- 67.82 Roofing mean Fervor Score (n=130) Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
- 65.67 Remodeling mean Fervor Score (n=146) Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
- 2.1 Cross-trade gap (mean points). Both trades sit in the C tier. Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
- 30.8% / 29.5% Brands with critical WCAG 2.1 AA violations (roofing / remodeling) Source: axe-core 4.10.2 (WCAG 2.1 AA), Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
- 11.23s / 10.16s Mobile LCP mean (roofing / remodeling). Google "poor" threshold is 4s. Source: Google Lighthouse 13.3.0 (mobile), Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
Cite as: "Construction Industry Marketing Benchmark 2026: 315 Sites Scored." The Contractor CRO Index, Fervor Studio. 2026-05-15. Sample size: 315.
Construction industry marketing has three sub-pillars: CRO, SEO, and web design. Every channel a contractor pays for, from paid ads to organic search to social to referrals, eventually loads the same page. The website. That is where the lead either books or leaves, so a benchmark for construction industry marketing has to start where the conversion actually happens. We scored 315 contractor websites across three trades between 2026-04-15 to 2026-05-12, using the same Fervor Grade™ rubric on each brand. Roofing averaged 67.82 out of 100, remodeling averaged 65.67 out of 100, and the cross-trade gap is small (2.1 points). The underlying category performance differs in instructive ways covered below.
State of
Roofing
- 130 sites inspected
- 70 median, range 30 to 90
- 19 at B or above, 64 at D or F
State of
Remodeling
- 146 sites inspected
- 71 median, range 3 to 86
- 24 at B or above, 67 at D or F
State of
HVAC
- 39 sites inspected
- 65 median, range 39 to 81
- 2 at B or above, 24 at D or F
Executive summary
Roofing won the headline by a margin small enough to read as noise: 2.1 Fervor Score points on average. Both trades sit firmly in the C tier of the standard school grading scale, and neither has reached B sample-wide. So the interesting story is not which trade is "better" online. It is what the three trades share. The two lowest-scoring categories in each trade are the same two categories, in the same order: Accessibility and Mobile Experience. Same root cause, same remediation path. So if you build contractor websites, the floor of the trade you serve looks a lot like the floor of the other trade. And the ceiling does too.
Three findings worth sharing
1. The sample-wide problem is the same in both trades. Mobile and accessibility.
Mobile Experience averages 77.2% of max for roofing and 69.6% for remodeling. Accessibility, against WCAG 2.1 AA, is 48.6% for roofing and 45.4% for remodeling. These are the two lowest-scoring categories in both verticals, and the gap is small. This is a contractor-website industry problem, not a trade-specific one.
2. Top performers exist in both trades.
Roofing's top brand earned a Fervor Score of 90. Remodeling's top was 86. Both are achievable benchmarks within their trade's competitive set. The gap isn't structural, it's executional. So if your site is sitting near the trade-sample median, the path to passing is a short list of fixes, not a rebuild.
3. The bottom tail is real.
Roofing has 31 F-graded brands (24% of the roofing trade sample) and 33 D-graded. Remodeling has 37 at F and 30 at D. These are sites with structural conversion failures. Not minor tweaks. Missing fundamentals. So if your site falls into one of those bands, the cheapest move is a Site Inspection.
Score distribution, side by side
Per-trade Fervor Score distribution. Every number on this page comes from the cross-trade pipeline's pre-computed comparison, not from anything we aggregated at render time.
| Metric | Roofing (n=130) | Remodeling (n=146) |
|---|---|---|
| Fervor Score mean | 67.82 | 65.67 |
| Fervor Score median | 70 | 71 |
| Standard deviation (spread) | 11.83 | 16.68 |
| Highest observed | 90 | 86 |
| Lowest observed | 30 | 3 |
| Base Score mean (before grade adjustment) | 74.78 | 68.25 |
Fervor Grade distribution, side by side
Letter grade counts within each trade. The shape is consistent across both trades. Most brands cluster in C or D, the long bottom tail is real (about a quarter of each trade graded F), and the A category is empty for remodeling and almost empty for roofing.
