Getting a roofing website ready for storm season

For your trade 6 min read

Storm season is the one stretch of the year your roofing site does real work. What is worth doing in the quiet months, before the phone starts.

It is March. The phone rings a normal number of times a day, there is a truck in for a service, and the website has not been opened by anybody in your company since it went live. In eight or ten weeks that same website will take more visitors in four days than it takes in the rest of the year put together.

Everything below is work for now, not for then. On the day the hail comes through you will be on a roof, and nothing on this list can be done from a roof.

Work out what a full week actually looks like

Before you can write an honest sentence about availability, you have to know the number. How many inspections can you do in a day when you are the one doing them. How many crews you can put out. How many tarp calls you can take before the schedule stops meaning anything.

Do that arithmetic in a quiet week and write the answers down somewhere you can find them. Nearly every unhappy storm-season customer is somebody who was told yes by a business that had already run out of days. The number is the thing that lets you say no early, and saying no early is the version people forgive.

Learn to change one line yourself, from a phone

Somewhere near the top of the page there should be a single line that says what you can do right now. In February that line might say you are booking inspections for spring. In June it might say you are tarping within a day and quoting replacements two weeks out.

The wording matters less than being able to change it yourself, from a phone, standing in a driveway, in under two minutes. Find out now whether you can. If you cannot, find out who can and how fast they answer, because the middle of a storm week is a poor time to discover that the only person who can edit your website stopped replying to email in 2024.

Take the photographs you will not have time to take in June

In the season, every photograph you take is of damage, at speed, one-handed. The photographs that are hard to get are the calm ones: your yard, the trucks lined up, the crew standing on the ground with their names, you on a ladder in daylight with nothing on fire.

Take those in a slow week. Twenty minutes with a phone gets you a year's worth. A homeowner deciding between you and a truck with out-of-state plates is looking for evidence that you exist here in ordinary weather, and ordinary weather is the only time that evidence can be photographed. The habit of photographing the work itself is a separate discipline worth building.

Decide how far you will drive, before somebody asks

Hail does not land tidily inside your service area. It lands forty miles up the road, and for two weeks you will be getting calls from towns you have never worked in.

Decide now. Write the towns you cover on the page as text, and decide privately what the outer limit is and what has to be true for you to break it. A crew that drives ninety minutes each way in week one is a crew that cannot get back to a customer in week three. That is not a website problem, but the website is where the boundary gets stated, and stating it saves you the conversation.

Write down the work you turn away

Most roofers do not do everything. Some will not touch tile. Some will not do a two-story with no ladder access. Some do not do gutters, or skylights, or the sort of flat commercial roof that needs a different crew altogether.

Put that on the page in plain words. It reads as odd advice, because it looks like turning off leads. In practice it stops the calls you were going to lose an hour to and then decline. In a normal month that is a minor kindness. In storm season, an hour is a roof.

Check the three things that fail without telling you

A website does not usually break loudly. The contact form stops sending, and there is no error and no bounce, so the inquiries just stop arriving. The certificate expires and a browser puts a warning in front of every visitor. The host has a bad afternoon and the site is simply not there.

None of that is your fault and none of it announces itself. So put two dates in your calendar, one now and one at the start of the season, and on each of those days send yourself a test inquiry from your own phone on mobile data. If it lands, you are done in ninety seconds.

Ask for the reviews now, not in the middle of it

The reviews that will matter in June are the ones from the jobs you finished in April. Asking in the middle of a storm week does not work: you have no time, and the customer knows every roofer in town is asking.

So ask in the quiet months, when the job is fresh and the conversation is calm. The asking itself is a small habit rather than a campaign, and a run of steady reviews from ordinary months reads better to a nervous homeowner than a burst of six that all arrived the same week.

A short checklist

• The number of inspections and crews you can genuinely run in a week, written down
• One editable line at the top of the page, and proof you can change it from a phone
• Calm photographs of the yard, the trucks and the crew, taken in a slow week
• The towns you cover, written as text, and a private limit you have decided in advance
• The jobs you do not take, stated plainly
• A test inquiry sent from your own phone today, and a date in the calendar to do it again
• A habit of asking for reviews on the jobs you are finishing right now

Questions people ask

When should I do this work

Any month where the phone is slow enough that you noticed. It is roughly half a day of decisions and twenty minutes of photographs, and the whole point is that none of it can be done later.

What should the page say during an actual storm week

That is a different job with a different set of answers, and it is covered properly in the piece on what a roofing site needs after a hailstorm.

Should I build a separate storm page and hide it until I need it

A page nobody has visited is a page nobody has tested. One page you keep current beats a hidden one that has been sitting unread since the year you made it.

Is it worth advertising before a storm

That is your call and it costs money either way. What is worth doing first is making sure the page an advert would send people to actually works, because paying to send visitors to a broken form is the expensive version of this mistake.

My site was built by somebody who has gone quiet

Then the first job is finding out what you can still get into and change, which is a common enough situation to have its own piece. Do that in March rather than in June.

Do I need someone looking after the site through the season

Only if you would rather not be the one checking. The checks above take minutes and you can do them yourself for nothing. If you would rather they were somebody else's job, Website Care is $149 a month, and it is a fair question whether you need it in a quiet year.