Cleaning Company Website: Fast Quotes, Prices and Booking

Someone gets the keys to a renovated flat on Thursday and wants it clean before the furniture arrives on Saturday. On Thursday evening they open four cleaning websites on their phone and send the same request to all of them: "How much for a two-room flat after renovation?" The company that answers first with a clear range and a free time usually gets the job. The others answer on Friday to a person who has already booked.

This guide is about that moment. What to write on the site, how to show prices when every flat is different, how fast to answer, and how to turn a one-off clean into a regular client.

A quote request is a lead that cools fast

The best-known audit of reply speed was published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. Researchers sent a test web enquiry to 2,241 US companies. 37% answered within an hour, 24% took more than 24 hours and 23% never answered. Among those that did reply, the average time was 42 hours (HBR, 2011, figures as reported by SmartCompany).

A second data set in the same article showed that companies that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify it, meaning a real conversation with the person who decides, as companies that tried an hour later. That is about getting the conversation, not about the sale.

You will also see a scarier claim: "call within 5 minutes or lose the lead". It comes from a 2007 presentation by InsideSales.com, not from Harvard. On phone leads from six companies, the odds of reaching a lead called within 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes were 100 times higher (Lead Response Management Study, 2007). It is a vendor's presentation, never peer-reviewed, and it says itself that it did not look at sales. Treat it as a direction, not a forecast.

The honest summary for a cleaning company: you do not need to answer in 5 minutes, but a request answered tomorrow is often a request answered too late.

What to send when you are on a job

You do not need the full quote within the hour. You need the first contact and the one question that lets you price the job:

Hello, this is [company name]. Thank you for the request. To give you an exact range: how big is the flat (rooms or square metres), how many bathrooms, and is it a regular clean, a deep clean or after renovation? Our nearest free day is [day].

Three facts, one free day. The client can answer from the sofa, and you can quote from the bus.

Measure your own number for one week

For seven days, write down every request from the site, Google, Instagram and messengers:

1. Time the request arrived.
2. Time of your first reply.
3. Did it become a booking?
4. Was the question something your website could have answered (price, area, "do you bring supplies")?

At the end of the week, count how many requests waited more than an hour and how many never got a reply. Point 4 shows what is missing on your site.

Price "from" and what changes it

"Price on request" in cleaning means: you will have to wait for an answer. The price really does depend on the flat, so show a starting price and say exactly what moves it. That also makes your quote shorter, because the client already knows the logic.

An example layout. The durations are typical examples for one team of two, and the prices are placeholders: put in your own.

Service	Typical time	Price	What changes the price
Regular cleaning, flat	2–3 h	from ...	Size, bathrooms, pets, how often
Deep (spring) cleaning	4–6 h	from ...	Kitchen inside cupboards, oven, fridge
After renovation	full day	from ... per m²	Dust level, paint and plaster residue
Windows	1–3 h	from ... per window	Frames, blinds, access, floor
Office cleaning	by agreement	from ... per visit	Area, frequency, evening or weekend

Under the table, answer the questions clients always ask (adapt the wording to how you really work):

• "We bring all supplies and equipment. Want eco products only? Tell us in the booking."
• "Regular clients pay the regular price; the first visit is a deep clean if the flat needs it."
• "We can work with your keys: you do not need to be at home."

Group the list by situation ("moving out", "after renovation", "every week") rather than by your internal names. The full list can stay one click away.

The first screen: area served and one button

When a page opens, most attention stays on the first screen. In a Nielsen Norman Group eyetracking study, people spent about 57% of their viewing time above the fold and 74% in the first two screenfuls (NN/g, 2018). That study was on desktop; on a phone the first screen is smaller, so the rule only gets stricter.

For a cleaning company, the first question is not "how good are you" but "do you come to me". Put this on the first screen:

• What and where: "Flat and office cleaning in [city] and [districts or nearby towns]." A list of districts works better than "and surroundings".
• One price signal: "Regular cleaning from ..." for your most common job.
• One button: "Book a cleaning". Phone and messenger next to it.

Directly below, on the second screen: real photos of your team and before-and-after shots of your work, then reviews. Stock photos of smiling people in gloves are recognised instantly.

What the booking form should ask

Only what you need to arrive prepared: address, size of the flat, service, pets, how you get in (keys, code, someone at home), parking. Everything else you can ask later.

Speed on the phone

Most of these requests come from a phone. Google reported in 2016 that 53% of visits to mobile sites are likely to be abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load (DoubleClick by Google, 2016; data from 3,700 mobile sites, see also Think with Google). That figure is old, mobile-only and comes from a company that sells speed tools. Still worth a check.

A ten-minute test: open your site on your phone with Wi-Fi off, and run it through PageSpeed Insights (free). If the first screen is slow, the usual culprit is a huge hero photo, a slider or a video background. Compress the photo, remove the rest.

Reminders and rebooking regular clients

In cleaning, a missed visit is worse than an empty chair in a salon: the team has already driven to the address. The strongest evidence on reminders comes from healthcare, so treat it as a strong hint. A Cochrane review of 8 randomised trials found attendance of 67.8% with no reminder and 78.6% with a text reminder (Cochrane, 2013). A later review found that several reminders worked better than one (Robotham et al., BMJ Open, 2016).

Send two, and make moving easy:

The day before: Hello, a reminder from [company name]: tomorrow at [time] Anna and Petra come for your regular cleaning at [address]. Please leave the keys as agreed and tell us if anything changed. Reply 2 to move the visit.

On the morning: We are on our way, arriving around [time]. Parking: [where].

Turn the first clean into a regular one

The best moment to offer regular cleaning is right after a deep clean, when the flat looks its best. Send this the same evening:

Thank you for today. To keep the flat like this, we can come every week or every two weeks, same team, same day. Want us to hold [day and time] for you?

Then count your own retention instead of trusting famous percentages: how many of last year's clients booked at least once more this year. That repeat rate is the only loyalty number that applies to your company.

How Raka AI can help

We build a cleaning company website like this for free: leave a request on the cleaning website page and we will contact you within 24 hours. After a free first month, the site costs $14.90 a month. Online booking, the client list (CRM) and the admin panel are included.

Sources

• Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, 2011 — https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads
• SmartCompany, 2011 (quotes the HBR figures) — https://www.smartcompany.com.au/marketing/20110704-are-you-letting-online-leads-go-cold/
• Oldroyd / InsideSales.com, "Lead Response Management Study", 2007 — https://www.mortech.com/hs-fs/hub/25649/file-13535879-pdf/docs/mit_study.pdf
• Nielsen Norman Group, "Scrolling and Attention", 2018 — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/
• DoubleClick by Google, "The Need for Mobile Speed", 2016 — https://doubleclick-publishers.googleblog.com/2016/09/
• Think with Google, mobile page speed benchmarks, 2017 — https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/_qs/documents/57/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf
• Gurol-Urganci et al., Cochrane review CD007458, 2013 — https://www.cochrane.org/CD007458/COMMUN_mobile-phone-messaging-reminders-attendance-healthcare-appointments
• Robotham et al., BMJ Open, 2016 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5093388/