Web design for janitorial, facility and industrial cleaning contractors.

Nobody buys cleaning. They buy the end of a recurring problem, and they buy somebody to hold responsible when the problem comes back.

That is why this sector's websites tend to underperform so badly. They were built on the assumption that the job is to show how clean things get, and a clean floor is the least persuasive photograph in commercial services. Every contractor has one. The buyer has looked at nine.

What a facility manager is actually assessing is whether handing you keys, an alarm code and an empty building at eleven at night is a decision they can defend in six months.

A contract is not a job

The transaction here has almost nothing in common with a one off clean, and the site has to be shaped around that difference.

A janitorial agreement runs for years, bills monthly, and is governed by a scope document that lists tasks against frequencies. It is awarded after a procurement process, often with a mandatory site walkthrough in the middle of it. It is terminated with notice, usually after a run of complaints that nobody escalated in time. The person signing it may not be the person who deals with you weekly, and the person who deals with you weekly is the one who decides whether it renews.

So the site's job is narrow and specific. Get onto the list of companies invited to walk the building. Everything after that happens in person.

That reframing kills a lot of conventional website advice. You are not trying to generate volume. You are trying to survive a filter applied by somebody with a spreadsheet, and then be the name a facility manager remembers when the incumbent misses a third Monday.

What is actually being checked

Before anyone looks at your cleaning, they look at whether you are a safe organization to contract with. That check is the same in every building worth having, and it is the material almost no site publishes.

• Commercial general liability, with limits stated. Institutional clients often set a floor, and if you are above it, say the number.
• Current clearance from the provincial workplace insurer, which a buyer will ask for before a contract is signed and sometimes before a bid is accepted.
• Bonding, where you carry it, and what the bond covers. Employee dishonesty coverage matters to anyone letting a crew into an office after hours.
• A written health and safety policy, training records, and training on the products your staff carry. Confirm your own obligations with somebody qualified rather than copying another contractor's wording.
• How staff are screened. Police record checks are routine in this sector, and clients in schools, healthcare and long term care usually require more than that. Say you will meet the requirement and confirm the specifics contract by contract, because the requirement often comes from the client's own policy rather than from any single rule.
• Whether you hold a recognized health and safety certification, and whether you are registered in the contractor prequalification systems your target clients use. Naming those systems on the page matters more than it looks, because procurement staff search for exactly those names.
• Workers' compensation standing and your claims history, which prequalification reviews will surface whether or not you mention them.

Publishing that is not boasting. It is removing the three emails a buyer would otherwise have to send before you are allowed to quote, and it is the single clearest signal that you have done this before.

Three businesses wearing one uniform

Recurring janitorial, post-construction cleanup and industrial plant cleaning get grouped together because the same company often does all three. They are not the same business and they should not share pages.

Recurring janitorial is sold on stability. The buyer is a property manager, a facilities director or an office manager, and they want to know what happens on a normal Tuesday and what happens on a bad one. Scope matrices, frequencies, day porter coverage, consumables, washroom hygiene, periodic floor work and who answers the phone at six in the morning.

Post-construction cleanup is project work on somebody else's critical path. The buyer is a site superintendent or a project manager, the notice is short, the building is not finished, and the deadline is an occupancy date that will not move. That page needs rough-clean against final-clean phases, crew sizes, what you do about dust in mechanical systems, who supplies power and water, how you handle a punch list and whether you can put eight people on site on a Saturday.

Industrial plant cleaning is a shutdown business. The buyer is a maintenance manager planning an outage months ahead, the hazards are real, and the questions are about confined space, lockout procedures, waste handling and whether your crew can be orientated to the plant's own safety requirements. The vocabulary on that page should sound nothing like the office page.

Written as one combined services list, each buyer reads two thirds of a page that was not for them and concludes you are a generalist.

The walkthrough is the actual sales meeting

Most contracts in this sector are decided in a forty minute walk around the building with the person who will have to live with the result.

What the website can do is get you there, and then make the walk easier. Three things help.

A clear statement of the building types and sizes you cover. A contractor who runs twelve thousand square foot offices and one who runs a six hundred thousand square foot distribution centre are not competitors, and pretending to be both loses you both.

A named person, with a direct line, who does estimating. Procurement officers and facility managers both work by phoning somebody. A generic address and a contact form reads as a company that will also be hard to reach at two in the morning.

An honest page about your service radius and your crew depth in each area. Route density is your margin in this business and everyone in it knows that, so a claim to cover the whole province from one depot does not land as ambition.

The transition plan is the page that wins the contract

Here is the fear that keeps bad incumbents in place: changing contractors goes wrong, and it goes wrong visibly, in front of everybody who works in the building.

Almost nobody addresses it. Write the page.

