How Much Does a Contractor Website Cost? What You Should Pay For

If you’re a roofer, a remodeler, an electrician or a general contractor, you’ve probably gotten website quotes that were all over the place. One person says a few hundred bucks, another sends a proposal for several thousand. I run a local service business myself and built its site from scratch, and now I build sites for contractors and other trades. Here’s how I’d think about what a contractor website should cost, and what you should actually be paying for.

How much does a contractor website cost?

It depends on who builds it and how much the site has to do. Roughly, you’ve got three options:

• Do it yourself on a builder. Lowest cost to start, but you pay a monthly plan forever and you spend your own evenings on it.
• A small studio or freelancer. A one-time build fee, usually with a small monthly fee for hosting and upkeep after.
• A full agency. The biggest price tag, often with long contracts and monthly retainers on top.

To give you real numbers, here are ours. A Plumb build is $899 one-time for a focused site up to 7 pages. Level is $1,999 for up to 15 pages, including 5 city pages and booking integration. True is $3,999 for up to 30 pages, including 15 city pages, for a contractor covering a lot of ground or several trades. On our packages page we list comparable agency tiers at $1,999, $3,499 and $5,999 for the same three levels, so you can see the gap.

Whoever you talk to, ask for the page count, the number of city pages, and what happens after launch. Those three things explain most of the difference between quotes.

Why does a contractor site usually cost more than a basic small business site?

Because a contractor’s site has more to do. A salon might need one services page and a booking button. A contractor usually needs:

• A page for each kind of job. A roofer doing repairs, full replacements and gutters should have a page for each. People search for the job, not the company.
• City pages. If you work six towns, you want a page written for each one. That’s how you show up when someone in the next town over searches.
• A project gallery with your own before and after photos. Big jobs get researched, and homeowners want to see your work.
• A quote request form that asks the right questions up front: what kind of job, the address, a photo, the timeline.
• Trust details like your license and insurance info, service area, and reviews where people can see them.

Every one of those is more pages, more writing and more setup. That’s what you’re paying for. If someone quotes you a contractor site that’s just one long page, it’ll be cheap, and it’ll mostly sit there.

What do I really need on day one, and what can wait?

You don’t need everything at once. I went five or six months with a Google Doc and a QR code as my “website,” and people thought it looked like a scam. A real, simple site would have beaten that on day one. It took me about a month to build the real one, and I had a customer in the first week after it went live.

If money is tight, I’d start with:

• A clean home page with your phone number at the top and a click-to-call button
• One page for each of your main services
• A quote request form
• Your Google Business Profile set up and linked to the site

That’s roughly a Plumb build. City pages, booking tied to your job software, a reviews feed and call tracking can come next, once the phone is ringing. You can add a city page later for $149 each instead of jumping a whole tier.

What I wouldn’t skip is the stuff that’s hard to add later: owning your domain, a site that loads fast on a phone, and clean page titles. Fixing those after the fact costs more than doing them right the first time.

What does a contractor website cost every month after it’s built?

This is the part a lot of quotes leave out. After launch you’ll pay for some mix of:

• Domain name, renewed every year.
• Hosting and upkeep, so the site stays online, backed up and updated.
• Edits, like new photos, a new service or a price change.
• Optional growth work, like SEO or ads, if you want more calls than the site brings in on its own.

For us, the Keep Level care plan is $79 a month and covers hosting, backups, updates and an hour of edits. So a Plumb build plus Keep Level comes to $1,847 for the first year ($899 + $948), then $948 a year after that. A Level build plus Keep Level is $2,947 the first year.

If you’d rather not pay a build fee up front, there’s the Foundation bundle: $199 a month on a 12-month term, which includes a Plumb-level site, hosting and care, and Google Business Profile management. Over 12 months that’s $2,388. You pay more over the year, but nothing big up front.

If you want calls faster than SEO can bring them, ads are the quicker lever. I spent about $1,000 a month on ads for my own business and got back roughly $4,000 to $5,000 a month. But I still prefer SEO, because the leads are better and they don’t stop the day you stop paying. If you need work now, I’d put about 70% into ads and 30% into SEO. If you’re not in a hurry, flip it. I went deeper on that in SEO vs Google Ads for small business.

How many jobs does a contractor website need to pay for itself?

This is the only math that matters. Take what one average job is worth to you after costs. Call it $X. Then divide the first-year cost of the site by X. That’s how many extra jobs the site has to bring in during year one to cover itself.

Here’s a made-up example to show the math. Say you’re a contractor and an average job leaves you $1,500 after materials and labor. A Level build with Keep Level is $2,947 for the first year. $2,947 ÷ $1,500 is about 2, so two extra jobs in the whole year covers it. Every job after that is the site making you money.

Plug in your own number. For bigger trades like roofing or remodeling, it’s often one job. For smaller service calls it might be a handful. Either way, a contractor site that brings in even a couple of extra jobs a year has paid for itself. If you want the same breakdown for other kinds of businesses, I covered it in how much a small business website costs.

The short version

• Ask every designer for the page count, the number of city pages and the monthly cost after launch. That’s where quotes really differ.
• Contractor sites cost more because they need service pages, city pages, a project gallery, a quote form and trust details.
• Start with the basics if money is tight, and add city pages and booking once calls come in.
• Don’t skip owning your domain, mobile speed and clean page titles.
• Count the monthly costs too, not just the build fee.
• Payback: first-year cost divided by what one job is worth to you.

Want a contractor site built for you?

This is what we do at Level Digital Studio for contractors, roofers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC companies, landscapers and every other kind of local service business. We build it, connect it, and hand it to you ready to take calls and quote requests. You own the site and the domain.

• Website builds. Plumb is $899 one-time for up to 7 pages, copy written for you and Google Business Profile setup. Level is $1,999 with up to 15 pages, 5 city pages, booking integration (Square, Jobber, Housecall Pro), a reviews feed and call tracking. True is $3,999 for up to 30 pages and 15 city pages, for multiple cities and trades.
• No build fee up front. The Foundation bundle is $199 a month on a 12-month term: a Plumb-level site, hosting and care, and Google Business Profile management.
• Getting found. Our SEO plans are $299, $799 and $1,299 a month, month to month, covering your Google Business Profile, reviews, new pages and local links.
• Calls sooner. Google Ads management is from $299 a month plus ad spend, and Google Local Services Ads management is from $250 a month.
• Care plans. Keep Level is $79 a month for hosting, backups, updates and an hour of edits. Keep Level+ is $99 a month with more edits, speed monitoring and a quarterly SEO check-up. Cancel and keep everything.
• Already have a site? A $149 site audit tells you in writing what to fix or whether to rebuild, and it’s credited toward a build if you go ahead.
• Extras. Extra city pages are $149 each, branded email setup is $79, and a logo and brand kit starts at $350.

Or start with the free site read below and I’ll tell you what I’d build for your trade.