What a cleaning company website needs to get bookings

Cleaning is bought quickly and under mild stress. Somebody has guests coming, or has moved out, or has finally given up on doing it themselves. They will contact two or three companies and book the first one that gives them a clear answer.

What should the quote form ask?

Three things, because three things is what sets the price: what kind of property, how many bedrooms, and how often. Everything else can wait until you are replying.

• Property type — flat, house, office, holiday rental.
• Size — bedrooms is the shorthand everybody understands; square metres is not.
• Frequency — one-off, weekly, fortnightly, monthly.
• Name, email and area. That is the whole form.

Every extra field costs you completions. Asking for a preferred date, a phone number, how they heard about you and whether they have pets, all before you have quoted anything, is how a form gets abandoned halfway.

Should you publish prices?

Yes, in some form. "Contact us for a quote" filters out the people who would have paid your rate along with the people who would not.

A price table with a from-figure per property size, and a line saying what changes it, does the filtering for you. If your prices genuinely vary — deep cleans, end of tenancy, commercial contracts — publish the fixed ones and give a range for the rest. A range you can stand behind beats silence.

Why do service areas need to be written out?

Two reasons. Somebody deciding whether to bother contacting you wants to check first, and a list of neighbourhoods in plain text is what a search engine reads when somebody searches for cleaners in one of them.

Write the areas as a list on a page. Do not put them inside an image of a map, which neither a search engine nor a screen reader can read, and do not build a separate page for every neighbourhood — that is a pattern search engines have been penalising for years.

What about before-and-after photographs?

They work, with two conditions. They have to be your own work, and they have to load. A gallery of twenty photographs straight off a phone is roughly sixty megabytes, which on a weak mobile connection is a blank screen for long enough that the person leaves.

Properly compressed, the same twenty photographs are around two megabytes and nobody notices a delay. Ask whoever builds your site whether images are converted to WebP and loaded lazily. If the answer is confused, that is informative.

How many pages does a cleaning company need?

Home

What, where, how much

Services

Each clean, explained

Pricing

Real numbers

About

Who turns up, insurance

Contact

The quote form

Five is enough. A sixth page about your commitment to quality helps nobody and gives you one more thing to keep up to date.

What kills bookings?

1. A form that does not work on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one.
2. No prices anywhere.
3. A contact page with a form that never says whether it sent.
4. Stock photographs of a smiling person with a mop. Everybody recognises them, and they read as a company with nothing of its own to show.
5. Being unreachable. If enquiries arrive at eleven at night, say on the site when you reply.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need a website if I get all my work through an app or a marketplace?

The marketplace takes a commission and shows a competitor underneath you. A website is where a repeat customer, or somebody who was given your name, goes instead. It does not replace the marketplace on day one; it gives you somewhere to send people who already know who you are.

Should the form ask for a phone number?

Make it optional. Some people will give it and prefer a call. Requiring it costs you the people who would rather be emailed, and those people still book.

How fast should I reply to a quote request?

Same day. The person almost certainly asked two other companies at the same time, and cleaning is usually booked by whoever answers first with a clear price.