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. Someone quoted you $300. Someone else said $15,000. A web design agency sent a proposal full of line items you did not understand.
Here is a plain breakdown of what contractor websites actually cost in 2026, what you get at each price point, and what the numbers mean in practice.
Updated February 2026.
TLDR: Contractor websites in Vancouver range from $200 on Craigslist (expect to redo it within a year) to $20,000 at a full-service agency. A boutique custom build starts at $1,250 CAD. Most Vancouver agencies charge $5,000 to $10,000 for a standard trades site. Monthly retainers run $150 to $600.
$200 to $800 — Craigslist, Kijiji, and Fiverr
This is the bottom of the market, and it shows. Someone posts on Kijiji offering a "professional website" for $350. 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 no performance testing, no schema markup, no Google Search Console setup. Sometimes the work is plagiarized from another business in your industry. The person who built it is unreachable six weeks later. This tier exists and plenty of contractors get burned by it every year. It is not a website strategy. It is a placeholder that costs more to fix than to build properly.
$0 to $60 per month — 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. Monthly fees run $25 to $60 on a self-serve plan. Setup takes a few weekends. The result is functional but generic. These sites load slowly on mobile, rank poorly in local search, and cannot be meaningfully customized when your business grows. For a trades company competing in Vancouver, this is a floor, not a strategy.
$1,250 to $3,500 — Boutique and freelance custom builds
Small studios and independent developers with lower overhead than agencies sit here. You get custom design rather than a template, faster timelines (typically 1 to 3 weeks versus 6 to 8 for an agency), and direct access to the person building your site. Quality varies significantly at this tier, so ask to see real Lighthouse scores on live sites before committing. At Digitari, the Starter tier is $1,250 fixed: custom design, 5 pages, live in 7 business days. No templates, no page builders.
$5,000 to $10,000 — Small agency standard build
This is what most trades businesses receive when they hire a Vancouver web design agency for a proper custom site. A 7 to 10 page site with dedicated service pages, local SEO structure, a project gallery, and a contact form. A Toronto agency recently quoted a 7-page HVAC contractor site with booking integration at $6,000 to $9,000. Vancouver agencies typically price 15 to 30 percent higher than Toronto. Timeline: 6 to 8 weeks. Billing is usually hourly at $100 to $185 per hour with no cap on how long it takes.
$10,000 to $20,000 — Mid-market agency full build
15 or more pages. Full location page architecture across Metro Vancouver, comprehensive service sub-pages, booking integrations like Jobber or ServiceTitan, a before and after project gallery, and a content strategy built out for the first 6 months. This is the foundation a dominant local search presence requires. Most agencies in this tier bill hourly with no ceiling on scope creep.
Monthly retainer: $150 to $600
A website without ongoing work loses ground over time. Retainers cover hosting, security updates, content changes, performance monitoring, and monthly SEO tasks. Basic managed care runs $150 to $250 per month. A full retainer with content and local SEO runs $400 to $600. A $300 per month retainer that generates one extra HVAC call per month at $400 average ticket is already well into positive ROI.
Number of pages is the biggest variable. A 5-page site and a 20-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 significantly. A site built from scratch to match your brand and conversion goals costs more than applying your logo to a template. The conversion rate difference justifies the cost almost every time.
Integrations add scope. Booking systems, live availability calendars, CRM connections, and review widgets all require additional development time.
Content is often a hidden cost. Some agencies quote a low build price and charge separately for writing the words on each page. At Digitari we include copy for all pages in the project scope. You provide the details about your business, we write the rest.
The $200 to $800 Craigslist and Kijiji tier is a consistent money pit. The savings upfront rarely survive contact with reality. Poorly built sites have no performance baseline, rank for nothing, and cannot be handed off to another developer cleanly 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. Hourly billing from agencies is a different issue. Vancouver agencies typically charge $100 to $185 per hour. A 40-hour project at $150 per hour is $6,000. A 60-hour project at the same rate is $9,000. You do not know which one you are getting until the invoice arrives. Fixed-price builds protect you from this.
WordPress plus page builder setups tend to be quoted cheaply and maintained expensively. The platform is free but the ongoing update overhead, plugin conflicts, and performance issues compound over time. What looks like a $2,500 website often becomes a $500 per month maintenance problem within two years.
No performance guarantee is a red flag. Any agency building a trades website in 2026 should be able to commit to a 90+ Lighthouse score. If they cannot quantify what they are delivering, the output will reflect that.
A well-built contractor website that generates 3 additional leads per month at a $500 average job value produces $18,000 in revenue in the first year. At that math, even a $10,000 agency build pays for itself before the end of year one if it actually ranks and converts. The question is not whether to invest in a website. It is whether the site you build will actually rank, convert, and generate those leads or sit there looking fine and doing nothing. That difference is entirely in the execution.
Running those jobs profitably requires knowing your actual margins. 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 get a scoped estimate for your business in two minutes.
How much does a contractor website cost in Canada?
It depends heavily on who you hire. Craigslist and Fiverr designers charge $200 to $800 and typically deliver a dressed-up template with no performance testing. Boutique custom builds start at $1,250 CAD for a proper 5-page site. Most Vancouver agencies charge $5,000 to $10,000 for a standard 7 to 10 page trades site. Mid-market agency builds with full location page architecture run $10,000 to $20,000.
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, schema markup, and a 90 or higher Lighthouse score. Copy writing and ongoing hosting are sometimes separate depending on the agency.
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. Template builds can be faster but sacrifice performance and ranking ability. At Digitari we target 7 business days for standard builds.
Should a contractor website be built on WordPress?
WordPress works but comes with tradeoffs. Most WordPress sites built with page builders score poorly on mobile speed tests, which directly hurts your Google rankings. Plugin conflicts and update overhead also add ongoing maintenance cost. Modern static frameworks like Next.js deliver faster load times, better Lighthouse scores, and lower long-term maintenance burden.
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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