The honest answer is "between $0 and $30,000", which helps nobody. Here is what the price actually depends on, what each tier buys in Los Angeles in 2026, and how to spend the money once instead of twice.
The four price tiers
| Tier | Typical price | What you get | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself (Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace) | $0 to $50 a month plus your evenings | A template, your photos, a contact form | A new company that needs a page this week |
| Freelance marketplace | $500 to $3,000 | A WordPress or builder site, often a bought theme, little copy, no tracking | Tight budget, you supply the content |
| Independent specialist | $6,000 to $9,000 | Custom design, written copy, fast build, tracking, Google Business Profile, handover | An established contractor who wants leads, not a brochure |
| Agency | $12,000 to $24,000 and up | Same deliverables plus account management, often paid over 12 months | A company with a marketing budget and several people involved |
The agency numbers are not a guess: one well-known contractor marketing agency publishes $12,000 for a templated site and $24,000 for a custom one, split into twelve monthly payments. Commonly quoted averages for a US small-business website sit between $5,000 and $25,000. My own full build or transformation for a Los Angeles contractor is $6,000 to $9,000, billed 50% at kickoff and 50% at launch.
What actually moves the price
Number of pages that have to sell. A home page, six service pages, four area pages, a project gallery and an about page is a different job from a one-page site. Every service you want to rank for needs its own page with its own copy.
The project gallery. Contractors live on before-and-after. A gallery that the office can update itself, with 70 projects, captions, filters and fast-loading photos, is real engineering. A static grid of twelve photos is an afternoon.
Copy. Someone has to write the words. If it is you, the site takes three months longer. If it is the builder, it costs more and launches on time. Copy written from search data (what homeowners actually type) is what makes the site rank.
Speed. A site that scores 90 on mobile is built differently from one that scores 45, and the difference is where the hours go: image pipelines, fonts, no page-builder bloat. Nineteen out of twenty contractor sites in LA fail Google's speed threshold; getting on the right side of that line is part of the price.
Tracking. Analytics, Tag Manager, call tracking, form tracking, every lead tagged with its source. Cheap sites skip it, and then nobody knows what the ads did.
Integrations. CRM, booking, review widgets, financing calculators, an AI assistant that answers pricing questions at 11 pm. Each one is useful, each one is scope.
Photography. Real photos of your crew and your projects beat stock every time, and they cost a day with a photographer, roughly $800 to $2,000 in LA.
What the price should always include
Whatever you pay, do not sign without these in writing:
- Mobile speed target (I put it in the contract: under 2.5 seconds for the main content on a phone).
- Every page written, not "client to provide copy".
- Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and call tracking installed and tested.
- Google Business Profile connected to the site with tracked links.
- The domain, hosting and all accounts in your name, not the builder's.
- A handover document: how to add a project, change a phone number, publish a post.
- 30 days of fixes after launch.
Red flags
- A price without a page list. You will pay for the "extras" later.
- "SEO included" with no explanation of which pages target which searches.
- Monthly payments for the site itself with no ownership until the end. If you stop paying, the site disappears.
- A demo that looks fast on the salesperson's laptop. Ask for the mobile PageSpeed score of the last three sites they built.
Ongoing costs
Hosting for a well-built site is $0 to $40 a month; a domain is $15 to $20 a year. Care plans (updates, backups, small edits, monthly report) run from $150 a month for maintenance only to $1,200 to $3,500 a month when they include ads and lead management. Decide up front whether you are buying a website or buying leads; the second one costs more and is the only one that pays for itself.
The math that matters
A Los Angeles kitchen remodel starts around $55,000. A bathroom around $30,000. One extra signed job a year covers any site on this list; the question is which site produces that job. For a design-build client in Venice, the rebuilt site and the ads behind it took quiz submissions from 6 to 20 a month in the second month after launch. That is the number to buy, not the number of pages.
If you want to know which tier your business actually needs, the free audit will tell you before you spend anything.
Free 24-hour marketing audit: a personalized written report and a prioritized 90-day action plan for your business. No obligation, no sales call.