My concrete company's website is code written for that company. It was not dragged together in a page builder and it is not a theme bought off a shelf. The company opened in February 2026. The first pour came 16 days after the first lead, and through September 30 it has taken in 264 leads and signed $425,962 in work.
The website did not do that alone. The ads bring the visitors and the follow-up turns quotes into jobs. This post is about the part in the middle: what is in the code, what a page builder would have put there instead, and how to test any website, including the one you have now, in about two minutes.
I first wrote this in January 2026, the week the site went live. I updated it in October 2026 with what has happened since.
What a page builder does to a website
A page builder is a program that writes the code for you while you drag boxes around. To let you drag anything anywhere, it has to carry code for every possibility: sliders, animations, pop-ups, galleries, forms, and dozens of scripts and stylesheets that load on every page whether the page uses them or not. A homeowner's phone has to download all of it before your headline appears.
In 2025 I replaced a site like that for another concrete contractor. On a phone it took about 20 seconds to load, and he had been paying for ads that sent people to it. The coded replacement loaded in under 3. That season is written up here.
The second cost shows up later. Every plugin a builder site leans on is something to update, and when one breaks, the form stops sending and nobody notices until a customer says they never heard back. That same contractor had paid an agency $5,000 a month while his form sent nothing.
What is in the code of my own site
The site runs on WordPress, because the people who keep a site going know WordPress and it is where the blog and the logins live. Everything on top of it was coded for this company. Here is what that means, page by page.
Each page is its own file
The driveway page is a file about driveways: its words, its photos, its form. Nothing from the patio page loads with it. The styles are one small file, and the styles for the first screen are written into the page itself, so the first screen draws before anything else has arrived.
Almost no JavaScript, and no jQuery
Most WordPress sites load jQuery on every page whether they use it or not. Mine does not load it at all. What runs is a few small files: the menu, the form, and the tracking described below.
No font to download, and photos sized to the screen
The site uses the fonts already on your phone, so nothing is fetched from Google's servers before the first word appears. The photos are in a modern compressed format, and each one is offered in several sizes so a phone takes the small one. Four photos of our work are most of what the homepage weighs.
A form that is code, not a plugin
The form on every page posts to the site itself. It carries a hidden field that only a bot would fill in and a check on how fast it was sent, so most spam never reaches me. When a visitor arrives from an ad, the site keeps the click that brought them and sends it along with the lead, so I know which ad and which search produced which job. The lead lands in my CRM, which answers it in seconds and starts the follow-up.
A page for each kind of work, each town and each ad
Driveways, patios, stamped concrete and sidewalks each have a page. Each town we work in has one, and the second city we opened in has its own section. The ad for stamped patios goes to a page with nothing on it but stamped patios, the photos and the form, not to the homepage.
The form at the top, with the minimum under it
On every page the form sits where a thumb lands: name, phone, email, a line about the project. Under it, in plain sight, is the smallest job we take. Someone with a small repair reads that and does not fill it in, which is the point. Next to the form: bonded and insured, and a phone number that dials when tapped.
The details Google reads
The business's name, address, phone and hours are marked up the way search engines expect, and the common questions are written out with their answers in a form Google can read. None of it is a trick. It is a page a machine can read as easily as a person.
What the test says
I ran Google's Lighthouse test on my own homepage on a phone on October 6, 2026, while updating this post. The first text was on screen in 1.7 seconds. Nothing moved or jumped while the page loaded. The score was 80 out of 100, and the report named the reason: the four photos of our work were going out at their full size, over a megabyte for a phone that needed about a third of that. The fix was a few lines of code. Each photo now comes in several sizes and the phone picks the one it needs. That is the kind of thing this post is about: in code you can see exactly what is slow and change only that.
I give you the real number rather than a round one because I publish the numbers I have. A coded site is something you can measure and correct one line at a time. A page builder site scores what the builder lets it score.
What a website does not do
A website does not bring visitors. The ads and Google do that. What the website does is turn a visitor into a form or a call, and a slow or confusing one turns them into nothing. If anyone tells you a new website will make the phone ring by itself, ask them where the visitors will come from.
It also does not answer the phone. At my company, 18 of the 28 jobs that have paid a deposit started as a phone call, not a form. A fast page that gets a homeowner to call is half the job. Someone has to pick up, and when nobody can, a text has to go back within the minute. That is follow-up, not web design, and it is the other half of why the numbers at the top of this post are what they are.
How to test any website in two minutes
You do not need to take my word for any of this. Test your own site, or the work of anyone who wants to build you one. Mine is at creststoneconcrete.com if you want to start there.
Run it through PageSpeed Insights
Go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste the address. Look at the phone result, not the desktop one. Under 50 is losing you customers. A coded page should be above 80, and can be above 90.
Open it on your own phone, on cellular
Not on the office wifi. Count the seconds until you can read the headline and see a way to call.
Send yourself a test form
Fill it in as a customer would. If it does not arrive, nothing else on the site matters.
Search the way a homeowner would
Type your trade and your town into Google. If the page that comes up is your homepage, or someone else's site, you can see the work to be done.
What it costs, and what you own
I charge $5,000 for a website on its own. Inside the 10-Bid Launch it is included, and it is yours to keep whether you stay with me or not. That is written into the offer, because a contractor who has been burned once should not have to rent his own website.
Owning it means something different with code. A site on Wix or Squarespace lives inside their product; stop paying and it is gone. A coded site is a set of files. They can move to any host, and the next person who works on them can read them.
A template is the right choice for some things: a personal page, a side business, a company testing whether a market exists before it spends real money. If your website is how homeowners find you and decide to call, it is the wrong place to save.