Contractor websites that load fast and rank in AI search
We rebuild plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing sites around the one thing that matters at 7:14am on a Tuesday: the click-to-call button. Mobile Lighthouse 95+, a service-area page for every city you cover, and the schema that gets you cited when someone asks ChatGPT for a Toronto plumber. The audit is free, and we usually quote below what your current agency is charging.
The five lines we hear from trade contractors on every audit call.
“My agency charges $1,400 a month and I still don't rank in my own city.”
The retainer is paying for templated blog posts and a slow WordPress build, not for the per-city pages and schema that actually surface in local search.
“Half my callers ask for a quote before they've even seen the website.”
Your site is doing the job of a phone book, not a salesman. There's no above-the-fold answer to price ranges, service area, or emergency response, so people just call to ask.
“Bigger franchises outspend me on Google Ads every month, so I quit.”
You can't out-bid Mr. Rooter or Reliance, but you can out-rank them on the long-tail queries (city + emergency + sub-trade) they ignore because the CPC is too low for their model.
“We have 180 five-star Google reviews and not one of them shows up on our site.”
Reviews are sitting in Google Business Profile and never make it into structured data, which means the rich snippets and AI citations are going to the competitor who bothered to wire it up.
“My site is built on Wix and takes six seconds to load on a phone.”
Trade buyers are searching on mobile, often in someone's basement at 2am. Six seconds is the gap between a $1,200 emergency call and a customer who scrolled past you for the next result.
Built for phone-first conversion, not portfolio aesthetics
Click-to-call sticky bar on every page
Per-service-area programmatic pages
Emergency-service schema surfaces
Review aggregation via Google Business Profile API
Before/after photo galleries with ImageObject schema
Mobile Lighthouse 95+ as the floor, not the goal
What each tier looks like for a contractor
Site
$2,500Story
$5,000Engine
$9,000Studio
$15,000+Monthly retainer (AEO included at every tier)
- Care$60/moHosting + AEO maintenance
- Local$300/mo+ 1 post/mo, local SEO
- Growth$700/mo+ 4 posts/mo, mention tracking
- Authority$2,000+/mo+ Reddit, Wikipedia, PR
Prices shown exclude applicable taxes.
See the full pricing and tier breakdownWe've shipped for Blackstone GC, a 20-year Toronto general contractor
Blackstone General Contractors has been running residential and commercial interior renovations across the Greater Toronto Area for over two decades. When they came to us their digital presence wasn't reflecting the craftsmanship, so we rebuilt the site around the project gallery (large immersive imagery, dedicated service pages for kitchens, bathrooms, commercial fit-outs, custom millwork) and tightened the contact flow so high-intent inquiries weren't getting lost in a noisy form. The full case is on /work/blackstone-gc.
Blackstone is a GC, not a plumber, but the fundamentals carry. The model that ranks Starlit Homes' twelve building-science pages for custom-home queries is the same model that ranks twelve service-area pages for a plumber, twelve emergency-call pages for an HVAC company, or twelve roof-type pages for a roofer. Same schema discipline (LocalBusiness, with Plumber, Electrician, HVACBusiness, or RoofingContractor as the precise type), same multi-page topic depth, same Cite-met hosting that turns indexing into citation flow.
What carries from Blackstone to a trade build: the photo-forward gallery treatment (before-and-after with ImageObject schema), the dark-themed premium look that signals "we've been doing this 20 years" without saying it, and a contact flow built for where the buyer actually is, which for trades is a phone in a basement at 7am. See the rest of the portfolio at /work.
Why trade contractors hire Space & Story
Free audit
24-page AI search audit, no commitment.
You hand us your URL, we send back a scored report covering AI citations, mobile Lighthouse, schema, and the gap between your current site and what trade contractors need to show up in 2026. No card, no call required.
Trade contractors guides & pricing.
What does a contractor website actually cost?
Honest pricing for contractor websites in 2026. Build tiers $2,500 to $15,000+, retainers $60 to $2,000/mo. What you get at each level and what to skip.
Read the guideAEO for trade contractors: getting cited for [city] plumber, HVAC, and electrician queries
How trade contractors get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for city-specific plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing queries.
Read the guideBuilt for your specific trade.
Each trade gets its own schema type, its own click-to-call layout, and its own per-city pages. Pick yours for the version of this work shaped for your shop.
Plumbing
Plumber schema, click-to-call layout, per-city pages.
Plumbing sitesTradeElectrical
Electrician schema, click-to-call layout, per-city pages.
Electrical sitesTradeHVAC
HVACBusiness schema, click-to-call layout, per-city pages.
HVAC sitesTradeRoofing
RoofingContractor schema, click-to-call layout, per-city pages.
Roofing sitesFrequently asked.
Trade contractors across Canada.
We build and rank trade contractors sites across Canada and the UK. Our Toronto page goes deep on the local market; for any other city, tell us on the audit and we tailor the build to it.