As someone who has built websites for over 30 years, here’s a secret about website costs.
Just because you pay $25,000 instead of $1,500 doesn’t mean you’re getting something that’s better or higher quality in any way.
Ensure you know how to go beyond the aesthetics of how it will look.
The paint job is nice, but we care more about the engine and transmission.
In other words, consider where the content is coming from—location service pages, blogs, profiles of team members, your reviews, etc.
What good is a nice-looking purse that is empty?
Let’s take BrandtHavac, for example. Their site design seems to be okay, but they’re using stock images instead of their own.
The inputs to the website must come from you, not magic AI tools– though AI tools can help edit this like a smart VA.
For example, BrandtHavac does not use its own content in some parts of the website. As explained above, they’re using Stock images, which can negatively affect their SEO.
You must be able to measure how many phone calls you’re getting and where they come from, meaning digital plumbing has to be in place.
A simple one-pager checklist for that, too.
If you’re a local service business, usually $850 is enough website cost to build your site and meet all the criteria I mentioned above.
You can also hire a VA on UpWork to clone another site you like, put it on WordPress, and host it on WP Engine with our standard set of plug-ins.
If you want someone in the US to do it, multiply the $850 price by 10X.
In fact, hiring from the US doesn’t matter; what really matters is hitting the site’s goals following EEAT (Expertise—Experience—Authority—Trust).
In other words, does your site demonstrate that you have expertise, experience, authority, and trust in your services?
Let’s use Bee Friendly Pest Control’s site as an example to demonstrate EEAT. If you look at their site, you will notice that they use real images to showcase their products and services.
Using real images shows that they have expertise, experience, authority, and trust in what they do.
If you want coaching, consulting, or agency-like services, multiply the price by 30X to accommodate a standard 3X agency markup on labor.
There is nothing wrong with paying $25K for a website, but be sure you’re itemizing what you’re getting because most US-based “designers” hire someone else anyway and pocket the difference.
$850 for the actual build-out (likely the agency is subbing out to someone, who then subs it out to someone else)– then the overhead of salespeople (they need to be paid), marketing, overhead, and a profit for the owner.
Hope this gives you insight into what websites actually cost.
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