Best Contractor Websites: We Scored 380, Only 1 Earned an A

So you want to know which trade builds the best contractor websites. Roofers? HVAC companies? The remodeling crews with the glossy before-and-after galleries? It's a fair question, and we went looking for the answer the only honest way you can. By scoring real sites against the same yardstick. Across three trades, 380 contractor sites, six conversion categories each. And the answer surprised even us.

Here it is, no buildup. Roofing wins. Barely. The mean Fervor Score came in at 67.82 for roofing, 65.67 for remodeling, 65.32 for HVAC. That's a 2.5-point spread across three entire trades. And all three of them land in the same letter grade.

A D.

So the real headline isn't "roofing has the best websites." It's that nobody does. The gap between the best trade and the worst is so thin it barely clears a rounding error, and the whole field is sitting in the bottom third of the gradebook. Let's get into what that actually means for you, because the answer reframes the question you should've been asking.

The best contractor websites aren't where you'd guess

Most people expect a winner-and-losers story here. One trade figured out the internet, the rest are stuck in 2009. That's the narrative you'd write if you hadn't looked at the numbers. And it barely matters which trade you're in.

But the numbers say something flatter and more useful. Roofing's 67.82 and HVAC's 65.32 are separated by two and a half points on a hundred-point scale. Put a roofing site and an HVAC site side by side and you would not, as a homeowner, be able to feel that difference. It doesn't show up in the booking flow. It doesn't show up in how fast the phone gets answered. It's a statistical edge, not a lived one.

And here's the part that matters for your business. If you're a remodeler reading this and feeling behind the roofers, don't. You're 2.15 points back. That's nothing. The thing keeping your site in the D tier has zero to do with your trade and everything to do with execution. The booking widget you never added. The phone number buried in the footer. The form with eleven fields nobody finishes.

So the trade-versus-trade framing is a distraction. The best contractor websites aren't clustered in one industry. They're scattered across all three, built by the handful of owners in each trade who treated their site like a salesperson instead of a brochure.

How we scored 380 sites, every one named in public

Quick note on method, because "we scored them" deserves a definition. Fervor ran 380 contractor websites through the same six-category framework: roofing, remodeling, and HVAC, scored on first impression, trust, lead capture, mobile, content, and accessibility. Roofing's sample was 130 sites. Remodeling was 146. HVAC was 104. Real sites, real businesses, every page captured and measured the same way.

And here's the part most website roundups won't tell you. We didn't anonymize anybody. Every one of those 380 sites is named, scored, and published in the open inside the Contractor CRO Index. Its own teardown, its own number, its own row you can go read right now. So this isn't anonymous research. The three State of the Industry reports are the layer that sits on top of those public teardowns: the trade-wide patterns you get when you stack 380 graded sites and count what keeps repeating. We looked at public sites. We published what we found, in public. The aggregate is just the bird's-eye view of work that already has your competitors' names on it.

And every number you're about to read traces back to one of three reports: the State of Roofing, the State of Remodeling, and the State of HVAC. All three sit inside the Contractor CRO Index. No estimates, no vibes. Counted.

Roofing leads every category, and it still earned a D

Here's the genuinely strange part. Roofing didn't just edge out the field on the overall average. It led all six scoring categories. First impression, trust, lead capture, mobile, content, accessibility. Roofing was at or near the top on every single one.

And it still got a D.

Sit with that for a second. The trade that does everything better than the other two trades is still failing by the standard of what a high-converting site actually looks like. Being the best of three D students doesn't make you a B student. It makes you the valedictorian of a class that's struggling.

So when a roofer tells me his site is "good for the industry," I believe him. It probably is. That's exactly the problem. The industry bar is on the floor. Clearing it tells you almost nothing about whether your site is turning visitors into booked jobs. Which is the only scoreboard that pays.

Where each trade actually pulls ahead

The averages are close, but the trades aren't identical under the hood. Each one wins something. None of them wins enough.

Start with lead capture, meaning whether a site actually makes it easy to become a customer. Roofing led at 78.1% of the category max. Remodeling hit 71.2%. HVAC trailed at 63.6%. So roofing's edge isn't a fluke of one metric. It's strongest exactly where it counts, on the machinery that turns a curious homeowner into a phone call.

But flip to phone access and the picture inverts. A phone number sitting in the persistent header (visible on every page, no scrolling, no hunting) showed up on 74% of HVAC sites. Roofing managed 64.6%. Remodeling came in dead last at 50%. Half of remodeling sites make you go looking for the phone number. For a trade where a $40,000 kitchen starts with a conversation, that's a strange place to add friction.

Online scheduling tells the same story in reverse. HVAC leads, and it isn't close. 56.7% of HVAC sites let you book online. Roofing sits at 33.8%, remodeling at 33.6%. That tracks with how the trades work. HVAC is emergency-driven; when the furnace dies at 11pm, a homeowner wants to grab a slot, not wait for a callback. Roofing and remodeling are project sales, so they lean on the conversation. Still, two-thirds of them offering no online booking at all is a lot of leads asked to do extra work.

So the trophy for "best contractor websites" doesn't go cleanly to anyone. Roofing wins the overall and owns lead capture. HVAC wins the phone and the booking widget. Remodeling wins... well, remodeling is in the room. It's executional, every bit of it. Pick the category and a different trade is leaving the easy points on the table.

The accessibility problem nobody's exempt from

One number cuts across all three trades and it's ugly everywhere. Critical accessibility violations, the kind that lock out a screen-reader user and light up a lawyer's automated scan, showed up on 60.8% of roofing sites, 59.6% of remodeling sites, and 64.4% of HVAC sites.

Read those again. They're nearly identical. Roughly three in five sites in every trade carry at least one critical accessibility failure. This isn't a trade weakness. It's a contractor-web weakness, full stop. Whatever template these sites got built on, whoever built them, the accessibility markup got skipped at the same rate across the board.

And that's not just a moral problem or a compliance checkbox. The same broken markup that fails a screen reader also confuses Google's crawler and trips up a distracted homeowner on a phone in a driveway. So the accessibility gap and the conversion gap are usually the same gap wearing two name tags. Fix one and you often move both. Most owners never connect those dots, because nobody ever scanned the site to show them.

The D-or-F share is the number that should scare you

Averages hide the bottom of the class. So here's the distribution, which is where the real story lives.

The share of sites earning a D or an F: roofing 49.2%, remodeling 45.9%, HVAC 60.6%. Nearly half of roofing sites are D-or-worse. Almost half of remodeling. And a clear majority (six in ten) of HVAC sites.

And here's the other end of that distribution, the part the trade averages bury. Out of all 380 sites, exactly one earned an A — Crown Industrial Roofing, a Toronto roofer that scored a 90. One out of 380. So the ceiling everybody calls impossible is reachable. Somebody reached it. The other 379 just haven't.

That last number reframes the whole "HVAC has online booking" win. Yes, HVAC leads on scheduling. But it also has the largest pile of genuinely failing sites. A booking widget on a site that botches everything else is a good door on a building with no roof. The feature doesn't save the experience.

So when you ask which trade has the best contractor websites, the more useful question hiding inside it is: what share of each trade is actively bad? And the answer is, a lot of every trade. Even roofing, the winner, has nearly half its sites in the failing column. The top of the field is mediocre and the bottom is a genuine liability.

What this means for your site specifically

Let's bring it home, because aggregate trends only matter if they tell you something about your own front door.

If your competitors' sites average a D, that's not cover. It's the biggest opening you'll get all year. The best contractor websites in any trade aren't competing against a high bar. They're competing against a field where half the players ship a failing site. So the cost of getting yours right isn't "beat the best agency in the country." It's "be the one site in your zip code that loads fast, shows the phone number, takes a booking, and doesn't lock out a screen reader." That's a low bar to clear and almost nobody's clearing it.

Run the math on what that's worth. Say your average job is $9,000 and your site pulls 50 inbound visits a week. If a clearer phone placement and a working booking flow convert just two extra of those a month into actual jobs, a conservative lift given how many sites bury the phone, that's $18,000 a month. Call it north of $200,000 a year, from fixes that are mostly a weekend of work, not a rebuild. The gap between a D site and a B site isn't a budget problem. It's a "nobody ever showed me the leak" problem.

And that's the whole point of scoring 380 sites. Not to crown a trade. To prove that the bar is low, the gaps are consistent, and the contractor who closes them wins, regardless of which trade he's in.

Frequently asked questions

Which trade has the best contractor websites?

Roofing, narrowly. It posted the highest mean Fervor Score at 67.82 and led all six scoring categories. But the win is razor-thin. Remodeling sits at 65.67 and HVAC at 65.32, a 2.5-point spread, and all three trades land in the D tier. So roofing is the best of a struggling field, not a standout.

How close are the three trades really?

Two and a half points separate the top trade from the bottom on a hundred-point scale. That's close enough that a homeowner couldn't feel the difference using the sites. The trade you're in barely predicts your site quality. Execution does.

If roofing leads every category, why only a D?

Because leading the field isn't the same as clearing the bar. Roofing beats the other two trades on every category, but the whole field is weak. Roughly half of roofing sites still earn a D or an F. Being the best of three D-tier trades makes you the top of a low pile, not a genuinely strong site.

Which trade is best at online booking?

HVAC, clearly. 56.7% of HVAC sites offer online scheduling, versus 33.8% for roofing and 33.6% for remodeling. That fits the emergency-service nature of HVAC, where homeowners want to grab a slot immediately. Roofing and remodeling, being project sales, lean on the phone conversation instead.

Do accessibility problems really affect every trade equally?

Close to it. Critical accessibility violations hit 60.8% of roofing sites, 59.6% of remodeling, and 64.4% of HVAC. Roughly three in five sites in every trade fail. It's a contractor-web pattern, not a trade-specific weakness, and the same broken markup usually drags conversion and SEO down with it.

My competitors all have weak sites. Is that good or bad for me?

Good, if you act on it. A field where half the sites earn a D or F means the bar to stand out is low. You don't need the best site in the country. You need the best site in your service area, which usually means a fast-loading page with a visible phone number, working online booking, and clean accessibility. Most of your competitors have none of those.

Methodology

Where these numbers come from

Every figure in this post traces to three Fervor reports: the State of Roofing, the State of Remodeling, and the State of HVAC reports, all part of the Contractor CRO Index. Fervor scored 380 contractor websites in total (130 roofing, 146 remodeling, 104 HVAC) against the same six-category framework, with accessibility measured by axe-core and performance by Lighthouse on every captured page. The mean Fervor Scores (roofing 67.82, remodeling 65.67, HVAC 65.32), category leads, lead-capture percentages, phone and scheduling rates, critical-WCAG shares, and D-or-F distributions are all sample-level aggregates. Each of those 380 sites is also named and scored individually in the Contractor CRO Index. The aggregate reports are the patterns those public teardowns share, not a substitute for them.