Every "free contractor website template" you can find is one of two things: a theme you still have to buy hosting for and fill with words you have not written, or a gated form that produces a phone call from a sales team. Neither is dishonest about the design — the designs are fine. They are dishonest about where the work actually is. A plumbing contractor who sits down to launch a site does not get stuck on the layout. They get stuck on the 6 pages of copy nobody has written, and they get stuck again three months later when they find out the contact form on that site came with legal obligations attached. This builder is the plan for both, and it says plainly that it is not shipping you a website.
Start with what the pages have to do. Home, services, service areas, about, reviews, contact. Six pages, and each has a job that is not the job of the other five. The home page has five seconds to make one promise — for you, one plain sentence about plumbing that holds, not a gallery of fixtures — back it with something checkable, and say what happens after someone calls. The services page answers "do they do the thing I need", in the words a customer would use rather than the words on your invoice, and it should say what you do not do. The service-areas page names the places you actually drive to, with response times and where the travel charge starts; the fastest way to earn calls you have to turn down is a page claiming a whole state. The about page is read immediately before someone rings, to decide whether you are a person or a call centre. The reviews page is regulated. The contact page is the one with the form on it, which is exactly why it is also the page that creates a legal duty.
That duty is California's Online Privacy Protection Act, Business and Professions Code sections 22575 through 22579, and it is the single most under-known obligation in this trade. It requires an operator of a commercial website that collects personally identifiable information through the internet about individual consumers residing in California to conspicuously post a privacy policy. Section 22577 defines that information to include a first and last name, a physical address, an email address, a telephone number, and any other identifier that permits contacting a specific individual — in other words, the fields on your contact form. There is no revenue threshold, no employee count, and no exemption for a one-truck operation. Section 22575 also enumerates what the policy has to say: the categories of information collected and who it is shared with, how a visitor can review and change it, how you announce changes to the policy, the policy's effective date, how the site responds to Do Not Track signals, and whether third parties track visitors across other sites. The builder walks all 6 and tells you which you have not covered. The posting duty carries a 30-day cure: you are in violation of it only if the policy is not up within 30 days of being notified of noncompliance.
The law everyone will quote at you instead is the CCPA, and for almost every contractor it is the wrong one. The CCPA reaches a business only if it satisfies at least one of three thresholds under Civil Code section 1798.140(d)(1): annual gross revenues above the inflation-adjusted figure — $26,625,000 from 1 January 2025, against the $25,000,000 written into the statute — or buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more consumers or households a year, or earning 50 percent or more of annual revenue from selling or sharing that data. A plumbing contractor with fifteen trucks meets none of them. This builder asks about all three and then says which law applies to you, because conflating the two is how a contractor ends up paying for a consumer-rights portal they never needed while still having no privacy policy at all.
Accessibility is where the marketing gets loosest, so here is the accurate version. ADA Title III covers your business as a place of public accommodation. In 2024 the Department of Justice issued a final rule adopting WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a binding technical standard — for Title II state and local government entities. Not for you. DOJ's own web accessibility guidance says the Department "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards" and points to WCAG as helpful existing guidance rather than a requirement. Anyone telling a contractor that the 2024 rule makes WCAG 2.1 AA legally mandatory for their business is wrong. WCAG 2.1 AA is still the benchmark worth meeting, because it is the standard DOJ references and the one plaintiffs plead in Title III website litigation. So this builder grades 4 checks you can genuinely do yourself — alt text on meaningful images, 4.5:1 contrast on body text, a contact form you can complete with the keyboard alone, captions on any video — as advice, with the criterion named, and never as a rule you are breaking.
Two more things the finished site has to carry. First, your licence number, in the states whose advertising statutes reach it. California requires it in all forms of advertising; Florida requires it in each offer of services, proposal, bid, contract or advertisement regardless of medium — wording that plainly includes a website. Texas requires an electrical contracting company's soliciting advertising to carry both the company name and the licence number, and because that rule sits in the electricians chapter this builder narrows it to electrical contractors rather than asserting it against an HVAC or plumbing business. Those three are graded with the statute cited. Every other state prints "not evaluated — check your state board", because no authority publishes a fifty-state table and guessing one would put a wrong verdict on someone's real advertising. Second, the reviews page. The FTC endorsement guides at 16 CFR 255 require an endorsement to reflect the endorser's honest experience and any material connection to be disclosed. The FTC's 2024 rule at 16 CFR Part 465 goes further and carries civil penalty exposure: fabricated or materially false reviews, compensation conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, undisclosed reviews from owners, managers, employees or their relatives, and representing that the displayed reviews are all or most of those submitted while quietly filtering by rating.
The last check is the one that looks trivial and is not. One canonical name, address and phone block, used on all 6 pages, byte for byte. Contractors break this constantly and invisibly: a call-tracking number on the home page for an ad campaign that ended two years ago, the old suite number still on contact, a Google listing that says Street where the site says St. The builder holds one canonical block and lets you record what any individual page actually shows, then compares the two — phone numbers by digits, so (512) 555-0134 and 512-555-0134 match and +1 forms match too, and addresses by their letters and numbers, so punctuation and spacing do not raise a false alarm. It is a local-search and customer-trust convention rather than a legal requirement, and the builder says so on the finding. A plumbing site gets found at eleven at night by someone standing in water. The home page has five seconds and one job: say you answer, say where you go, and put the number somewhere a wet thumb can hit it. Everything else — the services page, the areas page, the reviews — is read the next morning by the same person deciding whether to keep you.