Contractor Website Statistics (2026): What 311 Plumbing, HVAC and Electrical Homepages Offer Customers

Most home-service marketing advice says the same thing: make it easy for customers to reach you. We wanted to know how contractor websites actually do that today, so we checked them.

In October 2026, Peace Call looked at the homepages of 311 US plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors in 49 metro areas and recorded what each one offers a visitor who wants to get in touch: a tap-to-call phone link, a way to text or chat, online booking, a contact form, and whether the site promises 24/7 service. This is our own data. The method and limitations are below, and you can download the anonymized data as a CSV.

Key findings

• Tap-to-call is nearly universal: 89.7% of homepages (279 of 311) had a clickable tel: phone link, and 96.1% showed a phone number in the page text.
• Only 1 in 5 offered a written channel. 19.6% (61 of 311) had a text-us option, a chat or messaging widget, or a WhatsApp link. Just 6.8% (21) explicitly invited visitors to text.
• Online booking is still a minority feature: 21.9% (68 of 311) had a detectable online booking widget. HVAC led at 29.5%, compared with 16.7% for plumbing and 15.4% for electrical.
• The "24/7 gap": 55.6% of homepages (173) said 24/7, 24 hours or similar. Of those, 76.9% (133) offered no text, chat or WhatsApp option, and 105 offered no online booking either.
• Two in three were phone-or-form only: 65.9% (205 of 311) had neither a text/chat option nor an online booking widget.
• The basics are mostly done: every analyzed site ended on HTTPS, 98.4% had a mobile viewport tag, and 58.8% had a contact form on the homepage.

Why we looked at this

A contractor's phone rings while the crew is on a job, under a house, or asleep. When nobody picks up, the caller often moves on to the next company in the search results. A homepage that also lets people text, chat or book online gives that customer a second way in. The phone matters a lot. We wanted to see whether contractor websites offer anything besides it.

We didn't measure how many calls these businesses miss, how fast they answer, or whether any feature brings in more jobs. This study only records what their homepages offer. If you want to estimate what unanswered calls could cost your own business, use our missed call revenue calculator with your own numbers.

Finding 1: nearly every homepage has tap-to-call

89.7% of homepages (279 of 311) had at least one tel: link, so a visitor on a phone can tap to call. In 75.9% (236), a tel: link sat in the site header or navigation, or among the first links on the page, which is a rough proxy for "visible near the top." (We didn't render pages, so we can't measure what appears above the fold on a specific phone.)

The remaining sites are an easy fix: 22 homepages showed a phone number in the text but had no tap-to-call link on that page.

Finding 2: only 1 in 5 offer a way to reach them in writing

Only 19.6% of homepages (61 of 311) offered any written alternative to a phone call:

• Chat or messaging widget: 12.2% (38 sites). The most common we detected was the HighLevel/LeadConnector chat widget (16 sites), followed by Podium (7) and Schedule Engine's webchat (7), then ApexChat (3), LiveChat (2) and Birdeye (2).
• Text-us option: 6.8% (21 sites). This means an sms: link or wording such as "call or text" or "text us."
• WhatsApp link: 1.3% (4 sites).

Separately, 14.5% (45 sites) showed SMS consent language such as "Msg & data rates may apply" or "Reply STOP." 43 of those 45 also had a contact form on the homepage, which suggests the business texts people who opt in through the form. Only 4 of the 45 also invited visitors to text the business first.

Finding 3: most "24/7" homepages rely on the phone alone

55.6% of homepages (173 of 311) used wording such as "24/7," "24 hours," "24-hour" or "around the clock." Plumbers said it most often (64.9%), then HVAC (56.1%) and electricians (38.5%).

Of those 173 "24/7" homepages, only 23.1% (40) offered a text, chat or WhatsApp option. The other 76.9% (133) relied on the phone, sometimes plus a form. 105 of them had no online booking widget either.