| Fervor Grade | Roofing count | Roofing share | Remodeling count | Remodeling share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade A (Honor, 90+) | 1 | 0.8% | 0 | 0.0% |
| Grade B (Passing, 80 to 89) | 18 | 13.8% | 24 | 16.4% |
| Grade C (Conditional, 70 to 79) | 47 | 36.2% | 55 | 37.7% |
| Grade D (Probation, 60 to 69) | 33 | 25.4% | 30 | 20.5% |
| Grade F (Condemned, under 60) | 31 | 23.8% | 37 | 25.3% |
Category-by-category comparison
Each trade sample scored against the same six Fervor Grade categories. The percentage-of-max column shows how close each trade sample gets to a full score in that category. Roofing leads every category. The widest gap is on First Impression and Trust & Credibility. The narrowest gap is on Accessibility, where both trades sit in the red.
| Category | Roofing mean | Roofing % of max | Remodeling mean | Remodeling % of max | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Impression | 16.92 / 20 | 84.6% | 15.33 / 20 | 76.6% | Roofing |
| Trust & Credibility | 16.85 / 22 | 76.6% | 15.03 / 22 | 68.3% | Roofing |
| Lead Capture | 15.62 / 20 | 78.1% | 14.25 / 20 | 71.2% | Roofing |
| Mobile Experience | 11.58 / 15 | 77.2% | 10.45 / 15 | 69.6% | Roofing |
| Content & SEO | 10.54 / 15 | 70.3% | 9.59 / 15 | 63.9% | Roofing |
| Accessibility | 3.88 / 8 | 48.6% | 3.63 / 8 | 45.4% | Roofing |
Accessibility
Accessibility scores reflect the page's default state. What a visitor encounters when they land. Third-party accessibility overlay widgets (AccessiBe, UserWay, EqualWeb, AudioEye, and similar) are not credited toward a brand's accessibility Fervor Score. This aligns with the WebAIM and 700-plus accessibility expert position (the Overlay Fact Sheet), DOJ guidance, and U.S. case law in the Robles v. Domino's lineage. Overlays are opt-in, most visitors don't activate them, and they don't satisfy the ADA.
Empirical overlay census, 2026-05-12. We made a direct HTTPS GET against each brand's homepage with a Chrome 120 user agent and looked through the response for the named overlay vendors (9 of them in total). Cross-trade results. Roofing: 132 brands in the trade, 115 successfully fetched (87.1%), 7 with an overlay (5.3% of the roofing trade sample, made up of 4 AudioEye, 2 UserWay, 1 AccessiBe). Remodeling: 107 brands in the trade, 102 fetched (95.3%), 3 with an overlay (2.8% of the remodeling trade sample, made up of 2 AccessiBe, 1 UserWay). Combined across both: 10 of 217 successfully fetched (4.6%). Worst-case bounds, assuming every unfetched brand carried an overlay: roofing tops out at 17.6%, remodeling at 7.5%.
Why overlay widgets don't earn credit
Three pieces of receipts that explain why an installed overlay doesn't satisfy the ADA, and doesn't earn a brand any Fervor Grade™ credit in this report:
"The Ninth Circuit held that Title III of the ADA applies to a business's website and mobile app when those have a nexus to a physical place of public accommodation. In October 2019 the Supreme Court declined review, leaving the Ninth Circuit decision intact and exposing brick-and-mortar businesses nationwide to website-accessibility lawsuits."
Robles v. Domino's Pizza LLC, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir.) (2019)
"A blind plaintiff sued Eyebobs over website inaccessibility despite the site running an accessiBe overlay. The case settled by consent decree requiring the U.S. portion of the website be made accessible within 24 months, plus an accessibility coordination team, a published accessibility policy, regular reviews, training, and retention of an accessibility consultant."
Murphy v. Eyebobs LLC, W.D. Pa. (2021)
"The FTC's final order requires accessiBe to pay $1 million and bars the company from representing that its automated product can make any website WCAG-compliant or can ensure continued WCAG compliance over time, unless it has evidence to support such claims."
FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe to pay $1 Million, Federal Trade Commission (2025)
The aggregate stats on this page are mechanical and reproducible from the per-trade JSON files behind State of Roofing and State of Remodeling.
