I Graded Every Roofing Website in Baldwin County

I spent the first days of July doing something nobody in this county has done: I found every roofing business physically based in Baldwin County with a live website — thirteen of them — and graded each one on a published, reproducible rubric. Eight dimensions, one to ten, with the evidence written down. PageSpeed runs, structured-data inventories, review counts recorded with the date I read them, SSL handshakes. The whole thing cost nothing but time, which means anyone can rerun it and check my math. The full ranked table is public, scores and all.

Here's the stat that should stop a roofer mid-scroll: 85% fail the mobile speed test that matters, measured per Google's PageSpeed Insights, with every score published in the raw table. Google's Core Web Vitals draw the "good" line at getting your main content painted within 2.5 seconds on a phone. Eleven of the thirteen sites miss it. Only two pass, and one of those passes on a technicality — it's a bare static page so small there's nothing to slow down. So in a county where the homeowner searching "roof repair" is standing in a driveway on a phone, effectively one full-content roofing website loads the way Google says a website should.

That's the headline, but the sweep surfaced stranger things.

Not one site publishes pricing. Zero of thirteen. Every single one gates cost behind a form or a phone call, in the exact month Alabama's Strengthen Alabama Homes program has homeowners actively comparison-shopping FORTIFIED roof work against a $10,000 grant. The first roofer who names even a starting range owns a search intent the other twelve are hiding from.

The invisible plumbing is mostly missing too. Only five of thirteen sites carry proper local-business structured data — the machine-readable markup that tells Google what the business is and where it works. Three ship no structured data at all. One still serves an expired SSL certificate, which means a real browser throws a security warning before the site even loads. And just two of thirteen run anything resembling a real blog, in a trade where storm seasons and grant windows hand you the editorial calendar for free.

One finding I didn't expect: three additional "Baldwin County roofing company" domains that were live a year ago are now expired and parked. All three shared the same tells — near-identical AI-templated founder stories, indexed within weeks of each other, dead within twelve months. A churned lead-gen shell network, not real local businesses. They're excluded from the ranking, but they're a useful warning about what some of the listings in a search result actually are.

The rankings name category winners — best overall, fastest, best contact experience, best local coverage — and every award prints its basis, because the methodology is public and the raw scores ship with the article. No pay-to-play, no worst-lists, and no studio clients in this edition, which the page discloses outright. If you're one of the thirteen and you want to know exactly which numbers held your composite down, the table will tell you — and if you want those numbers fixed, that's a conversation I'm happy to have.