Website basics
What a painter’s website needs to win more jobs
Key takeaways
- The first screen should show a finished job, say where you work and offer a quote button.
- Before and after photos, grouped by job type and captioned by area, do more selling than any paragraph.
- A quote form that asks painting questions saves you a phone call on every enquiry.
- Separate service and area pages help the right customers find the right job.
- Trust comes from specifics you can back up: real reviews, a clear process and your business details.
A painter's website has one job: turn someone who has heard your name, or found you on Google, into a quote request. To do that it needs four things above everything else. Photos of finished work, a clear list of the areas you cover, a quote form that asks the right questions, and enough detail about how you work that a stranger trusts you with their house.
This checklist goes page by page through what a painting business in New Zealand should have on its site, why each part matters, and the mistakes that quietly cost jobs. If you'd rather have it built for you, the painter website plan covers all of it.
Why the website matters more than it used to
Painting is a crowded trade. Stats NZ counted 5,769 1 painting and decorating enterprises in February 2025. The count grew every year from 2019 to 2024, then dipped slightly.
Show the data as a table
| Year | Enterprises, February each year |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 4,965 |
| 2020 | 5,085 |
| 2021 | 5,202 |
| 2022 | 5,556 |
| 2023 | 5,802 |
| 2024 | 5,913 |
| 2025 | 5,769 |
What that means in practice: a homeowner who wants their weatherboards repainted has plenty of painters to choose from, and most will look at two or three before ringing anyone. Word of mouth still starts a lot of jobs, but the person who was recommended to you usually checks you out online first. If your site answers their questions, you get the call. If it's a Facebook page with last year's posts, or a site with a phone number and nothing else, the next painter gets a chance.
The first screen of the home page
Most visitors decide within a few seconds whether to keep reading. The first screen, before anyone scrolls, should answer three questions: what do you paint, where do you work, and how do I ask for a quote.
- A photo of a finished job. A whole house, a finished room or a clean commercial interior. Not a stock photo of a roller, and not a close-up of a brush.
- A headline that names the work and the area. "House painters in Nelson and Tasman" tells a local visitor they are in the right place. "Quality you can trust" tells them nothing.
- One clear button. "Request a quote" or "Book a colour consultation", repeated in the header so it's always in reach on a phone.
Keep the welcome paragraph out. Visitors don't read "Welcome to our website, we are a family owned business offering a wide range of painting services". They look at the photo and scan for their suburb.
Before and after photos
Painting is a trade where the result is visible, so show it. A before and after pair makes your prep work and finish obvious in a way no description can. Group the pairs by job type, such as exteriors, interiors, roofs, fences and decks, so a visitor can go straight to jobs like theirs.
Give each pair a short caption: the type of house, the area and what the job involved. "1920s villa in Nelson South, full exterior repaint, rotten boards replaced before priming" is useful. "Another happy customer" isn't. Take photos from the same spot before and after, in daylight, and include at least one wide shot that shows the whole wall or house.
Always get the owner's permission before showing their home, and leave out house numbers, number plates and faces. Our article on before and after photos and colour consultations covers this in more detail.
A quote form that asks painting questions
A plain contact form produces messages like "how much to paint my house?", which starts a round of phone tag. A form built for painting jobs gets you what you need to price the job or book a visit from the first message.
For a house painter, the useful questions are:
- Interior, exterior or both
- House type and roughly how many rooms or storeys
- Cladding for exteriors: weatherboard, brick, plaster, board and batten
- Suburb or town
- When they'd like the work done
- Photos, if they have them
Keep it short. Every extra required field loses some people, so make photos and extra detail optional. Commercial contractors, decorators and roof painters need different questions; the house painters page and its siblings list them for each kind of business.
Say whether you give quotes or estimates
Customers often use the words interchangeably, but they mean different things. Consumer Protection describes a quote as an offer to do a job for a specified price 2 , while an estimate is a best guess, and the final price should generally be within 10-15% 2 of it. A line under your quote form saying which you provide, and when you visit before pricing, heads off arguments later.
Service pages and area pages
If you offer exterior repaints, interior work, roof painting and wallpaper, give each its own page. People search for the specific job they need, and a page that talks about one job, with photos of that job and answers to its common questions, serves them better than a single "Services" page listing everything.
List the areas you cover plainly, on an areas page and in the footer of every page. Name suburbs and towns, and add a line about what happens if someone is just outside your area. Resist the temptation to create a separate page for every town within 100 km with the same text and a different name. Customers see through it, and Google's spam policies list pages aimed at specific cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse 3 .
Trust details that are true
A stranger is about to let you into their home or onto their roof. Help them trust you with details you can back up:
- Your business name, and the name of the person who runs it
- How a job runs, from quote to clean-up, including how you protect floors, furniture and gardens
- Real reviews, with a link to your Google reviews
- Trade association memberships or qualifications you actually hold
- Your health and safety approach for work at height
Leave out anything you can't prove. "Best painters in town" and invented testimonials do more harm than good, and under the Fair Trading Act claims about your business must not mislead.
Built for phones
Plenty of people look up a painter on their phone, sometimes standing in front of the house that needs painting. Check your site on your own phone. Can you read it without zooming? Does tapping the phone number dial it? Is the quote button easy to reach with a thumb? Do the photos load quickly on mobile data? If any answer is no, fix that before anything else.
What to do next
- Open your current site or Facebook page on your phone and look at it as a customer would.
- Pick your five best before and after pairs and write a one-line caption for each.
- Write down every suburb and town you are happy to work in.
- List the questions you ask on the phone before quoting. Those become your form.
- Decide whether you give quotes, estimates, or both, and write one sentence explaining it.
With those five lists, most of the content for a good painter's website already exists. The full list of what the plan builds from them is on what you get.
Questions painters ask
How many pages does a painter's website need?
Usually six to ten: home, one page per main service, a gallery, an areas page, a how-we-work page and a quote page. A sole trader doing only repaints can do well with fewer. More pages only help if each one covers something different.
Should I put prices on my website?
Fixed prices rarely work for painting because every job differs. What helps is explaining what affects the price, such as size, condition, height, surface and number of coats, and saying whether you charge for quotes.
Is a Facebook page enough?
It helps, but it isn't built for quote requests or for being found on Google. We compare the two in website or Facebook page.
The short version
A painter's website wins jobs when it shows finished work, names the areas you cover, asks the right quote questions and gives a stranger honest reasons to trust you. None of that needs clever design or a large budget, but it does need doing properly and keeping up to date. If you want it built and looked after for you, see pricing for the painter website plan.