Methodology terms
The shared vocabulary this report (and the per-trade reports) lean on. Lifted from the canonical methodology appendix.
- Contractor CRO Index
- The Site Inspection program. The live index of contractor websites scored via Site Inspection.
- Site Inspection
- An individual brand's Site Inspection. Combines screenshot review of every homepage, service, location, and contact page across mobile and desktop, structured DOM extraction (phone numbers, schema markup, form fields, credentials), accessibility evaluation using axe-core (WCAG 2.1 AA compliance check), Core Web Vitals via Google Lighthouse, and call-to-action click-through verification.
- Fervor Grade™ rubric
- A 100-point, 6-category rubric for evaluating contractor websites on the dimensions that drive lead generation and conversion. Each Site Inspection produces a Fervor Score (numeric, 0 to 100) which maps to a Fervor Grade (letter, A to F) using standard school grading thresholds. A 90 or above is Honor. 80 to 89 is Passing. 70 to 79 is Conditional. 60 to 69 is Probation. Under 60 is Condemned. Categories are weighted. First Impression 20 points. Trust & Credibility 22. Lead Capture 20. Mobile Experience 15. Content & SEO 15. Accessibility 8.
- Fervor Score
- A brand's numeric Site Inspection result on the 0 to 100 scale. The Adjusted Score is after Grade Adjustments. The Base Score is the rubric output before adjustments.
- Fervor Grade
- The letter grade A through F derived from a brand's Fervor Score using the standard school grading thresholds.
- Grade Adjustment
- A post-rubric correction applied to a brand's Base Score when contextual factors warrant it. Example. A brand running a 24/7 emergency service gets a partial Grade Adjustment if their phone number isn't visible above the fold (the standard rubric penalty is heavier than the actual conversion impact for their trade). The Adjusted Score, the final Fervor Score, equals Base Score plus the sum of Grade Adjustment deltas.
- axe-core
- Open-source accessibility tool maintained by Deque Systems. Reads the rendered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of a webpage and reports violations of WCAG 2.1 at the AA conformance level. Version 4.10.2 used here. Detects issues like missing alt text on images, insufficient color contrast, keyboard-trap navigation, and missing form labels.
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA. The accessibility standard the U.S. Department of Justice references when applying the ADA to commercial websites. Failure to meet AA is the basis for accessibility lawsuits under Title III of the ADA.
- Google Lighthouse Core Web Vitals
- Google's open-source page-quality tool. Measures Largest Contentful Paint (when the main content appears), Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps around during load), Total Blocking Time (how long the page is unresponsive to clicks), and the overall Performance score. Google uses these metrics as ranking signals in search results.
- DOM facts
- Structured data extracted from a page's rendered DOM at capture time. schema.org JSON-LD markup, tel and mailto links, form field structures, social-media link patterns, manufacturer and certification badges in body text, review widget signatures, alt text on images, and chat-widget presence. A mechanical second source of truth alongside the visual screenshot.
Citation
"Construction Industry Marketing Benchmark 2026: 315 Sites Scored." The Contractor CRO Index, Fervor Studio. 2026-05-15. Sample size: 315. Methodology: Fervor Grade™ rubric.
Short form: (Contractor CRO Index, Fervor Studio, 2026)
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Fervor Studio · fervorstudio.ca |
| Report ID | SoI-Cross-Trade-2026 |
| Published | 2026-05-15 |
| Data collection window | 2026-04-15 to 2026-05-12 |
| Sample size | 315 (130 roofing, 146 remodeling, 39 hvac) |
Editorial use policy
The dataset is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0. The non-commercial clause is narrower than it sounds, so here is the plain-English version that governs how the numbers can travel.
Editorial, journalistic, and content-marketing use is welcomed and encouraged, including on agency, contractor, and competitor blogs, with attribution to Fervor Studio. The non-commercial clause targets direct resale, paid newsletters, paywalled research, paid client deliverables, and inclusion in commercial SaaS products. If you're publishing about the data on a blog or in a story, you're covered. If you're packaging it into something a customer pays for, contact Fervor Studio for permission.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers about how roofing, remodeling, and hvac contractor websites compare under the Fervor Grade rubric. Every answer cites the underlying primary research or, for third-party claims, the original publisher.
