Do Contractors Need a Website If They Have a Google Business Profile?

In March 2024, Google switched off every free website that businesses had built through their Business Profiles. Visitors got bounced to the profile until June 10, 2024, and after that, Google’s notice said they’d get a “page not found” error. Plenty of small contractors had used one of those business.site addresses as their only website.

A free website from Google turned out to be Google’s website.

It’s a good way into the question contractors ask before spending a dollar on a site, which is whether you need a website if you have a Google Business Profile. I build websites for a living, so weigh my answer with that in mind. Google doesn’t require one, and some contractors are fine without one. Most of the rest are trusting their whole phone line to a listing they don’t control.

This assumes your profile is already finished. If it isn’t, setting up a Google Business Profile for contractors comes first, because nothing below matters until that’s done.

Do You Need a Website If You Have a Google Business Profile?

Not by Google’s rules. Its own guidelines for representing your business ask you to provide a phone number that connects to your business, or a website that represents it. Or. A verified profile with a real local number and no website is inside the rules, and it can show up in the map pack.

Google ranks that map pack on three things, according to its help page on local ranking. Relevance, meaning how well your profile matches the search. Distance from the person searching. And prominence, which is how well known you are. A website isn’t listed as a requirement anywhere on that page, though it does show up inside the third factor, which I’ll get to.

Two kinds of contractor can skip it for now.

The first is booked solid on referrals and repeat customers and isn’t trying to grow. If your schedule is full three weeks out and every new job comes from somebody’s brother-in-law, a website fixes a problem you don’t have. Keep the profile accurate so people who hear your name can find your number, and keep collecting reviews. Spend your evenings on something else.

The second is brand new. No reviews yet and a truck payment due. A verified profile and your first handful of reviews will do more for you in month one than any website, and they cost nothing. Build the site once the work is coming in.

Everyone else, I’d want on a website. Here’s why.

What a Google Business Profile Can’t Hold

Google gives you a business description on the profile, and the limit is 750 characters, with no links allowed. That’s roughly 120 words. It’s all the room you get to explain what you do and why a homeowner should call you over the next pin on the map.

Google’s sample description on that same page is for an ice cream shop, which tells you who the field was built for. A homeowner deciding who replaces their sewer line wants to know whether you do trenchless work, whether you pull the permit, how long the yard stays torn up, and whether you’ve done this on a street like theirs. They’ll read three pages to find out. The profile has none of those pages.

Search itself is the bigger gap. Google runs two rankings on one results page. The map pack at the top runs mostly on your profile and leans hard on distance. Below it, the regular results run on websites. A homeowner in Downers Grove searching “tankless water heater installation” might see three map pins from shops closer than yours, then a list of pages that answer the question. With no website, you’re only entered in the first contest.

I went through how the two rankings differ in how to rank on Google as a contractor. The short version is that organic results aren’t locked to your pin the way the map is. A good page about your work in the next town over can rank there even when your shop is too far out to make the map.

Your Profile Belongs to Google

The business.site shutdown is the dramatic example. Day to day, the risk is a suspension. Google’s help page on suspended profiles puts it in one line: “We may suspend or disable Business Profiles that don’t follow our guidelines.” After that, you file an appeal.

Honest contractors get caught in this too. It can start with a business name that picked up a town and a keyword years ago, or an address edit that sends you back through verification. Sometimes a competitor reports you. While it gets sorted out, the profile you spent years filling with reviews and photos isn’t yours to fix.

A website has no switch like that. You own the domain and you write every page on it. If your profile goes dark for three weeks, people who search your company name still have somewhere to land.

It’s the same reason I’d treat paid leads as a bridge, which is most of the argument in whether Angi leads are worth it. Anything that lives on someone else’s platform can be changed by someone else, usually without asking you first.

A Broken Website Is Worse Than No Website

This is where my own numbers argue against selling you a site.

When I tested 103 Chicagoland contractor websites this summer, nine of them didn’t load at all. Five had domains that no longer resolved, which usually means somebody missed a renewal. Those businesses were still listed with the dead address, so anyone who clicked through hit a browser error and moved on to the next name.

Of the sites that did load, 22% had no tappable phone number and no contact form. More than one in five contractor websites gave a homeowner on a phone no quick way to reach the business. One lawn care company’s website turned out to be a Facebook page.

Put that next to a profile with no website at all. The profile has a Call button right on it. Someone searching from their kitchen taps it and your phone rings. Now add a Website button that leads to an error page, or to a homepage where the number is plain text that does nothing when touched. You’ve taken a person who was ready to call and sent them somewhere they can’t.

If the choice is a profile alone or a profile pointing at a broken site, I’d take the profile alone every time. That’s the one situation where I’d tell a contractor to pull the website link off the profile until the site is fixed.

Check yours tonight. Open your own Business Profile on your phone with wifi off, tap Website, and see where it goes. Then tap the phone number on whatever page loads. If either step fails, you’ve got your answer for this month.

How a Website Helps Your Profile Rank

Back to that local ranking page. Google says prominence is “based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.” Reviews live on the profile. Links almost always point at a website.

For a contractor, those links come from places like a manufacturer’s list of certified installers, a local paper’s write-up of the basement you rebuilt after a flood, the chamber of commerce directory, or the youth baseball team you sponsor. Every one of them wants a web address. Without a site there’s nothing for them to point at, and that piece of prominence goes to the contractor down the road who has one.

The site also gives Google a second source to check your profile against. When the business name and phone number match on both, Google has an easier time trusting either one.

A website won’t lift you over a closer competitor with twice your reviews. Distance and reviews carry the map pack. The site works at the margin, and in a crowded market like plumbing in Naperville, the margin decides who’s third and who’s fourth, and only three get shown.

The Smallest Website That Earns Its Keep

If you’re going to have one, keep it small and make it work on a phone.

In the 103-site test I set a deliberately low bar. Loads at all, runs on HTTPS, has a mobile viewport tag, has a tappable phone number and a contact form, answers in under 0.8 seconds, weighs under 2 MB. Only 31 of the 103 cleared it. It’s the floor, and most contractor sites in Chicagoland are under it.

Past that, the pages that matter fit on an index card. Start with a homepage that has your phone number at the top of every screen. Add a page for each service you want more of, written in the words customers use. Name the towns you serve, with a sentence or two about the work you do there so it doesn’t read like a list. Use photos from real jobs, and put the same name and number on the site that’s on your profile, character for character.

That covers most of what makes a good contractor website, and none of it needs a custom build. If you’re weighing the money, what a contractor website costs breaks down the ways to pay for one.

Order matters too. Starting from zero, I’d finish the profile this week, start asking every customer for a review next week, put the site up this quarter, and check it on your own phone every month after that. A finished profile pointing at a fast, simple site that answers the phone is the setup I’d want for any contractor who wants more work than referrals bring in.

That pairing is the whole job we do for home service businesses. Fast sites built around the services and towns you want, with the Business Profile set up to match. It runs on flat monthly plans with hosting and updates included, so the site doesn’t quietly break while you’re out on jobs, and we’re easy to reach.