The garage door company website: seven things it must do, speed, tap-to-call, service pages and pricing
A door company's website is where the lead checks you after the ad or the map pack. The seven jobs it has to do, how fast it must load, which pages it needs, and whether to show prices.
The garage door website is almost never where the lead starts. It is where the lead checks you. She saw your name in the map pack or on an ad, tapped through, and gave you about four seconds to confirm you are real, local, and able to come today. If the page is still loading at four seconds, she is on the next company's site.
Across 14,382 garage door listings, 18.5% have no website at all, and that group has a median of 8 reviews versus 36 for companies with one. The site does not cause the reviews. Both come from an owner who runs the business on purpose. If you are in the no-site group, a plain, fast site is the first thing to build. If you have a site from 2017 with a slideshow, it is time.
The seven jobs
1. Load in under three seconds on a phone. Test it on your own phone, on cellular, not on the shop wifi. Most slow door-company sites are slow because of a full-size photo slideshow at the top. Replace it with one compressed photo of a door you installed. Then run Google's PageSpeed Insights and fix whatever it lists first.
2. Tap-to-call at the top of every page. The phone number is a button, visible without scrolling, on every page, in a color that stands out. On a phone the number dials when tapped. It sounds obvious; look at ten competitor sites and count how many make you hunt for the number.
3. Say what you do and where, in the first screen. "Garage door repair and installation in [county]. Same-day spring and opener repair. Price quoted before we start." Not "Welcome to our website." The towns go in the first paragraph and in the footer.
4. A page for each service. Spring replacement, opener installation, opener repair, cable and roller repair, off-track doors, new door installation, commercial doors. Each page states the problem, what you do, a price range, how fast, and the towns. These pages are what Google and the AI assistants match searches to. One "Services" page with a bullet list does not rank for anything.
5. Real photos. Your trucks, your techs, doors you installed on houses in your towns. One stock photo of a smiling model in a hard hat makes the whole site look like a lead-generation front, which is exactly what the $29 service-call companies use. Homeowners have learned to spot it.
6. Reviews on the page, pulled from Google. Show your rating, your count, and three recent reviews that mention a job. Link to your Google profile. This is the proof the visitor came for.
7. A form that asks two things and texts you. Name and phone, plus "What is the door doing?" The form sends a text to you and an auto-reply to the customer within a minute. A form that emails the office inbox gets checked at 5 p.m., and by then the job is booked with someone else.
Prices on the site: yes, as ranges
Owners argue about this one. The case for showing ranges wins in this trade specifically, because of the bait-and-switch reputation the $29 outfits have given it. A homeowner who sees "Torsion spring replacement: $180 to $450 depending on door size and spring cycle rating, quoted before we start" trusts you more than one who sees nothing, and she is less likely to call the company advertising $29 and then charging $900.
Ranges, never a single number. "Opener installation from $400 installed" and "New steel doors from $1,200" are enough. The pricing guide covers how to present the three tiers once she calls.
Pages you need and pages you do not
Need: home, one page per service, a new-doors gallery, about (with a real name and photo), contact, and a page per main town if you serve more than three. Each town page is written for that town, not a copy with the name swapped.
Do not need: a blog you will never update, a "financing" page that is one paragraph (put the financing line on the new-doors page), a careers page unless you are hiring, and a "testimonials" page that duplicates the reviews block.
Speed, specifically
Three things make a door-company site slow and all three are fixable in a day:
- Photos uploaded at full size from the phone. Resize to 1600 pixels wide, compress, and the page drops from 9 MB to under 1 MB.
- A chat widget, a review widget, a tracking pixel and three fonts all loading before the content. Keep call tracking and one analytics tag. Drop the rest.
- Cheap shared hosting. Moving to a static host or a modern platform usually cuts load time in half with no other changes.
Tracking what the site does
Put a call-tracking number on the site (it forwards to your real line and records). Count calls that last 45 seconds or more. Count form submissions. Check both weekly against ad spend and profile views. If the site gets 400 visits and 6 calls, the site is the problem. If it gets 400 visits and 40 calls and 20 of them went to voicemail, the phone is the problem, and the calculator will tell you what that costs.
Frequently asked
Can I use a page builder or do I need a developer? A builder is fine if the result loads fast and has the seven things above. Most do not out of the box because of the template slideshows. Strip the template down.
Should the site have a chat widget? Only if someone answers it inside a minute during business hours. An unanswered chat is worse than none. For most door companies, tap-to-call and a text-back form do the job.
How much should a garage door company website cost? A plain, fast, eight to fifteen page site built properly runs $1,500 to $5,000 as a one-time project, or $100 to $300 a month on a managed plan. Anything above $10,000 for a company this size is paying for things the homeowner will never see.
Website design and rebuilds are one of the services on the free 14-day trial: a fast tap-to-call site with a page per service, live on your domain within the two weeks. No card, text or call (385) 534-3558.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, garage door companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor