Painting company website: what goes above the fold

A painting company’s homepage needs five things before the first scroll: whether you do interior, exterior or both, the towns you work in, one clear way to start an estimate (a call, or a short quote form), a license and insurance line a buyer can check, and a photo of your own work that loads fast on a phone. Everything else can sit lower down.

Nielsen Norman Group’s 2018 eye-tracking study found people spent about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold and 74% in the first two screenfuls. The first screen is not the only screen, but it is the one almost everyone sees. Here is how a paint job is bought, and what that means for those few inches.

Interior or exterior: the first fork

A homeowner arrives with one of two jobs in mind, and they are different purchases. Exterior work depends on the weather. Sherwin-Williams rates its Duration Exterior for “low temperature application down to 35° F”, and other products set their own floors on their data sheets. Interior work can be booked in January.

So the first screen should say which you do, in words, not only in a photo:

Two buttons or links right under the headline, “Interior” and “Exterior”, send each buyer to the page written for their job. In late fall, if your nights are already below what your exterior products allow, the hero is the place to say you are booking interiors now and taking exterior dates for spring. That is our advice, not a rule, and the timing depends on your climate and products.

A headline that says what and where

The headline is the first thing read, and a painting company’s buyer wants to know two things: do you paint this kind of house, and do you come here. “Quality you can trust” answers neither.

Put the service and the towns in the headline or the line directly under it. If your work splits by kind of building, say that too: “Repaints for older homes in [town]” and “New-construction interiors” are different buyers. Keep the town list to the places you actually take jobs; a longer list lower on the page, or links to town pages, can carry the rest.

What to cut from the first screen:

• A slider that rotates three messages. Only one shows at a time, and the visitor has to wait for the other two.
• A full-width video that pushes the headline and the button down on a phone.
• A pop-up offer that covers the headline before it is read.

The estimate ask: walk-through or photos

A painting estimate starts with someone looking at the surfaces. For an exterior that is usually a visit; for one or two rooms, photos and measurements can get you to a ballpark. The first-screen button should tell the visitor which you need, because “Get a free quote” with no hint of what happens next leaves them guessing.

Two clear asks, side by side:

1. “Book a free estimate visit”, with the phone number next to it, tappable on a phone.
2. “Send us your project”, a short form, with a message prompt that does the work a photo upload would.

The form’s message prompt matters more than its button color. A prompt that asks for these four things gets you to a useful first reply:

• Which rooms, or which sides of the house.
• Roughly when the home was built.
• Any peeling, stains or repairs you can see.
• Photos, sent as a reply to your email or as a text to [number].

If you offer color help, say so in the button area as one line (“Color help included with every estimate”), but only if you do it on every job. A first-screen promise that turns out to cost extra is a bad start to a walk-through.

Proof in one line: license and insurance

A trust strip under the buttons answers “can this painter legally do my job, and what if something goes wrong”. In two states we read, the wording of that line is regulated. The rest of the states were not checked for this post.

California. The CSLB’s C-33 classification is the painting license; its definition starts with the prep, “prepares by scraping, sandblasting or other means”, then applies paints, stains, varnishes and the rest. §7030.5 requires a licensee to put the license number in “all forms of advertising”, and the regulation that defines advertising includes “any electronic transmission”. §7027.4 makes it a cause for discipline to advertise “insured” without naming the type of insurance, such as commercial general liability or workers’ compensation, and to advertise “bonded” when that refers to the license bond. So “Licensed, bonded and insured” is the wrong badge in California. Our full write-up of these rules is the California license number advertising post.

Washington. L&I says “Washington State requires all construction contractors to register with L&I.” A specialty contractor carries a $15,000 bond (for renewals dated July 1, 2024 or later) and liability insurance of $200,000 public liability plus $50,000 property damage, or $250,000 combined. RCW 18.27.100 adds that “All advertising that shows the contractor’s name or address shall show the contractor’s current registration number.”

A trust line that works in both, filled with your own details:

Put the full line in the footer of every page, and a short version under the estimate buttons. No rule we read says the number must sit in the first screen; it just has to be in the advertising, and the buyer who checks will look near the button.

The pre-1978 house question

A painting company working in older neighborhoods has one more first-screen decision. EPA says “Firms cannot advertise or perform renovation activities covered by the RRP Rule in homes or child-occupied facilities built before 1978 without firm certification.” The word that matters for a homepage is advertise: a headline like “Exterior repaints for historic homes” is an offer of covered work.

If your firm is certified, a short line in the trust strip, “EPA Lead-Safe Certified Firm, homes built before 1978”, answers the question an owner of a 1950s house will have. If it is not, keep older-home offers off the first screen until it is. The logo itself has its own rules on size, wording and the firm number; they are in our post on the EPA Lead-Safe logo on a painting website, and we won’t repeat them here.

The hero photo: your paint, loading fast

The big photo on a painting homepage is usually the largest thing on the first screen, which makes it what web.dev calls the Largest Contentful Paint element. web.dev’s target for a good LCP is “2.5 seconds or less”, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, on mobile and desktop separately.

What web.dev says about that photo:

• “Never lazy-load your LCP image.” Lazy loading the hero delays the very thing the visitor came to see.
• Set fetchpriority="high" on the hero <img>, and on no more than one or two images; past that, priority stops helping.
• A hero set as a CSS background image is not discoverable from the HTML unless it is preloaded. A plain image tag is simpler.
• Give images their dimensions. web.dev lists “images or videos with unknown dimensions” as a cause of layout shift, and a good CLS score is 0.1 or less. A form or badge that jumps as the photo loads is a mis-tap waiting to happen.

Use your own finished job, cropped so the color and the trim line show on a phone screen. A wide shot of a whole house at phone width can turn into a gray rectangle; a corner with crisp cut lines on the trim shows the work. Stock photos of a roller on a wall tell the buyer nothing about you.

What to check on your own phone

Open your homepage on a phone, on cellular data, and answer five questions without scrolling:

1. Can you tell in two seconds whether this painter does interior, exterior, or both, and whether that matches what you can book this month?
2. Are your towns named?
3. Can you tap to call, and is there a form or a link to one?
4. Does the form’s prompt ask for rooms or sides, year built and photos?
5. Is the license or registration number on the page, and does “insured” name the type?

Then watch the requests that come in for a month. If messages arrive without the year built or the rooms, the prompt is the thing to rewrite, not the design. If calls ask whether you do exteriors in winter, the headline is not saying it. More on how painting sites fit together is on the painting industry page, and if you want a painting website with this first screen built for you, LocalBiz does that.