Solar Installer Website Builder: What Actually Works in 2026

Last quarter we reviewed 47 solar installer websites across Cyprus, the UK, and Switzerland as part of a routine onboarding exercise. We were not looking for beauty. We were asking a simpler question: if I were a homeowner who had just searched "solar panels Limassol" or "solar installer Surrey", would this site give me enough information to request a quote?

Thirty-one of the 47 did not. Not because the installers were bad at their jobs — the portfolios, the accreditations, and the customer reviews suggested otherwise. The sites failed because they were built on generic tools that were never designed for a considered, high-value purchase like residential solar.

What the audit actually showed

The pattern across failing sites was consistent. A homepage with a hero image, a short paragraph about the company, a three-step graphic ("Get a Quote / We Install / You Save"), and a contact form. Sometimes a testimonial carousel. Occasionally a project gallery.

What was almost never present: a specific price. An actual system size example. A payback calculation. A grant or incentive estimate. Any answer, in other words, to the question every homeowner brings to the first visit.

The sixteen sites that performed well — measured by the presence of instant quote tools, detailed product pages, and real ROI figures — shared a different character. They treated the website as a sales tool rather than a business card. And the difference was not design talent. It was tooling.

Two of those sixteen were built on generic platforms with heavy custom development layered on top. The other fourteen were built on platforms with solar-specific functionality built in. The custom-development route had cost each operator between €3,000 and €8,000 in one-off build fees, according to the installers themselves when we spoke to them.

The homeowner's actual decision sequence

Understanding what a homeowner needs from a solar installer website is not complicated, but it is specific. From our own onboarding conversations with 200-plus solar installers across Europe, the homeowner journey nearly always follows the same order of questions:

1. Does this company serve my area?
2. What would a system roughly cost for a house my size?
3. What brands do they use, and why those particular ones?
4. How long before it pays back, and what are the available grants?
5. Can I get a quote without committing to a sales call?

A generic website builder — Wix, Squarespace, a starter WordPress theme — answers questions one and five, partially. The middle three require solar-specific tooling: a product catalogue with real specifications, a pricing engine that knows your regional VAT rate and applicable grants, and an ROI calculator tied to actual utility tariffs.

Without those, the homeowner leaves your site and finds an installer whose site has them.

The specific failures we found most often

Across the 31 underperforming sites, three failures appeared so frequently they deserve direct treatment.

The opaque price problem. Twenty-four of the 31 sites showed either no price or a "starting from" figure with no further context. "Starting from €4,999" is meaningless when every other installer in the region uses the same figure. Two of the better-performing sites showed a priced example system — a 6 kWp package for a 180 m² semi-detached home in their service area, with the panel model, inverter brand, installation cost, and 25-year ROI broken out. Those two sites reported significantly shorter sales cycles in our onboarding conversations.

The missing grant layer. Cyprus homeowners buying solar expect the installer to explain the "Photovoltaics for All" grant. UK homeowners expect to understand the Smart Export Guarantee rate. Swiss homeowners ask about Pronovo. Seventeen of the 31 failing sites mentioned grants in passing — "ask us about available grants" — without quantifying them. This is the equivalent of a car dealer advertising "financing available" without quoting a monthly payment.

The dead-end contact form. Every site had a contact form. The form led, in most cases, to an email inbox. The average installer response time to an email lead, from our own data, is just over 22 hours. By that point, in a competitive market, a meaningful proportion of homeowners have heard from a different installer. A pipeline-connected instant-quote tool is not a luxury at this stage of the market — it is a baseline expectation.

What the better sites did differently

The sites that answered all five homeowner questions shared three structural features. They had a quote-request flow that produced a real, priced offer within minutes rather than routing to email. Their product pages showed specifications homeowners care about — panel wattage and efficiency rating, battery usable capacity, inverter brand and warranty — not just marketing copy. And they gave returning customers a portal to track their installation rather than requiring phone calls for status updates.

None of this requires bespoke software development. Platforms built specifically for solar installers ship these features as standard. The question for any installer evaluating a website platform is simply whether the tool understands a solar business or whether you will spend the next six months forcing a generic CMS to approximate one.

Raysly was built to answer those five homeowner questions out of the box — regional VAT, grant logic, tiered instant offers, pipeline-connected lead capture, and a client portal — without requiring an agency and without a build fee. For any installer whose website currently ends at a contact form, that is worth a close look.