Contractor website cost in 2026: what you'll actually pay

A contractor website cost in 2026 runs from a few hundred dollars a year if you build it yourself on a website builder, to several thousand if you hire someone, plus a smaller yearly bill that never goes away: domain, hosting, email and upkeep. Upwork's September 2026 cost guide puts a freelancer-built business website at roughly $2,000 to $8,000 or more. The build price gets all the attention, but the number that decides whether you got a good deal is what you pay in year two, and whether you own what you paid for.

Plumber, electrician, HVAC, pest control, auto repair: the small business website cost figures for 2026 are the same whatever your trade. Below we split the bill into its parts, put year one next to year two for each way of getting a site, and finish with the questions to ask before anyone gets your card number.

Prices below are the ones listed on each company's own pricing or help pages in September 2026. They change often, promotions come and go, and taxes and fees get added at checkout. Check the live page before you decide.

What you're actually paying for

However a quote is packaged, it's some mix of these six things:

1. The build. Design, pages, writing and setup. Usually paid once.
2. The domain. Your address, like yourplumbing.com. Paid every year.
3. Hosting or a builder plan. The computer that serves your site. Monthly or yearly.
4. Business email. you@yourplumbing.com instead of a Gmail address. Per person, per month.
5. Maintenance. Updates, backups, fixes, small edits. Monthly, hourly, or you do it.
6. Content. Photos of your work, your crew and your van, plus the words on each page.

When someone gives you one number, ask which of the six it covers. A cheap build on an expensive monthly plan isn't cheap, and a "free" site you can't take with you isn't free.

Domain and hosting: the small bills that keep renewing

The domain

It's the cheapest line on the bill and the easiest one to lose control of.

Namecheap's domains page in September 2026 listed a new .com at $11.28 for the first year (a 25% sale off $14.98), renewing at $18.48. Every registrar does some version of this. Budget for the renewal number, since that's what you'll pay every year after the first.

Upwork's guide gives a general range of $10 to $20 a year for a domain, which lines up.

Most website builders throw the domain in free for year one. Squarespace's pricing page, for example, says its annual plans include one year of free domain registration. After that you renew it like anyone else.

Hosting or the builder plan

On a website builder, hosting is baked into the plan price. If your site is built on WordPress or something similar, hosting is a separate bill.

Upwork lists hosting anywhere from $2.50 to over $500 a month depending on the type. A five-page trade site lives at the very bottom of that range. You're not running an online store with thousands of visitors a day, so don't let anyone sell you a server built for one.

Business email

A matching address makes your quotes and invoices look like they came from a real business. It also keeps working if you switch phone or internet provider.

Google Workspace's billing help page lists these prices in US dollars per user, per month, in September 2026:

Plan	Flexible (cancel any time)	Annual commitment
Business Starter	$8.40	$7
Business Standard	$16.80	$14
Business Plus	$26.40	$22

Watch the fine print on annual: you commit for the year and owe the full commitment even if you cancel early. A one or two person shop rarely needs more than Business Starter on the flexible plan. (For comparison, two people on Business Starter annual works out to $7 x 2 x 12 = $168 a year.)

What the build costs, depending on who does it

Doing it yourself on a builder

Least cash, most Sunday nights.

Squarespace's pricing page listed Basic at $19 a month billed annually ($25 month to month) and Core at $29 a month billed annually ($39 month to month) in September 2026. Both come with a free domain for the first year on annual billing.

GoDaddy listed its Website Builder "as low as $9.99/mo" on an annual term. The renewal price wasn't on that page, so ask or check at checkout before you assume that's what you'll pay long term.

Upwork puts a basic DIY site at around $300 to $500 in the first year, which is about what those plans add up to.

What nobody puts on the invoice is your time. Say you bill $100 an hour and the site eats 15 hours before you're happy with it. That's $1,500. If you don't know your real hourly number yet, the break-even rate calculator works it out in a few minutes. Worth doing before you decide your Sunday afternoons are free.

Hiring a freelancer

Upwork's September 2026 guide says a business website typically costs $2,000 to $8,000 or more to have built, with web designers at $15 to $39 an hour. Its separate web designer rates page gives a median of $21 an hour on the platform.

Those are marketplace rates. A local designer will often charge more. And what you get for the money is all over the place: one freelancer writes your copy, sets up Google and hands you every login, while the next drops in a template and leaves you to fill the blanks.

