The short answer
Budget about $5,000 to build and decide on upkeep separately.
A contractor or home service website built by Lithium typically costs $5,000, and about nine out of ten of our builds come in at that price. That covers planning, design, copy, the WordPress build, tracking and launch. Bigger sites with many services, regions or integrations get a fixed proposal after a 30-minute discovery call, so you know the number before anything starts. Hosting and maintenance is a separate, optional $99 a month.
You own what you pay for: the domain, the hosting account, the WordPress install and the content. That matters more than the price, and we come back to it below.
| Work or cost | Price |
|---|---|
| Typical website build | Typically $5,000 per project |
| Larger website | Fixed proposal after a 30-minute discovery call |
| Hosting and maintenance (optional) | $99 a month, or $1,188 for twelve months |
| Typical build plus twelve months of the plan | $6,188 |
| Domain renewal | Paid to your domain registrar |
Website budget calculator
Add a typical $5,000 build to your monthly website costs over the months you choose. Enter whole months from 1 to 120. For monthly costs, enter 99 if you plan on Lithium’s optional hosting and maintenance, add any other monthly software you pay for, and turn yearly charges like domain renewal into a monthly amount.
Larger sites with a fixed proposal fall outside this typical-build total. SEO and advertising are separate budgets.
Three ways to get a website
Do it yourself, hire a freelancer or hire an agency.
Every contractor website gets built one of three ways, and each one trades money for time and risk differently. Website builders charge a monthly subscription and leave the writing, photos, setup and search work to you. Freelancers vary the most: some are excellent, some disappear mid-project, and the price tells you little about which you have. Agencies cost more than a builder subscription, and a good one hands you a finished, tracked site and stays reachable after launch.
The cheapest option on paper is often the most expensive in practice. An owner who spends forty evenings building a site has paid for it in time, and a site that never shows up in search costs you the jobs it should have brought in.
Do it yourself
- Lowest cash cost
- You write, shoot and set up everything
- Hard to rank in several towns
Freelancer
- Prices vary widely
- Quality depends on the person
- Check who owns the files
Agency
- Higher price, more done for you
- Copy, tracking and SEO setup
- Check ownership and contract terms
What moves the price
Six things that make a website cost more.
Most contractor and home service sites fit the typical $5,000 build. These are the things that push a project into a fixed proposal instead, with real examples from sites we built.
Many services or divisions
Westmore Construction does commercial steel buildings and crane service. Its rebuild went from 15 pages to 85 plus nine guides.
Many towns or regions
Each location page needs its own real content. Porter Paving’s site has 52 city pages across seven regions.
Booking and CRM integrations
Lovett Services books jobs through ServiceTitan from the site and has text-to-chat and call tracking wired in.
Custom tools
Northwest New Homes has a clickable plat map built from county parcel boundaries, showing every lot’s price and status.
Merging or migrating old sites
Lovett merged two websites into one and redirected 52 old pages one to one.
Brand work
Panda Plumbing’s project included designing the brand from scratch before the 31-page site.
What $5,000 buys
What a typical Lithium website includes.
When you compare quotes, compare what each one delivers, line by line. Here is what comes with a typical Lithium build. If another quote is lower, check which of these it leaves out and what it would cost you to add them later. If a term is new to you, the marketing glossary explains it in plain English.
- A sitemap, URL plan and page-by-page brief
- Copy written for your services and towns
- A custom design built on WordPress
- Tap-to-call and quote forms on every page
- GA4, call tracking and Google Ads conversion tags
- Schema markup and an llms.txt file for AI search
- Core Web Vitals speed targets on phones
- Redirects from your old URLs
- Testing on real phones before launch
- A private Loom walkthrough at handover
Your side of the work
Time is part of the price, too.
A Lithium build takes six to nine weeks from kickoff to launch. The site plan and sitemap come first, around week two. Design, the WordPress build and the copy run in parallel through about week six, with forms, tracking and any booking or CRM connections. Testing, redirects and launch close it out.
Your part is smaller than doing it yourself but it is not zero. Expect a kickoff call, a review of the sitemap, a review of the copy and the design, and a folder of real job photos. Name one person who can answer questions and approve pages. Quick answers from that person keep a project moving. Porter Paving went from research to launch in about three weeks.
If you build it yourself, the time goes up a lot. Writing a strong service page takes hours, and a contractor site needs a page for each service and area you want to rank for. Add photo editing, form setup, tracking and testing, and price your evenings before you call a builder subscription cheap.
Replacing a site you already have adds one more job: keeping the search rankings and links the old pages earned. Our website redesign checklist walks through the redirects, tracking and tests that protect them.
After launch
The costs that keep running, and who owns what.
Every website has running costs: the domain renewal, hosting, software updates, backups and the small edits you need through the year. With Lithium, hosting and maintenance is optional and costs $99 a month. It covers secure private hosting on a dedicated high-speed server, daily backups, software and security updates and basic website changes. Most clients choose it to keep the new site updated and running smoothly. Domain renewal stays with your registrar.
A typical $5,000 build plus twelve months of the plan comes to $6,188 for the first year. After that, the plan alone is $1,188 a year if you keep it.
Ownership is the line that matters most. Lithium clients own the domain, the hosting account, the WordPress install and the content, with or without the plan. If you ever leave, you take the whole site with you. Ask every company you get a quote from the same question: if I stop paying you, what do I keep?
Is it worth it?
Run your own payback math.
Take your average profit per job and divide $5,000 by it. That is how many extra jobs the website needs to bring in to pay for itself. For a roofer or remodeler with a big average ticket, it might be one job. For a trade with smaller tickets it is more, and those trades usually have more jobs to win.
Then track it. Lithium sets up GA4 and call tracking on every site, so after launch you can see which pages produce calls and quote requests. Match those against the jobs you booked. That gives you a real answer, not a guess.
A website on its own is a storefront. Most of the work it brings in comes from the traffic you send to it, through SEO, Google Ads and your Google Business Profile. Budget for the site first, then decide how you will bring people to it. Our guide to SEO vs. PPC covers that choice.
Before you sign
Red flags in a website quote.
The agency owns your domain
If the domain is registered in their name, you do not control your own address. Ask for it in yours.
A “free” site with a long contract
A low or no build fee paid back through a long monthly contract often means you never own the site.
A platform only they can edit
If the site runs on a system nobody else can work on, leaving means starting over.
No plan for your old URLs
A quote that never mentions redirects puts the rankings your old site earned at risk.
A vague scope
“Custom website” with no page count, no copy plan and no tracking listed is not something you can compare.
Guaranteed rankings
Nobody controls Google. A guarantee of first-page rankings is a sales line, not a plan.
