What Should a Contractor Website Cost?

Ask three web designers what a contractor website costs and you will get three answers between four hundred dollars and fifteen thousand. All three can be honest. The range is wide because the word website covers a template with your logo dropped in and a set of pages built to rank for the work you actually want.

What the low end buys

At the bottom of the range you are buying a template. Somebody picks a theme, swaps in your business name, drops in three stock photos of a van and a handshake, and hands it over. It will look fine. It will load reasonably. It will be almost identical to eleven other sites in your city because the same theme is for sale to all of them.

That is not automatically wrong. If you need something at a URL so a referral can check you exist, a template does that job and there is no sense paying more for it.

What it will not do is get found. Nobody structured it around what people search for in your trade, because structuring it that way takes research nobody did at that price.

What the high end buys

Above a few thousand you start paying for the part that is not design at all. Somebody works out which terms people in your area actually type, which of those terms you have a chance at, and what has to be on the page to answer them. Then somebody writes it.

The design sits on top of that work. It matters, but it is the smaller half.

Why the number you are quoted varies so much

Three things move the price more than anything else:

• How many pages. A four page site and a twenty page site are different amounts of writing, and writing is the slow part.
• Whether anybody does the search research. This is the single biggest fork. It is invisible on the finished site and it decides whether the site gets found.
• What happens after launch. A site handed over and left alone costs less than one somebody keeps working on. Ranking is not a thing you finish.

The question that matters more than the price

Most contractors ask what a website costs when the useful question is what it has to earn back.

A roof replacement is worth several thousand. One job a year from a site that cost two thousand has paid for itself and then some. A landscaping maintenance contract that renews every spring is worth more than the site over three years.

Work out what one customer is worth to you, then ask how many the site needs to bring in before the number stops mattering. That usually reframes the whole conversation.

What we charge, since it would be strange not to say

The website is free and the local SEO is $297 a month. There is no build fee, and the reason is not generosity. A website on its own does not bring you work. Somebody has to find it first, and finding it is the ongoing part, so that is the part that is priced.

You see the homepage before any of that starts. If you do not want it, you walk away and it has cost you nothing.

What to ask whoever you hire

Ask what terms they expect the site to rank for and why they picked those. If the answer is vague, or if it is a list of terms with your city bolted onto the front and no reasoning behind it, that is your answer about which end of the range you are buying.

Then ask what happens in month two. A site is a start, not a finish.

If you want to see the shape of it first, web design in Louisville, KY covers how the whole thing works, and you can ask for a free preview of your site before deciding anything.