That doesn't mean these businesses don't answer at night. Many may have an answering service or an on-call technician. But for a customer at 2 a.m. who would rather type than talk, the homepage offers no other way in.

If you run one of these businesses, a missed call text-back setup is one common way to cover the gap. When a call goes unanswered, the caller automatically gets a text and can reply in writing. Our free missed call text generator writes one-segment messages for your trade, and the free template pack has after-hours versions.

Finding 4: online booking is common in HVAC, rare elsewhere

21.9% of homepages (68 of 311) had an online booking or scheduling widget we could detect. The tools we found most often were Schedule Engine (33 sites), ServiceTitan's scheduler (31) and Housecall Pro online booking (18), followed by Wix Bookings (6) and Jobber (3). Some sites had more than one.

HVAC homepages were the most likely to offer booking (29.5%), compared with 16.7% for plumbing and 15.4% for electrical.

Many more sites talk about booking than offer a booking tool. 64.3% used wording like "schedule service" or "book online," but 138 of those sites had no booking widget we could detect. On those sites, the button usually leads to a form or a phone number.

Finding 5: the technical basics are mostly in place

• HTTPS: all 311 analyzed homepages ended on an HTTPS address.
• Mobile-ready markup: 98.4% (306) had a mobile viewport tag.
• Contact form: 58.8% (183) had a contact or quote form on the homepage itself. Many others probably have one on a contact page, which we didn't check.
• Platform: 68.2% (212) were built on WordPress. Wix (11), GoDaddy's builder (10) and Squarespace (8) were next.
• Page size: the median homepage HTML document was 219 KB before images, scripts and fonts. We also recorded download times, but we measured them from a server in Japan, so they don't represent a US visitor's experience. They're in the CSV but not in our findings.

What this means for contractors

None of this is a ranking, and the right setup depends on your business. These are the cheapest gaps the data points to:

1. Make every phone number tappable. That's a one-line tel: link. 22 sites in our sample showed a number without one.
2. Give callers a written way in. About 80% of the sites (250 of 311) offered no text, chat or WhatsApp option. A text-us link, a chat widget, or a missed-call text-back covers people who can't or won't call.
3. If your homepage says 24/7, check that it is 24/7 in writing too. Test it yourself: call after hours, let it ring out, and see what happens next.
4. If you say "book online," make sure the button books something. Otherwise label it honestly, for example "Request a visit."

Want a number for your own business? Plug your call volume, missed-call rate and average job value into the missed call revenue calculator, or the plumbing and HVAC versions. Each trade also has a hub that pulls this study's numbers together with scripts and templates: plumbers, HVAC and electricians. If you're weighing text-back tools, see the best missed call text back apps.

Methodology

Sample. We started from OpenStreetMap, a public map whose data is free to use under the ODbL. We took every business tagged as a plumber, HVAC contractor or electrician that lists a website and is located inside one of 50 US metro areas (779 listings). We removed duplicates so each website counts once, plus social media profiles and suppliers/wholesalers, which left 726 websites. From those, we drew a stratified random sample of 450: round-robin across metro areas, rotating trades within each metro, with a fixed random seed. Pest control was planned but dropped, because the map servers kept timing out on that query.

Collection. On October 8, 2026 (US Eastern time), an automated script visited each sampled homepage once. It identified itself in its user agent with a link to this page, checked robots.txt first, and skipped any site that disallowed it. It sent at most one request per second overall and spread requests across different sites. It did not run JavaScript, fill in or submit forms, click anything, or call or text anyone.

Analyzed sites. 311 of the 450 homepages could be analyzed. The other 139 weren't: 38 sites blocked crawlers in robots.txt or refused the robots.txt request, 68 timed out or had connection or certificate errors, 26 returned an error status, and 7 returned almost no server-rendered text. The 311 cover 49 metro areas in 29 states plus Washington, DC: 132 HVAC, 114 plumbing and 65 electrical contractors.