• What happens between signing and the first night.
• How keys, fobs, alarm codes and access are handed over and controlled, and who holds the list.
• How your crew learns this specific building rather than a generic one.
• What equipment and supplies arrive, and when.
• Who is on site for the first week, and at what level of supervision.
• What the thirty day review looks like and who attends it.
• What you do if the outgoing contractor leaves the building in poor condition, which happens more often than anybody admits.

A facility manager reading that page is being told the thing they most needed to hear, by the only contractor who thought to say it.

Who is in my building at two in the morning

Supervision is the whole product and it is the hardest thing to evidence.

Say how it works. The ratio of supervisors to sites. Whether supervision is in person, by inspection, or both. How often a site is formally inspected and what the report looks like. Whether crews clock in on site with a mobile system, and whether the client can see that. What your escalation path is when something is missed, with a response time attached.

If you run quality assurance software, name it. Inspection platforms built for this sector produce photographic reports and scored audits, and a buyer who has been let down before responds to a sample report far more strongly than to a paragraph about commitment. Publish a redacted example.

Then say how a complaint reaches a human after hours, because the night a washroom floods is the night the relationship is decided.

Recruitment is half the website and it is usually absent

You can win a contract you cannot staff, and in this industry that happens constantly. Night shift labour is scarce, turnover is the defining operational problem, and you are competing for the same people as every warehouse within a bus route.

Yet the careers page on most cleaning company sites is a line in the footer leading to a form that asks for a resume and a cover letter.

Build it like a job board posting instead, because that is what it is competing with.

• Shift times, exact. Evenings, overnights, weekends, split shifts, and how many hours.
• Pay, stated. Since the start of 2026 Ontario employers above a staff threshold most cleaning contractors are well over have had to put a wage or a wage range in a publicly advertised posting, with limits on how wide that range can be. Confirm where your own headcount puts you, then publish the number anyway, because the people you want will not apply without one.
• Location, by building area or neighbourhood, and whether it is reachable on transit at that hour.
• Whether a licence and a vehicle are needed.
• What the work actually involves, physically, including lifting and standing.
• Whether training is provided and paid.
• An application that works on a phone in four minutes with no resume, and a way to apply by text or by phone for people who will not fill in a form.

Write the whole thing in plain language, and if a meaningful share of your workforce speaks another language at home, publish the posting in that language too. Referral bonuses belong on that page as well, because your existing staff are your best recruiters and they need something to send.

A contract lost because you could not staff it costs more than any website.

What to say about price

Do not publish a rate per square foot. Buyers do not expect one, and any number you post will be quoted back at you against a building that does not resemble the one you were thinking of.

Publish the method instead. What drives the price: cleanable square footage rather than gross, the frequency schedule, the floor surfaces, the washroom count and fixture count, how much of the space is occupied during cleaning, security requirements and whether consumables are supplied by you or by them. Say which of those you need before you can quote.

That page does two useful things. It tells a buyer their quotes are not comparable unless everyone priced the same scope, which is a genuinely helpful thing to learn. And it filters out the enquiries that were never going to be contracts.

Where search sits, and where it does not

The map listing does a lot of work for a residential trade. It does much less here, because a facilities director assembling a shortlist is not standing on a street tapping a map. They are at a desk, searching a service and a city, or working from a list somebody already gave them.

What they type is narrower and more useful than it looks. A service plus a city. A building type plus a city. The name of a prequalification system plus your region. The phrase a specification uses rather than the phrase a brochure uses. Those searches have almost no competition in most Ontario markets, because contractors in this sector either have no site or have one page.

So the search work here is a page per service line, a page per building type you genuinely want, and your service area written out properly. The local search checklist covers the groundwork, and most of it still applies even though the map is a smaller part of the picture.

Keep the profile current anyway. It is where your phone number, your hours and your name consistency get checked, and inconsistency there is the sort of thing a procurement officer notices.

No contractor is credited on this page

Cleaning companies have hired us. None of them are named here, which was their call rather than ours.

That leaves the reasoning to stand by itself. Test it on a call: what should a transition page for your largest building actually say, or why has the careers section produced nothing in six months. If you would sooner look at finished builds, the work page is the place to start.

What this costs, set against one contract

We do not quote under $5,000. A contract cleaning site then sits in the middle of our range rather than at the top, because the page count is moderate and the work is in the writing rather than the engineering. Three service lines, a compliance and documents section, a transition page, a sector page or two and a careers section that actually functions is the usual shape. The price is settled in writing first and billed against each phase as it lands.

The arithmetic here is unusually simple. Set the build against the annual value of one mid-sized janitorial agreement, then against the cost of carrying three unfilled night positions for a quarter. Most owners run that calculation in about a minute and stop asking whether the site is worth doing.

The build occupies three and a half weeks at the outside and a week and a half at the inside, counted from an approved brief. What to plan around is bid season rather than a launch date, because the site has to be live before the postings you already know are coming. What a website costs breaks the figure down and the anatomy of a trade website covers the structural parts. For a straight read, send us the last tender you lost and you will hear what the site failed to say.