What to put on a painter and decorator's website

A painter and decorator's website needs six things to win the job. Photos of finished rooms, taken on your phone. Your day rate or a price per room, listed. The areas you cover. Your public liability insurance and any memberships you hold. Three real Google reviews with names. And a plain note on what happens when someone gets in touch, including how long they'll wait for you. That's the whole list.

This is for painters and decorators who don't have a site yet, or have one they're not happy with. Whoever builds it (you, us, a freelancer), the six sections below are what should be on it, in order, with the reasoning for each.

1. Photos of finished rooms, shot on your phone

This is the big one. A plumber can get away with two photos. You can't. Your whole trade is how things look when you're done, and a customer who can't see your finish will assume you don't have one.

Six to ten photos. Finished rooms in daylight, curtains open, shot from the doorway. Then the close-ups: the line where wall colour meets ceiling white, glossed woodwork, a papered feature wall with the pattern matched across the seam. The close-ups are what separate you from someone with a roller and a free weekend.

A crisp cutting-in line, photographed close up on your phone, does more selling than anything you could write.

No stock photos of paint tins or colour swatches. They look like you bought a template and never finished it. A phone snap of a room you actually painted tells the customer two things: you exist, and you're good.

2. Your day rate, or a price per room

List it. Whatever it is.

“£220 a day plus materials” works. So do room examples: “£350 for a double bedroom, walls and ceiling. Around £550 for a living room including woodwork. Hall, stairs and landing from £700.”You don't need a complicated table.

The usual pushback: “but every job is different”. Sure. Nobody's expecting an exact quote from a website. They're expecting a ballpark so they know you're a £550 job and not a £5,000 surprise. You give them that, they get in touch. You hide it, they message the next decorator on the list.

3. The areas you cover

Be specific. “York, Harrogate and the villages between” is good. “North Yorkshire” is too vague.

Decorating is daily-commute work. You're on site every morning for three or four days, so you have a real radius, and the customer can't tell what it is unless you say. The number-one reason a homeowner closes a tradesperson's site without getting in touch is that they can't work out whether you'd actually come to them. List the towns or postcodes. If exterior jobs have a wider range than interiors, say so.

4. Insurance and any memberships

One plain sentence near the top: “Fully insured, £2 million public liability.”

You're working inside someone's home, around their carpets, their sofa, their piano. The insurance line answers the question they were too polite to ask. It takes ten seconds to add and it settles nerves for everyone who lands on the page.

If you're a Dulux Select Decorator or TrustMark registered, put the badge on the homepage and say what it means in one line. If you're not, leave the space empty. A row of accreditation logos that aren't actually yours is worse than none.

5. Three real Google reviews

Three reviews with real names and dates beats fifty star-ratings with no name. Pull them live from your Google Business Profile so they stay current.

For a decorator, the best reviews aren't the ones that say “great finish”. They're the ones that mention dust sheets, tidiness, and turning up when you said you would. If a customer wrote “left the house cleaner than he found it”, that's the one to show.

Don't fake them. An anonymous “Excellent work, very professional!” with no name and no date is worse than no reviews at all. It's a tell. And if your overall rating is strong (4.7 or better with 20+ reviews), mention the number.

6. What happens when they get in touch

Spell out the steps. Something like: you'll come round to see the job within a few days, they'll get a written quote by email within 48 hours, and your next free start date is roughly six weeks out.

That last part matters most. Good decorators are famously booked up, and most hide it, thinking it loses them work. It doesn't. Decorating is planned weeks ahead anyway - it's not a burst pipe. An honest “currently booking jobs from September” on your site makes you look in demand, filters out the people who needed it done by Friday, and saves you ten phone calls that go nowhere.

And make the contact itself easy: phone number in the header and footer, a WhatsApp link if you take WhatsApp. Most customers will want to send you photos of the rooms anyway.

What to leave off

Things decorators add that don't help:

Stock photos of rollers and swatch fans. A long history of the business. Separate pages for interior painting, exterior painting and wallpapering that all say the same thing (one page is fine). A page called “Our Values”. A gallery of every paint brand logo you've ever used. A blog you'll never update.

The test

When the site is done, ask yourself: if someone's just moved house and wants three rooms painted before the carpets go down, after 60 seconds on this page do they know roughly what it costs, whether you cover their area, and how long they'd wait for you to start?

If yes, you've got a good site. If no, simplify until they can.

We've also written about the five reasons customers Google a tradesperson and never call them - worth a read if enquiries are slower than you'd like.

One last thing

You don't need to build this yourself. We do it for £20 a month, including all the changes you ask for afterwards. See the dedicated painter and decorator page for what's included. But whoever ends up building it, the six things above are what should be on it.