If you are a contractor or trades business owner in Vancouver trying to figure out what a website should cost, you have probably gotten wildly different answers. One quote is a few hundred dollars. Another is five figures. A web design agency sent a proposal full of line items you did not understand.
Here is a plain breakdown of what you are actually choosing between in 2026, what changes the number, and what to watch for.
Updated February 2026.
TLDR: The useful question is not what a website costs, it is how the work is billed and how much the site has to do. At Digitari, Website Monthly is $150 a month with hosting included and no contract, and sites that need real functionality behind them are scoped and quoted per project. Ongoing plans run from $35/mo for hosting to $300/mo for fully managed local marketing.
Marketplace and gig-site listings
This is the bottom of the market, and it shows. What you usually get is a Squarespace or Wix template with your logo dropped in and some text copy-pasted from your Facebook page. There is often no performance testing, no schema markup, and no Google Search Console setup. Sometimes the copy is lifted from another business in your industry. The person who built it can be hard to reach a few weeks later. It is not a website strategy. It is a placeholder, and it usually costs more to fix than to build properly the first time.
DIY template builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy)
If you are going to use a template platform, building it yourself is at least honest about what it is. You pay a monthly platform fee, setup takes a few weekends, and the result is functional but generic. These sites are harder to customize as your business grows, and you are renting the platform rather than owning the site. For a trades company competing in Vancouver, this is a floor, not a strategy.
A custom site billed monthly
This is what we do. Website, Monthly is $150 a month for a custom 7-page site: home, about, contact, a services hub, and three service pages. Hosting, SSL, and lead capture forms are included, and you get 12 content updates a year turned around in two business days. Extra service or service area pages are $15 a month each. You register and own your domain, there is no contract. It goes live in about a week.
The point of billing monthly is not that it is the cheap option. It is that a website stops being something you have to find a large amount of money for before you can start.
A custom build, scoped per project
Some sites need to do more than present information. Customer logins, booking and scheduling, integrations with the software you already run, custom forms and workflows, anything with a database behind it. That work is not a package, so we do not publish a price for it. Custom builds are scoped on a call and quoted per project, with a fixed quote before any work starts.
Agency retainers and hourly billing
Larger agencies typically bill hourly or on a retainer. The thing to understand about hourly billing is that you do not know the final number until the invoice arrives, because the number depends on how long the work takes rather than what you agreed to. If you go this route, ask for a cap, ask what happens when scope changes, and get both answers in writing.
Ongoing plans
A website without ongoing work loses ground over time. Hosting on its own is $35/mo and keeps your site live, secure, and backed up. Google Business Profile management is $150/mo plus a $100 one-time setup. Digitari Presence is $300/mo for fully managed local marketing: managed profile, reviews, weekly posts, fresh content, and a monthly report. It runs on a site we built.
Number of pages is the biggest variable. A seven-page site and a twenty-page site are completely different amounts of work. Each page needs custom copy, SEO optimization, schema markup, and mobile testing.
Custom design versus template matters. A site designed around your brand and your conversion goals, with copy written for your business, is more work than applying your logo to a template, and it is the difference between looking like your competitors and looking like yourself.
Functionality adds scope faster than pages do. Booking systems, live availability calendars, CRM connections, and customer logins all require real development rather than another page of content. This is the line between a monthly site and a scoped custom build.
Content is often a hidden cost. Some providers quote a low build price and charge separately for writing the words on each page. Ask directly. At Digitari, copy is part of the work, and you provide the details about your business while we write the rest.
The cheapest tier is a consistent money pit. Whatever you save at the start rarely survives contact with reality. Poorly built sites have no performance baseline, rank for nothing, and cannot be handed cleanly to another developer because the underlying code is usually a mess. You end up paying to rebuild from scratch anyway.
If you are not sure what hourly rate your business needs to charge to cover its actual costs, the hourly rate calculator works this out from your income target, overhead, and billable hours.
Uncapped hourly billing is a different issue. If nobody will tell you the total before work starts, you are the one carrying the risk of the project taking longer than expected. A fixed quote moves that risk back to the person doing the work.
WordPress plus page builder setups tend to be quoted cheaply and maintained expensively. The platform is free, but update overhead, plugin conflicts, and performance issues compound over the years you own the site. Ask who is doing that maintenance and what it costs before you commit.
Vague deliverables are the real red flag. If a proposal cannot tell you how many pages you are getting, who writes the copy, who owns the site at the end, and what happens if you want to leave, those answers are unlikely to improve after you have paid.
The useful question is not what a website costs. It is whether the site will actually rank, convert, and bring in work, or sit there looking fine and doing nothing. That difference is entirely in the execution, not in the price tag.
Running the jobs it brings in profitably is a separate problem. The job profit margin calculator is a quick way to verify that your current rates cover materials, labour, and overhead before you scale up your lead volume. See what we build and what it costs, or see Website, Monthly.
How much does a contractor website cost in Canada?
It depends on how the work is billed and how much the site has to do. Some providers charge a single amount up front, some bill hourly with no cap, and some bill monthly. At Digitari, Website Monthly is $150 a month for a custom 7-page site with hosting, SSL, and lead forms included, plus 12 content updates a year, and there is no contract. Sites that need customer logins, booking, or integrations are scoped and quoted per project.
What is included in a contractor website build?
A proper build should include custom design, mobile-optimized pages for each service you offer, location pages for each city you serve, on-page SEO with proper title tags and meta descriptions, and schema markup. Ask specifically whether copy writing and ongoing hosting are included or billed separately.
How long does it take to build a trades business website?
A focused custom build typically takes 1 to 3 weeks from kickoff to launch depending on scope and how quickly you provide business details, photos, and feedback. At Digitari, a Website Monthly site goes live in about a week from the day we start.
Should a contractor website be built on WordPress?
WordPress works but comes with tradeoffs. Page builder setups add plugin conflicts and update overhead, and that maintenance burden compounds over time. Statically generated frameworks like Next.js have no plugin stack to patch. The right answer depends on who is maintaining the site after launch.
Do I need a new website or can I just do SEO on my current one?
It depends on the foundation. If your current site loads slowly, has no dedicated service pages, and was built on a page builder, SEO work on top of it will have limited results. If your site is structurally sound but just needs content and citations, SEO alone can move the needle. A free audit will tell you which situation you are in.
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