The short answer
What a contractor website costs in Canada depends on how many pages it has, who writes the copy, who owns the site and what hosting costs after launch. Rega's published price for a 10-page site is $1,500 one time, inside the Solo system at $750 a month. Ask any quote what is included.
In this article
- Why is there no single price for a contractor website?
- What makes a contractor website cost more or less?
- What does Rega charge for a contractor website?
- Who owns a contractor website after it is built?
- What does a website price usually leave out?
- What should you ask before you accept a website quote?
- Does the price buy phone calls?
- When is a new website not the right spend?
- Common questions
- Want to know if your market is still open?
Why is there no single price for a contractor website?
Because two quotes with the same number on them can be for different things. One buys a five-page template with your logo dropped in. Another buys a site with every page written for your trade, your photos worked in and your enquiry form wired to something that tells you where the call came from. The price follows the work.
We are not going to print a market range here. We have no sourced figure for what other agencies, freelancers or site builders charge in Canada, and a number with no source is the kind of thing that makes an article worthless. What we can do is show you what moves the price, what to ask, and what we charge ourselves.
What makes a contractor website cost more or less?
Five things do most of it.
Pages. Every service page is a page someone has to write, lay out and check. A site with a home page, contact page and three service pages is a different job from a 15-page site with a page for each service and a gallery.
Who writes the words. Copy written from scratch in your voice takes real time. Copy lifted from your old site, or filled in from a template, takes very little, and it reads that way to a homeowner.
Photos and video. Real photos of your finished jobs do more than anything else on the page. Somebody has to take them, and on most builds that somebody is you. Ask whether a quote includes photography or whether you supply it.
What the site does after someone fills in the form. A contact form that emails an inbox is one thing. A form that feeds a system that texts the person back and tracks the source is another. Habitat for Humanity MVI’s CEO, Trevor Coyle, described the second kind in a client testimonial: the site was connected to their CRM, “so all our form submissions now flow directly into it, which has saved us a lot of time.”
Brand. A site is cheaper to build on a logo and colours that already exist. If there is no brand to build on, someone has to make one first, and that is a separate piece of work.
What does Rega charge for a contractor website?
Rega does not sell a website as a stand-alone product on its price list. The site is built as part of one of three systems, and each one has a published build fee and monthly fee. All figures are in Canadian dollars.
Solo: $1,500 one time to build, then $750 a month. It includes a 10-page website built for you, a lead system for contractors that catches every call and text, review requests after a job, call tracking, and SEO for contractors content every month.
Crew: $1,750 one time, then $2,000 a month. It is a 15-page site, plus Facebook or Google ads managed up to $3,000 of spend, your Google Business Profile managed, and a job pipeline built for you.
Company: $1,750 one time, then $3,500 a month. It adds both ad platforms managed up to $7,500 of spend, email and SMS campaigns to your own customer list and seasonal campaigns with landing pages.
Two limits on those numbers. Ad spend is never inside our fee: you pay Facebook or Google directly, and the figures above are a ceiling on the spend we manage. And the build fee is the price of the site when a monthly system goes with it. It is not a quote for a site on its own. If you want only a site, ask us for a quote in writing, and because a fixed quote is the price, the number we give you is the number you pay.
It is month to month: cancel with 10 days notice before renewal.
Who owns a contractor website after it is built?
Ask this before you ask anything else, because it is the question that costs the most to find out late. On a site built for you, it should be clear in writing whether you own the site and its code, whether your domain is registered in your name, and what happens to the site if you stop paying or stop working with the company.
Our published answer is that you own the site and the code at the end of it. Whatever company you talk to, get theirs in writing.
What does a website price usually leave out?
The recurring costs, mostly. A quote for the build says nothing about what you pay in year two, and that is where agencies differ most.
- Hosting. Somebody pays to keep the site online. Find out who, how much, and whether it is in the monthly fee or a separate bill.
- Changes after launch. Ask whether edits are included, how many, and what an extra one costs.
- Domain. Ask who registers and renews the domain name, and whose name it is in.
- Photography. If the quote assumes you supply photos, plan the time to take them.
- Ad spend. If the site comes with ads, the money paid to Facebook or Google is separate from the management fee.
What should you ask before you accept a website quote?
Six questions cover most of it.
- How many pages is this, and can you list them?
- Who writes the copy, and is it written from scratch or adapted from my old site?
- Whose photos are used, and who takes them?
- Who owns the site, the code and the domain?
- What do I pay every month after launch, and what does that cover?
- Is the price a fixed quote or an estimate?
The last one matters more than it sounds. A fixed quote is the price. An estimate is a guess that can move, and you want to know which one you are holding.
Does the price buy phone calls?
No, and nobody can honestly promise that it does. A website is the place calls get caught, not the thing that creates the demand. A good one makes a homeowner who found you through Google, a neighbour or an ad trust you enough to ring. It cannot fix a business that does not answer the phone. If your site looks fine and the calls still are not coming, see why a contractor website is not getting calls.
What a site can do is be the part you control. Sterling Excavation’s owner, Sterling Anderson, reviewed his site build on Google: “Adian did an amazing job building our website. He was professional, easy to work with, and delivered exactly what we were looking for.” That is what a site build should feel like: clear, agreed in advance and delivered as described.
When is a new website not the right spend?
If you will not be involved. A site built for a trades business works when the owner supplies photos of finished work, says how they want to come across, gives access to their accounts and answers questions quickly. An owner who takes no part gets a worse site whatever they pay, and we would rather say so up front.
It is also worth waiting if your current site already takes enquiries and the real problem is that nobody answers them quickly. That is a follow-up problem, not a design one.
Common questions
Can I just buy a website from you with no monthly fee? Our published prices are the three systems above. A site on its own is quoted one to one, and we do not publish a price for it. Ask us and we will put it in writing.
Do I need a blog or articles on my site? Not on day one. Articles are how a site gets found for questions homeowners ask before they hire, and they are part of Solo and above as monthly SEO content. A new business can start with the core pages.
How long does a site take? It depends on how fast the photos and answers come back from you, so we do not print a single number. Delay is almost always on the owner’s side of the table, and we say so when we quote.
Do you guarantee calls or rankings? No. We do not promise lead counts, sales or search rankings, and nobody else should either.
Want to know if your market is still open?
We take one client per trade per market, so the first thing worth finding out is whether yours is available. Ask for a market check through the contact page: tell us your trade and where you work, and we will tell you where it stands before anyone talks about a price.