If you want someone looking after the site afterwards, Upwork lists maintenance and security at $50 to $200 a month.

Hiring an agency

We couldn't find a credible published price range for agency-built trade websites, so we're not going to invent one. Agencies tend to roll design, writing, project management and sometimes ongoing marketing into a single quote. Get two or three in writing and go through them line by line against the six parts at the top of this page.

One real example of a done-for-you service: GoDaddy's pricing page listed Website Design Services at a one-time $499.99 plus an annual hosting fee (the hosting amount wasn't shown).

Monthly "website plus SEO" subscriptions

Plenty of companies that sell to trades will give you a site for little or nothing upfront, then charge monthly for hosting, edits and some search marketing. That can work if you want someone else handling all of it and you know exactly what the monthly fee buys.

The risk lives in the contract. Look for minimum terms, fees to leave, and whether the domain and the site stay with them when you cancel. The questions further down cover this.

Year one vs year two, side by side

Year one usually looks fine. Year two is where people get caught.

The figures use prices checked on official pages in September 2026 where we have them. Anything marked "example" is a made-up round number to show the shape of the cost, not a quote from any company.

Option	Year 1	Year 2	Who owns the domain	Main catch
DIY builder (Squarespace Core, annual)	$348 plan, domain free first year	$348 plan plus domain renewal at Squarespace's price	You, in your account	Your time, and you're tied to that builder's design tools
Freelancer build	$2,000 to $8,000+ (Upwork's range), plus hosting and domain	Hosting and domain only, plus $50 to $200 a month if you pay for maintenance (Upwork's range)	Depends who registered it. Ask.	Quality varies a lot; check what's handed over
Agency build	Get quotes (no verified range)	Hosting, domain and any retainer	Depends on contract	Retainers that renew automatically
Monthly trade-website subscription	Example: $0 setup plus $150 a month = $1,800	Example: $150 a month = $1,800	Often the provider	Minimum terms, exit fees, losing the site when you leave
One-time bundle (TradeShopKit)	$399, domain and hosting included	Domain and hosting renew at the provider's price	You	Changes after launch are yours to make or pay for

Add business email to any row: about $84 a year per person on Google Workspace Business Starter annual.

A monthly fee feels small when it leaves your account. Over two or three years it often costs more than a one-time build, and the option with the cheapest first year isn't always the cheapest by year three. Run it out three years before you pick.

Photos, words and add-ons

Photos

Stock shots of smiling models in spotless hard hats don't make the phone ring. A photo of your actual van parked outside a customer's house does. So does your crew, and a finished install. A phone and a bright day cost nothing. A local photographer for a half-day shoot costs more, but you'll use those pictures on your site, your Google Business Profile and your social posts for years.

Start a folder on your phone today. Every job that looks good when you're done, get a before and an after.

Words

Somebody has to write a page for each service you offer and each area you cover. If your builder or designer doesn't include writing, that somebody is you. The service page copy generator gives you a first draft for a service page that you can then rework in your own words.

Add-ons that cost extra

The usual upsells. Some earn their keep, some don't for a small shop:

• Online booking or scheduling software: handy if you run set time slots, and usually its own monthly subscription.
• Live chat or chatbots. Only worth it if someone will actually answer. (If nobody's watching it between jobs, it just collects unanswered messages.)
• Paid ads management is a separate service with its own budget. It's not part of a website.
• "SEO packages." Ask for a written list of what gets done each month. If they can't give you one, don't pay for it.
• Extra pages are fine when they target a real service or a town you actually work in. Padding pages do nothing.

Some things shouldn't cost extra at all. A Google Business Profile is free to create, as Google says on its own Business Profile page. Paying someone to set it up is your call, but you should never pay a monthly fee just to have one.

The costs that show up a year later

Everyone compares build prices. These are the lines that cost people money once the site's been up a while.

Renewal prices

First-year discounts on domains, builders and hosting are standard. That Namecheap .com goes from $11.28 to $18.48 on renewal. Ask "what does this cost in year two?" every time, and write the answer down.

Not owning your domain

If a designer or website company registers your domain in their own account, they control it. Fall out with them, or watch them go out of business, and getting it back can be slow or impossible. Meanwhile your phone number, your reviews and the lettering on the side of your van all point to an address you don't control.

