because the business itself is still coming in through referrals and repeat clients who already trust them. The website only becomes an obvious problem when you look at who isn't calling: the commercial client comparing three general contractors online before ever picking up the phone, or the homeowner researching for weeks before a $150,000 remodel.

What We're Rebuilding It Into

Rather than patch the existing site, we're rebuilding Terracotta's entire platform to what we internally call the full standard: a public marketing site, a customer login and portal, an admin dashboard, and a back office, all self-hosted on our own infrastructure, including a dedicated self-hosted Supabase instance, rather than stitched together from third-party SaaS tools. Their real brand color, logo, and existing service and location catalog carried over as the actual content foundation, so this isn't a blank-slate rebrand. It's a foundation-up rebuild of a company that already had the right pieces, just not a site built to hold them.

For a contractor doing serious volume, that customer portal and back office matter more than they might sound like they should. A client who can log in and see where their project stands, without calling the office for an update, is a client who trusts you more and calls less for status checks, which frees up real project management time.

The Portfolio Still Has to Do the Heavy Lifting

None of the platform work matters if the portfolio itself is weak, because for a contractor, the portfolio is the single page doing the most persuading. A few things separate a portfolio that actually closes deals from one that's just a photo dump: real before-and-after photos organized by project type (kitchen remodels, additions, whole-home renovations) rather than one long undifferentiated gallery, and a brief note on scope, timeline, and location (city or neighborhood, never a specific address) for each project.

Genuinely, hiring an actual photographer for your best completed projects is worth the few hundred dollars it costs. A phone photo taken in bad light next to a ladder and a stack of drop cloths undersells work that probably took weeks to finish. If you want a sense of how we think about laying out real project work, our own portfolio follows the same logic we're applying to Terracotta's.

Trust Signals for a Decision Nobody Makes Quickly

Construction projects are big-ticket, long-consideration purchases, closer to buying a car than picking a lawn service. That changes what belongs on the site: license numbers, bonding, and insurance coverage stated plainly rather than implied; years in business and any professional affiliations (AGC, local homebuilder associations); a written explanation of your actual process, consultation through final walkthrough, so a client isn't guessing what happens after they sign; and real testimonials, ideally paired with the project photos they're describing, backed by a Google Business Profile kept current with recent project photos.

That process explanation deserves more attention than most contractor sites give it. Clients aren't just evaluating whether you can do the work. They're evaluating whether the next several weeks of construction are going to be a manageable experience or a stressful one, and a clear, honest process page answers that question before they ever call.

Check Your Own Score Before You Decide What to Fix

You don't need to hire anyone to find out roughly where your own site stands. Run it through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free) or Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at what comes back: broken pages, missing meta descriptions, pages that technically exist but return nothing useful. If the results look anything like Terracotta's did, that's the actual gap to close, not a full brand overhaul, and not a redesign chasing a trend. Fix the foundation first.

What This Costs to Do Right

For a contractor who needs a real portfolio, clear service pages, and a foundation that doesn't quietly bleed traffic, a Standard Website at $950 covers that ground. For a contractor managing multiple crews, wanting a customer portal, or ready for the kind of back-office system we're building for Terracotta, the Custom Business Platform at $5,000 or the Enterprise Platform at $7,500 are the tiers built for that. Our pricing page breaks down what's actually included at each level.

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Kyle Stephens is a Marine Corps veteran and founder of StephensCode. Terracotta Construction's rebuild is still in progress as of this writing; we'll publish the full before-and-after results once it's live.