The seven things a solar company website has to do
What a homeowner spending five figures needs to see, the pages that close, speed and tap-to-call, financing and warranty content, and what to cut.
- 1. Prove you are local and still here
- 2. Answer the money question without a phone call
- 3. Load fast and call in one tap
- 4. Have a real page for every service and every place
- 5. Show proof that cannot be faked
- 6. Take the lead in the way the buyer wants to give it
- 7. Say plainly how you sell
- What to cut
- Frequently asked
13.1% of solar companies list no website on their Google profile. Among those that do, most have a site built to look like a national brand: a stock aerial photo, a rotating hero, three icons, a contact form. It answers none of the questions a homeowner has before spending five figures.
The gap in the data is stark. Solar companies with a website carry a median of 24 reviews. Those without carry 2. That is not causation, but it does tell you which half of the industry treats the business as a business.
Here is what the site has to do. Seven things, in order of how much they matter.
1. Prove you are local and still here
The first question a homeowner has, after a decade of headlines about solar companies failing, is whether you will exist when the inverter fails.
Put on the home page, above the fold or immediately below: the city and county you are based in, the year you started, the number of systems you have installed, and whether the crews are employees or subcontractors. Add a photo of the actual building or the actual truck. Add your license number in the footer where a homeowner can copy it into the state license lookup.
"Family owned in Chandler since 2014. 1,180 systems installed. All work performed by our own W-2 crews." That paragraph does more than a redesign.
2. Answer the money question without a phone call
Homeowners will not call until they have a rough range. If your site refuses to discuss cost, they leave and get the range from a competitor or from an assistant.
You do not have to publish a fixed price. Publish the structure:
- A typical range per watt installed in your market, stated as a range with the caveats.
- What a typical system size looks like for a home with a given monthly bill.
- The four ways to pay: cash, loan, lease, PPA, with an honest sentence on the drawback of each.
- Whether you have a minimum system size or a minimum bill you can help.
Then a financing page that names the lenders you work with, the rough term lengths available, and what a homeowner needs to have ready. A large share of solar shopping is really financing shopping, and the installer who explains it plainly gets the call.
3. Load fast and call in one tap
Over 70% of your traffic is a phone. Targets: under two seconds to first paint on a 4G connection, under 400KB of images on the home page.
The usual solar site sins: a full-screen background video of drone footage, a slider with five uncompressed hero images, three chat widgets, and a font loading from four sources. Cut all of it.
The phone number goes in the header as a tap-to-call link, in the footer, and at the end of every page. Not an image of a number. Not a number that only opens a modal. A tel link. Test it on your own phone before you believe it works.
4. Have a real page for every service and every place
One page per thing you sell:
- Residential solar installation
- Battery storage and backup power
- Solar plus storage system design
- Solar panel repair, service and monitoring
- Panel removal and reinstall for roof replacement
- EV charger installation
- Commercial solar, if you do it
And one page per county or significant city you install in. A city page is not a copy of the home page with the name swapped. It needs local content: two or three installs in that city with photos, the permitting authority and current typical timeline there, the utility serving it, and two reviews from customers in that town.
The storage page deserves its own attention. Storage search demand keeps climbing and the buyer is different from the panel buyer: they are usually reacting to an outage or a change in how their utility credits exports. Write that page for someone who wants to know what stays on during a blackout, not for someone doing a payback calculation.
5. Show proof that cannot be faked
Three kinds, and you need all three:
Installs with addresses in the neighborhood. Ten to twenty projects with a photo, the town, the system size, the panel and inverter brands, and one line about what the homeowner wanted solved. This is your single strongest page and almost no solar site has it.
Reviews with detail, on the page. Pull five that mention system size and bill change. Show the town under each. Link out to your Google profile so they can verify the rest. Across 32,440 listings the average rating is 4.6 stars and 77.5% are at 4.5 or above, so a star image proves nothing on its own. The words prove something.
Your warranty and service policy, in full. Workmanship term, roof penetration leak coverage, what happens if a panel underperforms, response time for a service call, monitoring, and what transfers when the house sells. Write it out. This page gets read start to finish by serious buyers and it gets quoted by AI answer engines, as covered in the AI search guide.
6. Take the lead in the way the buyer wants to give it
Give three paths, because different buyers use different ones on a purchase this size:
- Call, tap-to-call, most valuable.
- A short form: name, address, phone, average monthly bill. Four fields. Do not ask for roof age or panel preference on the first contact.
- A bill upload, which is the highest-intent action available. A homeowner who uploads twelve months of usage is close to buying.
Add a scheduler for a consultation, and make sure whatever comes in triggers a text to the customer within seconds and a task for a human within five minutes. See the missed calls guide.
7. Say plainly how you sell
This is the page nobody builds and it is worth more in this trade than anywhere else.
Write a short "how we sell" page. Do you knock doors. Do you use commissioned setters. Do you subcontract installs. How long from signature to permission to operate in your county right now. What the site assessment involves. Whether the price changes after the assessment and under what conditions.
Every homeowner in your market has been through a high-pressure solar pitch or knows someone who has. Stating in writing that you do not knock doors, do not use one-day pricing, and will send a written proposal they can take to another company is the most powerful differentiator available to a local installer today, and it costs nothing but the nerve to publish it.
What to cut
- The rotating hero slider. Nobody sees slide two.
- Stock photos of white couples touching solar panels.
- The savings calculator widget that demands an email before showing anything.
- The countdown timer on an incentive. Homeowners recognize it and it puts you in the same bucket as the knockers.
- Any page written to hit a keyword rather than answer a question.
Frequently asked
How much should a site like this cost? $3,000 to $9,000 built properly for a local installer, or a few weeks of your own time on a decent template. Anything under $1,000 will be a template with your logo dropped in.
Should I use a solar-specific website vendor? Only if you keep ownership of the domain and the content. Many of the industry vendors keep both, and leaving costs you the site.
How many pages do I need to start? Nine. Home, residential solar, storage, service and repair, financing, warranty and service policy, projects, about with the local proof, and contact. Add city pages after.
Websites are one of the services in the free 14-day trial, built in about a week and yours to keep. Text or call (385) 832-6175. See where you sit in the benchmark report first.