Websites for Commercial Cleaning Companies: Show the Calculation

Every second cleaning company website promises "fair prices" and then supplies not a single number, no calculation logic and no criterion a buyer could work along. That is not modesty, it is the wrong model: in this trade the price only comes into existence after someone has walked the building, and that is exactly what belongs on the page instead of being hidden behind a platitude.

Why a price per square metre cannot exist

The price of a maintenance cleaning contract hangs on factors no website knows: floor area and layout, floor coverings, frequency, access before or after business hours, the number of washrooms, how densely a space is furnished, lift or stairwell. Two buildings with identical square metres can differ several times over in effort. Quote a number anyway and you will have to withdraw it in the first meeting, which means the relationship starts with a correction.

The robust alternative is a page that shows the arithmetic: which factors drive the effort, how a cleaning specification is structured, what separates maintenance, glass, deep and special cleaning, and the range a realistic frequency usually sits in. A prospect who has read that arrives with a better enquiry, and your calculation does not have to start from zero.

The wage floor is your strongest argument, not your problem

German building cleaning has a floor no competitor can legally undercut. The sector minimum wage is made generally binding by statutory instrument under section 7 of the Posted Workers Act, so it applies to every business whether or not it belongs to the guild. From 1 January 2026, pay group 1 for interior cleaning rises to 15.00 euros per hour, and pay group 6 for glass and facade cleaning to 18.40 euros per hour.

Those figures are public, and that is precisely what makes them a selling point. A quote that cannot add up once you count hourly pay, on-costs, materials, supervision and margin is either financed out of wages or renegotiated later. Set that out calmly on your own site, without naming a single competitor, and you shift the conversation from price comparison to arithmetic. That is the ground on which a company that calculates properly wins.

Split by building type, do not list services

The usual website lists services: maintenance cleaning, glass cleaning, deep cleaning, post-construction cleaning. But a buyer is not searching for a service, they are searching for someone who knows their building. A facility manager for an office block, a practice with hygiene and disinfection requirements, a production site with safety inductions and a property manager with forty stairwells have nothing in common except the word "cleaning".

A page per building type solves two things at once. It answers the question about experience with that specific type, and it matches the terms people actually search rather than one generic word everyone competes for. How that structure works in B2B generally is covered, using logistics as the example, in Websites for logistics and freight forwarding.

The evidence pack belongs in plain sight, not in an appendix

Every tender above a certain size brings the same list: liability cover levels, clearance certificates, declarations on minimum wage and social contributions, references for comparable buildings, details of quality control. The reason is not bureaucracy for its own sake. In contracting chains, a client can under certain conditions be liable like a guarantor under section 14 of the Posted Workers Act for the minimum wages owed by the firm it engaged. Case law narrows that considerably, but procurement protects itself regardless.

Almost every company supplies this documentation only on request. Explain on the website instead which evidence you hold, what cover levels you carry and how quality is checked on site, and you shorten the review loop while standing out immediately in a market with plenty of unreliable providers. Which proof points actually build trust online and which are merely decorative is set out in Trust elements in 2026.

The careers page is your capacity ceiling

In this trade growth is not limited by demand but by whether you can staff the next building. That makes the careers page a revenue question rather than an HR one: every contract you decline for lack of people is lost contribution margin.

What works here differs sharply from the usual careers section. Applications arrive almost exclusively from a phone, often without a covering letter and not always in German. An application flow with three fields and a call-back option beats any PDF form. Concrete details on location, working time windows, hours and pay beat any sentence about a "dynamic team". Automating the reply to applications loses fewer candidates during the wait; what such a flow looks like is set out on our automation page.

• Calculation factors and service types explained instead of a price per square metre
• The wage floor and the arithmetic laid out openly, without naming competitors
• One page per building type instead of a plain list of services
• Evidence, cover levels and quality control visible rather than supplied on request
• References with building type, floor area and frequency instead of an anonymous logo wall
• Application flow without a covering letter, usable on a phone and in several languages

Concrete steps for the next 90 days

• Days 1-30: build a page on how you calculate, separate the service types cleanly, and extend the quote request to cover floor area, frequency and access times
• Days 31-60: build building-type pages for your two strongest segments, add evidence and cover levels, publish two references with building type and frequency
• Days 61-90: cut the application flow to three fields, test it on a phone and in the languages your workforce speaks, and set up an automatic acknowledgement

Conclusion

Commercial cleaning sells something nobody can see or touch beforehand, in a market with severe price pressure and a legally fixed floor underneath it. Draw the right conclusion from that and you stop hiding the price and start explaining it, turning your own calculation into the argument. How the path from first contact to the first meeting should be built in B2B is covered in The B2B funnel up to the first call.