How much does a contractor website cost?

What do the price tiers actually get you?

Three bands cover almost every quote a home-service company gets, and the difference between them is who does the work rather than how good the result is.

• Roughly $200 to $500 a year — a builder you drive yourself. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. The software is genuinely fine. What you are not buying is anyone to write the copy, take the photos, decide what goes on the page or notice six months later that the contact form stopped sending.
• Roughly $1,000 to $5,000 once — a freelancer or a small studio. Someone builds it for you, writes the words, and hands it over. This is where most trades companies land, and it is the band where the quotes differ most, because "a website" can mean one page or eight.
• $5,000 and up — an agency. Worth it when the job is actually big: several locations, a booking system, a CRM that has to stay in sync. Not worth it for a two-truck HVAC company that needs to be found and phoned.

The number on the quote tells you very little on its own. What it includes is the whole question, and the next four sections are the parts people usually find out about afterwards.

Why is there a monthly fee on top of the build price?

Because a website is not a thing you buy once. It has to be hosted, the domain has to be renewed, the software behind it has to be patched, and somebody has to notice when it breaks. Those costs exist whether or not anyone charges you for them separately.

Splitting the price into a build fee and a monthly fee is normal in this trade, and it is also where quotes get slippery. Two things worth asking before you sign anything:

• Do you own what you paid for? The site, the copy, the domain. Some cheap builds are cheap because you are renting the result, and leaving means starting over.
• Is there a contract? A twelve-month minimum on a maintenance plan is a way of hiding part of the build price in the monthly one.

How long should a contractor website take to build?

One page, about a week. A three-to-five-page site, about two. Anything quoted at eight weeks is usually eight weeks of waiting, not eight weeks of work — the schedule is the agency's, not yours.

The part that actually holds most projects up is not design. It is photos and content: nobody has good pictures of the trucks, nobody has written down the service area, and the reviews are sitting in three different places. If you want the build to go fast, have those ready before it starts.

Do I need a full site or will one page do?

One page is enough if you do one thing in one area and the site's only job is to get the phone to ring. A single page that says what you do, where you do it, why you are trustworthy, and how to reach you will out-perform a five-page site that says the same thing spread thin.

You want more pages when you have more than one story to tell: separate services that people search for separately, several towns you want to be found in, or a service area wide enough that "we cover the metro" is costing you calls from the edges of it. Then a page per service and a page per area earn their keep, because each one can answer a different search.

What makes a contractor site actually bring in calls?

Not the design. The design is what makes people believe you before they read anything, which matters, but the things that turn a visit into a job are duller than that:

• The phone number visible without scrolling, on a phone, tappable.
• The service area written out in the names people actually use for their own towns.
• A form that goes somewhere a human checks — email, text, or straight into your CRM.
• Real photos of real jobs. Stock photography of a smiling stranger in a clean van reads as a company that has no photos.
• Your Google Business Profile linked and current. For a local trade it does more work than the website does, and the two should agree with each other.
• Speed. Most of your visitors are on a phone, outdoors, on a bad connection, deciding between you and the next result.

What do I charge?

Flat, published, and the same for everyone: $990 for a landing page live in seven days, $1,900 for a full three-to-five-page site live in ten, and from $2,900 when the job is genuinely bigger. Copy is written for you in all three. You pay setup once and what it buys is yours — the site, the words, the first year of the domain.

Then the site runs on a plan: $149 a month for hosting, backups, monitoring and small changes, or $299 a month if you also want someone working on your visibility. Month to month, no contract, cancel any time after launch.

The reason those numbers are lower than the same work used to cost is not that it is less work. It is that I do the deciding and AI does the volume — the drafts, the variations, the production. That is a real skill rather than a discount, and it is the same reason the timelines are days instead of months. What it does not replace is knowing what your business is actually selling, which is still a conversation.