Renovation work is one of the busiest trades on the Costa del Sol. Kitchens, bathrooms, terraces, whole-house refurbishments, and a steady stream of people buying older properties who need someone reliable to bring them up to date. The work is there. The question is whether it comes to you or to the firm down the road.
Most building and renovation companies still rely almost entirely on word of mouth. That is a genuinely good source of work, but it has a ceiling: it only reaches people who already know someone who knows you. Meanwhile, the customer with a 30,000 euro refurbishment budget who just moved to Malaga is on their phone searching, comparing, and deciding based on what they can see.
What your customer actually does before calling you
A renovation is a big, nerve-racking spend. Nobody hands that over casually. The pattern is almost always the same: they search for a builder in their area, they look at who appears in the map results, they look at photos of finished work, they read reviews, and only then do they make contact. Usually with two or three firms.
If you have no website, you are invisible for the first three steps. If you have a Facebook page with a handful of photos from 2023, you look like a firm that is not really operating. That is the whole problem, and it is entirely fixable.
The pages a renovation website needs
You do not need twenty pages. You need a handful that do their job well:
- A home page that says immediately what you do, where you work, and how to reach you. "Kitchen and bathroom renovations across Malaga and the Costa del Sol" beats a vague welcome message every time.
- Your work. This is the page that wins the job. More on it below.
- Services, split into what you actually get asked for: full refurbishments, kitchens, bathrooms, terraces and pools, extensions.
- About you. Years in the trade, your team, your licences and insurance. Renovation customers are buying trust more than anything.
- Contact, with a phone number that is tappable on a mobile, a short form, and WhatsApp.
Photos are your entire sales pitch
For a trade like yours, photos do more selling than any words on the page. Some rules that make a real difference:
- Before and after pairs. Nothing else demonstrates value so clearly. A tired 1990s bathroom next to the finished result is worth a thousand words of copy.
- Take them yourself, on your phone, on every job. You do not need a photographer. You need daylight, a tidy site, and the discipline to take the shot before you pack up.
- Show variety and show finish quality. Wide shots to show the transformation, close-ups on tiling, joinery and edges, because that is where customers judge whether you are careful.
- Caption them with the location and the job. "Full bathroom renovation, Fuengirola" helps customers and helps you show up in local searches.
Get in the habit of five minutes of photos at the end of every job and within a year you have a portfolio your competitors cannot match.
Be findable locally
For builders, nearly all the valuable search traffic is local. Someone types "reformas" plus their town, or "builder near me", and Google shows a map with three businesses. Getting into that map is the highest-value thing you can do, and it starts with a Google Business Profile, not with your website. We have a full step-by-step in our guide to getting found on Google, and the single biggest lever within it is collecting reviews, which matter enormously for a trade where trust is everything.
On the website side, mention the towns you cover in your page titles and text, and give each main service its own page so you can rank for specific searches rather than one generic homepage.
Make it easy to ask for a quote
Renovation enquiries die from friction. Someone is on a phone, on a sofa, at 9pm. If the next step is "email us at this address", you have lost half of them. What works:
- A tap-to-call button and a WhatsApp button visible without scrolling.
- A short form. Name, contact, what they need, roughly when. Five fields, not fifteen.
- An honest note on what happens next: "We will come and look, then give you a written quote." Uncertainty is what stops people enquiring.
The mistakes that cost the most work
- No photos of finished jobs. The most common and most expensive mistake in this trade.
- Social media only. You do not control it, it is hard to find, and it does not rank in Google for "reformas Malaga".
- A site that is unusable on a phone. The vast majority of your enquiries will arrive from a mobile.
- No mention of where you work. If a customer cannot tell whether you cover their town, they move on.
- Slow loading. Big unoptimised photos are the usual culprit, which is ironic given photos are the point.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website if I get all my work by recommendation?
Recommendations still need somewhere to check you out. When someone passes your name on, the first thing the new customer does is search for you. A website turns a passing mention into a booked job, and it keeps working when the referrals go quiet.
How much does a website for a building company cost?
Our monthly plans start from 49 pounds a month with a small setup fee, covering design, hosting, maintenance and support. A one-off build from a freelancer or agency typically runs into the low thousands. Either way, one won job usually covers a year of it.
What photos do I need to get started?
Six to ten finished jobs is plenty to launch, ideally with a couple of before and after pairs. Do not wait for perfect. Launch with what you have and add to it as you finish work.
How long does it take to build?
Usually one to three weeks for a site like this. The part that decides the timeline is nearly always how quickly you gather your photos and job details.
Should I show my prices?
Full price lists rarely work for renovation, since every job is different. What does work is giving a sense of scale, such as a typical starting figure for a bathroom, so enquiries arrive from people with a realistic budget instead of wasting your time on site visits.
If you build and renovate for a living, your website only has one job: prove you do good work and make it easy to ask. That is exactly what we build. Have a look at our websites for builders, or get a free consultation and we will tell you honestly what would bring you more enquiries.