How much does a website cost for a home-service business?

Short answer: for a trades business — plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing — a real custom website typically runs somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000 as a one-time build, depending on how many pages and service areas you need covered. Anything wildly cheaper than that is usually a template with your logo dropped in, and anything wildly more expensive is probably an agency billing for overhead you don't need.

What actually moves the price:

• Number of service pages — one per service and per town you cover, since each one is a separate shot at ranking on Google
• Custom design vs. a theme — hand-built sites cost more upfront but don't look like every other contractor's site in your area
• Lead capture setup — quote forms, click-to-call, and integrations with your CRM or scheduling tool
• Copywriting — whether you're writing the content yourself or having it written for you
• Photography — real project photos convert better than stock images, and sourcing them takes time

A fair, common structure is 50% due upfront to start the project, 50% due on completion before it goes live. That protects both sides — you're not paying in full for something you haven't seen, and the person building it isn't doing unpaid work on spec.

What you should avoid: subscription-only "website" products where you never actually own the site, and cheap DIY-builder templates that look fine on a laptop but load slowly and rank poorly on the mobile searches most of your customers are actually using.