What counts. Every check reads the page's HTML:

We spot-checked the matches by hand and removed patterns that produced false positives before the final run. The collection and analysis scripts are available on request.

Limitations. Read these before you cite a number:

• OpenStreetMap isn't a census. Contractors listed there with a website may differ from contractors in general, for example they may be more established. The figures describe this sample of 311 sites, not every US contractor.
• Homepages only. A site may have chat, booking or a form on other pages.
• No JavaScript. Tools loaded later, for example through a tag manager (54% of sites had one), are invisible to this method. So the chat, text and booking figures are lower bounds. The real shares may be somewhat higher.
• Sites we couldn't fetch are excluded, and they may differ from the rest.
• The trade groups are small, especially electrical (65 sites). Treat differences between trades as indicative, not precise.
• Snapshot in time. Websites change. The data reflects October 8, 2026.

Download the data

The anonymized dataset has one row per analyzed homepage: sample ID, metro area, trade, and every feature above. Business names and URLs are left out. It's free to use with attribution.

Download the CSV (311 rows)

Embed a chart. Copy the HTML for the chart you want and paste it into an HTML block on your site. Each snippet loads the chart from our site and includes the credit link. The charts are SVG images, so they stay sharp at any size.

Chart 1: what contractor homepages offer

<a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/"><img src="https://getpeacecall.com/research/contractor-website-statistics/chart-1-homepage-features.svg" alt="What contractor homepages offer: Peace Call study of 311 plumbing, HVAC and electrical websites" width="760" height="498" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/">Peace Call contractor website study (2026)</a></p>

Chart 2: ways to reach a contractor beyond the phone

<a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/"><img src="https://getpeacecall.com/research/contractor-website-statistics/chart-2-beyond-the-phone.svg" alt="Ways to reach a contractor beyond the phone: Peace Call study of 311 contractor websites" width="760" height="270" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/">Peace Call contractor website study (2026)</a></p>

Chart 4: the 24/7 gap

<a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/"><img src="https://getpeacecall.com/research/contractor-website-statistics/chart-4-24-7-gap.svg" alt="The 24/7 gap: most contractor homepages that say 24/7 offer no text or chat option (Peace Call study, 2026)" width="760" height="232" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/">Peace Call contractor website study (2026)</a></p>

Chart 3: features by trade

<a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/"><img src="https://getpeacecall.com/research/contractor-website-statistics/chart-3-by-trade.svg" alt="Contractor website features by trade, plumbing vs HVAC vs electrical: Peace Call study of 311 websites" width="760" height="430" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://getpeacecall.com/contractor-website-statistics/">Peace Call contractor website study (2026)</a></p>

Prefer a copy on your own server? Download the SVG and keep the source line with the link. Questions, or need a custom cut of the data, such as one trade? Email hello@getpeacecall.com. You can also embed our missed call revenue calculator.

FAQ

What percentage of contractor websites have online booking? In our October 2026 sample of 311 US plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractor homepages, 21.9% had an online booking or scheduling widget we could detect. HVAC was highest at 29.5%, then plumbing at 16.7% and electrical at 15.4%. Because we didn't run JavaScript, the true share may be somewhat higher.

How many contractor websites let customers text them? 6.8% of the 311 homepages explicitly offered texting, through an sms: link or wording such as "call or text." Counting chat widgets and WhatsApp links too, 19.6% offered some way to reach the business in writing.

Do most contractor websites have click-to-call? Yes. 89.7% of the homepages we checked had a tap-to-call (tel:) link, and 96.1% showed a phone number in the page text.

How many contractor websites say they are open 24/7? 55.6% of the homepages used wording such as "24/7," "24 hours" or "around the clock": 64.9% of plumbers, 56.1% of HVAC companies and 38.5% of electricians.

Can I use these statistics and charts? Yes. Quote the numbers, embed the charts or use the CSV, and credit Peace Call with a link to this page. Please mention the sample (311 homepages, October 2026) and the limitations.