Straight answers for local service businesses
A small business website usually costs between $0 and $5,000 up front, plus $15 to $300 a month to keep it running. Most local service businesses land in one of three places: doing it yourself for a few hundred dollars a year, hiring a freelancer for $1,500 to $5,000 one time, or paying a monthly service in the $75 to $300 range that covers build, hosting, and updates. An agency build runs $8,000 and up, and for a plumber, landscaper, or cleaner working one town, that is almost always more site than you need.
Here are the honest ranges. These are what local service businesses really pay, not list prices from a sales page.
If you are a plumber in Medford or a landscaper covering three towns, the middle two options are where you should be looking. Everything above that is buying a suit you'll never wear.
Because "website" describes a business card and a booking platform with the same word.
A five-page site for a painter with a contact form is a couple of days of work for someone who knows what they're doing. A site with online scheduling, service-area landing pages for twelve towns, a customer portal, and payment processing is a month of work. Same word, wildly different builds.
The second reason: you're mostly paying for time, not software. The tools are cheap or free. Writing the copy, gathering the photos, setting up the pages, testing on a phone, connecting the form to your email so leads actually arrive, that's the expensive part. When a quote seems high, ask how many hours it represents. When it seems suspiciously low, ask the same question.
The build price gets all the attention. The recurring costs are what surprise people six months later.
Budget $30 to $80 a month total if you're self-managing a simple site. That's the real floor.
Spend money on these:
Skip these, at least at first: custom illustration, animated hero videos, a blog you'll never write, a chatbot, and any "SEO package" sold before anyone has looked at your Google Business Profile.
Sometimes, yes. If you're a solo cleaner just getting started and money is tight, a $200-a-year Squarespace site with good photos and your phone number up top will do the job. It's better than no site.
The catch is time. Most trades who go the DIY route get about 70 percent done and then get busy with actual work. The half-finished site sits there for two years with placeholder text on the about page. If you know that's you, paying someone is not laziness. It's the cheaper choice once you count the jobs the dead site didn't win.
Ask these four questions before you sign anything:
A $2,500 build from someone who answers those clearly is a better deal than a $900 build from someone who doesn't.
If you're a one to five person local service business, plan on $1,500 to $3,500 one time, or $100 to $200 a month all-in. That gets you a fast, clean, five to eight page site that shows up when someone searches your trade plus your town.
One job pays for it. For a plumber, that's one water heater replacement. For a landscaper, one patio. Judge the cost against that, not against the sticker.
And whatever you spend, get your Google Business Profile squared away first. It's free, it takes an afternoon, and it's the thing most local customers actually see before they ever reach your site.
You can build one on a free tier of a site builder, but it will usually carry the platform's branding and a URL like yourbusiness.wixsite.com, which looks unfinished to customers. Buying your own domain for about $15 a year fixes most of that. A free Google Business Profile is genuinely valuable and costs nothing.
A simple five-page site takes one to three weeks with a good builder, and most of that wait is waiting on you for photos and details about your services. DIY takes as long as you have evenings for, which in practice is often months.
Not usually, once you count it up. WordPress software is free but you pay for hosting, a theme, paid plugins, and security updates, and it needs more maintenance. For a straightforward local service site, a hosted builder is often the cheaper and lower-hassle path.
Pay once if you're comfortable handling hosting, updates, and edits yourself, or if you have someone on hand who is. Pay monthly if you want the whole thing off your plate and expect to change content as your services or service area shift. Neither is a scam, they're just different tradeoffs.
Not at the start. A well-built site with your town names, real service pages, and a complete Google Business Profile covers the basics. Consider paid SEO help only after you've been live six months and can see what's working.
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