If a project manager at a general contractor opened your homepage tomorrow, how long would it take them to work out that you do commercial work? Underneath that sits a question most companies never ask: who your website is written for, and whether that's still the customer you actually have.
Plenty of established companies started somewhere smaller. Houses, light residential, one-off jobs for people in town. Then the work got bigger and the customers changed, and at some point most of the revenue started coming from contractors, facility managers, plant engineers and building owners. That shift took years, and it's often the thing the company is proudest of.
The website usually didn't come along. Not because anybody decided it shouldn't. Hardly anyone sits down and chooses to keep describing the old business. The pages just kept working well enough that no one had a reason to open them, and the words that were right in 2012 are still there.
The words that stayed behind
The pattern tends to be easy to see from outside and hard to see from inside. It shows up in small things that all point the same way.
The homepage leads with how long the company has been serving the town, and never says what it builds or installs. Service pages are written per job rather than per contract. The gallery is finished spaces with no scope, no size and no client. The testimonials are first name and last initial. The contact form asks for a street address, because the version of this company that built the form went to people's houses. The service area is a list of neighborhoods rather than a region, a set of counties, or the kinds of facilities the company works in.
None of those is wrong, exactly. Together they answer a question hardly anyone is asking anymore.
And this isn't the usual vagueness problem. We've written separately about the homepage that doesn't say what you do, and this is a different fault. A company that has genuinely changed customers isn't being vague at all. It's being specific about the wrong person, which is harder to spot, and it costs you a different way.
What commercial buyers look for instead
Someone qualifying you for commercial work is answering a narrow set of questions, and almost all of them are about size and risk rather than craft. Each one has a version that can live on a page, and in our experience most sites carry few of them.
Can you carry a job this size? Not whether you're good. Whether a project at this scale is routine for you. What carries it: a stated range of project sizes you work in, and per-project contract values where your contract allows it. Public work is already on the record; private contracts often carry a confidentiality clause covering the value.
Are you insurable at their limits? Commercial and industrial owners usually set specific coverage amounts and want to be named as an additional insured, and the line that decides whether you clear a large requirement is normally umbrella or excess liability. What carries it: your actual coverage lines and limits, stated. The certificate itself is a separate artifact, issued to whoever asked for it and expiring with the policy, so the page carries the numbers and the paperwork follows on request.
Are you bondable? Public work and a lot of larger private work needs a bond. What carries it: the surety you're bonded through, and your single-project and aggregate capacity. Capacity moves with your working capital and backlog, so pair it with the year, and expect to send a current letter from your surety when someone asks. A page that says nothing about bonding tends to invite a reviewer to assume there's a reason.
Do you hold the right license classification, in the states that have them? What carries it: the license number and class, not a badge graphic.
What's your safety record? On larger industrial and plant work that means your experience modification rate, and usually your OSHA 300A numbers alongside it. What carries it: the EMR figure with the years it covers, and your recordable rate, on a page someone can find. Your EMR is recalculated each year by NCCI or your state's rating bureau; the recordable rate comes off your own OSHA 300 log annually. Date them both. A figure from two renewals ago raises the question of why it stopped.
Who else has hired you? Named general contractors, named owners, named facilities. Most commercial buyers weigh one reference from their own world above a count of jobs.
Here's the honest limit on all of it. For large general contractors, almost none of this paperwork is exchanged through your website. It goes through their prequalification system, and they'll ask directly. For plant and refinery work it's stricter again: access is usually gated by a third-party contractor network like ISNetworld, Avetta or Veriforce, where the operator sets the threshold and your website has no bearing on it.
So the website isn't where you get approved, and it's worth being clear about that. What it usually is, is what someone checks once your name reaches them, whether that came from a referral, a rep, or a search. Not always: a GC working from an existing bidder list may send the prequal packet without opening your site at all. But where that look does happen, it comes before any of the paperwork, and unlike the paperwork it's the part you can change this quarter.
What the buyer concludes, which isn't what you'd expect
The failure mode here isn't that the buyer thinks the writing is bad. Hardly any buyer is grading prose.
What happens is quieter. Most people reading a page built for a different kind of customer will take it at face value and conclude the company is built for a different kind of customer. Not dishonest, not incapable. Just not set up for this. The site said residential, so they read residential, and a project manager with four companies to call and a deadline has no reason to test that assumption.
That's the part worth sitting with, because it means the cost isn't a lost opportunity you can point at. It's a call that didn't happen, from someone whose name you'll never know. We've made a version of that point about sites describing a business that no longer exists; the difference here is that the business is current, and it's the customer who moved.
And it tends to be worst at exactly the wrong moment. A company that has moved upmarket usually has more to prove and better proof to show than it did ten years ago. The site is usually still making the older, smaller case.
One question worth asking someone else
The structured version of this exercise already exists, and we wrote it up in how to read your own website like an outsider, including why the context in your head makes it so hard to do unaided.
There's one move that's specific to this problem, though, and it takes a minute. Send your homepage link to somebody you know who works on the commercial side, someone who has never worked with you, and ask them a single question: what size job would you guess this company takes?
Their guess is a fair read of what your website is currently selling. If it comes back smaller than your average project, you've found the gap, and you found it without a meeting.
Changing it is mostly subtraction
The instinct is to add a commercial page. That rarely fixes it, because the rest of the site keeps voting the other way and a visitor is unlikely to land only on the page you built for them.
What works better is changing what the site leads with. The first line says what you build or install and for whom. The project examples carry scope, size and a client name where you're allowed to use one. The qualification facts a buyer scans for sit on the page instead of waiting to be requested. The form asks for the project, not the house. Underneath the wording sits a decision most companies have never actually made: which customer the site is for.
Most of that is already true about the company. It's just not on the website yet. For what this looks like across industrial and commercial work specifically, our industrial website design and construction website design pages go further into the structure.