Ownership comes down to who's listed as the registrant. ICANN, the body that oversees domain names, says in its guidance for domain holders that you have the right to move your domain to another registrar, and your registrar has to give you the transfer code (often called an auth code) within five calendar days of asking. It also notes a domain usually can't be moved for 60 days after it's first registered or after the owner's details change. None of that helps if your name isn't the one on the record.

Lock-in

Some platforms let you leave but keep your design. Some monthly contracts have a minimum term or a cancellation fee. Some won't hand over the site files at all. Find out before you sign, because once you want out it's too late to negotiate.

"Website plus SEO" contracts that never end

A monthly "website and SEO" bill can be good value. It can also be a hosting fee with a marketing sticker on it. Simple test: can they show you, in writing, what they did last month and what changed because of it? If the only thing that changes is the date on the invoice, you're paying rent.

How many jobs does the website need to pay for itself?

Turn the yearly cost into jobs. It's a lot easier to weigh than a dollar figure on a pricing page.

A made-up example: your site, domain, hosting and email come to $600 in year one, and your average job leaves $200 profit after parts and labor. Three extra jobs over the whole year covers it. If your average job leaves $80, you need about eight.

You can't work out profit per job without your real costs, so start with the break-even rate calculator, which tells you what an hour of your time actually costs the business. Then the marketing budget calculator shows where the website sits next to everything else you spend to bring in work, like van signage, directories or ads.

If a site can't plausibly bring in that handful of jobs, spend less. If it clearly can, the cheapest option isn't automatically the right one.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

Print this out, or have it open on the call. Get the answers in writing.

• Who will be listed as the owner of my domain? It should be you or your business, in an account you can log into.
• What does it cost in year two, and every year after? Domain, hosting, plan, email and any maintenance.
• Is there a minimum contract term? And is there a fee to cancel?
• If I leave, what do I take with me? The domain, the content, the photos, the design files?
• Do I get the logins? Domain registrar, hosting or builder, Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Search Console.
• Who writes the words on each page? If it's you, how many pages and by when?
• Is click-to-call on every page and does the quote form send to my phone or email?
• Who makes changes after launch, and what do they cost? A new service, a new phone number, new photos.
• What exactly is included in any monthly "SEO" fee? Ask for a written monthly list.
• How long until it's live? And what happens if it isn't?

A decent provider answers all of these without squirming. If they dodge the domain question, walk away.

Where the TradeShopKit bundle fits

Our website bundle is the "one-time bundle" row in the table above. You get a five-page site written for you, click-to-call on every page, a quote request form, Google Business Profile setup, and Google Analytics and Search Console connected. Domain and hosting are included for the first year. It's $399 one-time (was $500), nothing monthly is required, and it goes live within 10 days or you get your money back.

About year two, since we've spent this whole page telling you to ask: after the first year, the domain and hosting renew at the provider's price, same as they would for any site. Put that in the budget from day one. Details are on the build page.

Quick answers

How much does a plumber website cost?

Same as any small trade site: a few hundred dollars a year to build it yourself on a builder, or the $2,000 to $8,000+ range Upwork gives for a freelancer-built business website, plus yearly domain, hosting and email. Nothing about plumbing pushes the price up.

What does an HVAC website cost to run each year?

Budget for the domain renewal (Namecheap listed a .com renewal at $18.48 in September 2026), hosting or a builder plan, and email at about $7 to $8.40 per person per month on Google Workspace Business Starter. Add maintenance if you pay someone to do it.

What is a normal website maintenance cost?

Upwork's 2026 guide lists $50 to $200 a month for paid maintenance and security. A simple five-page trade site that doesn't change much can often be kept up by you in an hour or two a month.

Is a free website good enough for a trade business?

Fine for a test. Before you rely on one, check what the free plan leaves out, especially whether you can connect your own domain. An address like yourbusiness.com is yours to control and keep if you switch providers.

Should I pay monthly or one-time for a website?

Add up three years of each, renewals and exit fees included. Monthly is easier on cash flow but often costs more over time, and you need to know what happens to your site and domain the day you stop paying.

Do I need to pay for a Google Business Profile?

No. Google says creating a Business Profile is free. You can pay someone to set it up or manage it if you want, but the listing itself costs nothing.

Before you sign anything

For every option on your list, write down two things: the year-two cost, and whose name goes on the domain. Those two answers will knock out more bad deals than any feature list. Then go with whichever pays for itself in the fewest jobs and leaves your address in your hands.