What a contractor's website actually costs in North Jersey

Ask three companies what a website costs and you will get four hundred dollars, three thousand, and fifteen thousand. All three are quoting the same five pages. Nobody explains the gap, so most contractors assume the expensive one is padding and the cheap one is a trick.

Neither is quite right. Here is what the money actually buys.

Under $1,000

At this price somebody is putting your logo and your phone number into a template. It will have a stock photo of a roof on the front, a services page with six paragraphs that could belong to any company in any state, and a contact form.

This is not a scam and it is not always the wrong call. If you have no site at all, a cheap template beats nothing, because a homeowner who cannot find you does not call you. But understand what you are getting: a site that looks exactly like the other eleven contractors in your county who bought the same template, built on a platform that charges you monthly forever and keeps the site if you stop paying.

The other thing you are not getting is anybody who knows your trade. A roofing template does not know that ice dams are the thing people in Bergen County search for in February.

$2,000 to $4,000

This is where a site gets built for your company specifically. Someone asks which jobs you want more of, which of your services make money and which you took on because a customer asked, and what a homeowner is worried about when they call you.

Then they write the pages around that. Your service list becomes the three or four jobs that pay, in the words people type into Google. Not eleven services in alphabetical order. Your photographs are of your work. Your licence number and your insurance are somewhere a nervous homeowner can find them.

For most contractors doing residential work in this area, this is the right number. My own one-time builds start at $2,500.

$8,000 and up

Above about eight thousand you are paying for things most contractors do not need yet. Custom photography and video. A booking system wired into your scheduling software. A customer portal. Multi-location structure if you run crews out of three yards.

If you are doing five million a year and you have an office manager whose job includes the website, this is money well spent. If you are two trucks and a guy who answers the phone from the cab, it is not.

The part of the quote that matters most

Ask what happens after launch.

A website is not a one-time purchase in practice, because the thing it sits on keeps moving. Certificates expire. Hosts change their PHP version. A plugin stops being maintained. Google changes what it measures. Six months after launch, somebody has to care about that, and if nobody does the site quietly stops working.

So the real question in any quote is: when I need a phone number changed or a new service added, what happens? If the answer is a per-hour rate with no commitment to turnaround, you will stop asking, and within two years your site will list a service you no longer offer and a phone number you no longer use. I have seen that more often than I have seen a hacked site.

What I charge, and why it is on the website

Two options. A one-time build from $2,500. You own it outright and host it wherever you like. Or $500 a month with nothing down. That covers the build, the hosting, unlimited edits and updates for as long as you stay. Six-month minimum, then month to month.

The monthly is more expensive over five years. I say that out loud because it is true, and because the trade-off is real: you get the site now instead of in three months, and you never get an invoice for changing a phone number.

Both numbers are on the pricing page. That is unusual in this business and it is deliberate. If someone will not give you a range before a discovery call, the range is not the problem. The call is a sales process, and you are the product.

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