What is construction industry marketing?
Construction industry marketing is the umbrella for every channel that drives leads to a contractor business: CRO, SEO, web design, paid media, reputation management, and referral systems. Every channel eventually delivers traffic to the same place, the website, which is why this benchmark scores the website pillar first. The conversion floor the website creates is what the rest of the construction industry marketing stack relies on.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
What is the Contractor CRO Index?
The Contractor CRO Index is Fervor Studio's annual benchmark of contractor websites in North America, covering general contractor marketing across the building envelope and home improvement marketing across residential remodeling. We Site Inspected 315 sites in 2026, 130 roofing brands, 146 remodeling brands, and 39 hvac brands, against the same 100-point rubric. Every score traces back to a captured screenshot, a read of the page, an axe-core 4.10.2 accessibility check, and Google Lighthouse 13.3.0 Core Web Vitals.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
How do roofing, remodeling, and hvac contractor websites compare?
Roofing won by 2.1 Fervor Score points on average (67.82 vs 65.67). Both trades land in the C (Conditional) tier of the standard school grading scale. Roofing leads every category, but the cross-trade gap is small. Mobile Experience and Accessibility are the two lowest-scoring categories in both trades.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
Which trade has more sites at A or B grade?
Remodeling has NaN brands at B or above (NaN% of the remodeling trade sample). Roofing has 19 (15%). Roofing has the single A in the combined sample. Both trades have most of their mass in C or below.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
Where does each trade lose the most points?
Accessibility, for both. Roofing scores 48.6% of the accessibility max; remodeling scores 45.4%. Mobile Experience is second-weakest in both trades. Neither trade has reached even 80% of the accessibility max sample-wide. Same root cause, same remediation path.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
How many contractor websites have critical accessibility violations?
Across both trades: 30.8% of roofing brands and 29.5% of remodeling brands carry at least one critical WCAG 2.1 AA violation. We checked every page with axe-core 4.10.2. Critical violations are the kind ADA Title III plaintiffs cite in lawsuits, including Robles v. Domino's Pizza (9th Cir. 2019).
Source: axe-core 4.10.2 (WCAG 2.1 AA), Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
What is the average mobile page load speed?
The typical roofing homepage loads its biggest visible element in about 11.23s on a phone. Remodeling: 10.16s. Google's threshold for "good" is 2.5s. Over 4s is "poor." Both trades sit deep in Google's poor band on mobile. Google's page-experience guidance confirms Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal.
Source: Google Lighthouse 13.3.0 (mobile), Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
Why does roofing outperform remodeling on every category?
Roofing has run on a phone-driven, emergency-call business model for longer than the modern web. The category leans heavily on visible phone numbers, fast page loads, and clear trust signals. Remodeling sites lean more on portfolio depth, design polish, and longer consideration cycles. The rubric weights both equally, so the operational habits of the roofing trade map closer to what the rubric measures.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
What is a Fervor Grade?
Fervor Grade is the letter grade (A through F) Fervor Studio assigns each contractor website on a 100-point scoring rubric. A 90 or above is Honor. 80 to 89 is Passing. 70 to 79 is Conditional. 60 to 69 is Probation. Under 60 is Condemned. Same scale your kids get report cards on. The grade boils a 150-measurement Site Inspection down into one letter a contractor can act on.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
How does Fervor Studio score contractor websites?
Same process on every brand. We capture screenshots at desktop and mobile width across every page our crawler can reach. We read the underlying page (forms, structured markup, phone and email links, badges, widgets). We run axe-core 4.10.2 against WCAG 2.1 AA. And we measure Core Web Vitals with Google Lighthouse 13.3.0. About 150 individual measurements per page. The 100-point Fervor Grade rubric then scores what we captured.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
Where can I cite this report?
Use this citation: "Construction Industry Marketing Benchmark 2026: 315 Sites Scored." The Contractor CRO Index, Fervor Studio. 2026-05-15. Sample size: 315. Short form: (Contractor CRO Index, Fervor Studio, 2026). The full per-trade detail and methodology lives at the linked per-trade reports above.
Source: Fervor Studio, Contractor CRO Index 2026 (n=315 contractor sites, roofing + remodeling + hvac)
