What it costs to keep a contractor website running, line by line

01

Why every number you've found is useless

Search for what a website costs to maintain and you'll get ranges like $5 to $5,000 a month. That's accurate in the way "a truck costs somewhere between $500 and $500,000" is accurate. Then look at who's publishing: hosting companies, website builders, and agencies that sell maintenance plans. Nobody's lying. Each of them is describing a bill that has their product on it.

None of those pages is about a roofer's five-page site or a plumber's one-page lead site. A small contractor site doesn't run a store, doesn't have member logins, and changes a few times a year. Its real running cost fits in one table, so that's what this page is, with prices taken from the published pages we checked in October 2026. If you're still deciding how to pay for the build itself, our one-time vs subscription guide runs that three-year math, and what a contractor website costs to build covers the upfront side. This one is about what comes after launch.

02

The line-item bill for a small contractor site

Eight lines cover it. The first four are basics every site has, no matter who built it. The other four are services, and how much of them you need depends mostly on what the site is built on.

That's the biggest swing on the whole bill. A static site is a set of plain, prebuilt pages: no database, no plugins, no admin login for anyone to break into. WordPress runs software on the server, and Elementor, which sells WordPress hosting, puts it bluntly: "If you use WordPress, it must be maintained." That one choice decides whether "updates and security" is a real line on your bill or close to nothing.

03

What a year actually costs: four illustrations

These are illustrations, not quotes. The assumptions: one .com at Porkbun's $11.08, two Google Workspace mailboxes at $7 a month each ($168 a year), prices before tax, and nothing bought that the site doesn't need.

Notice where the gap between the cheapest and the priciest comes from. It isn't technology. It's labor and rent.

• Owned static site, you handle it: about $179 a year. Domain $11.08, email $168, hosting $0 on a free static tier, SSL $0. Call it $15 a month. When something needs changing, you pay a developer for that one job.
• The same site on a care plan: about $1,370–$1,970 a year. Add $99–$149 a month, which is our care plan's range, for someone else to handle hosting, backups, security updates and small edits. That money buys hands-off upkeep. The site would stay yours without it.
• WordPress site, hosting and maintenance bought separately: about $840–$2,760 a year. Shared hosting at Elementor's $5–$15 a month, a maintenance plan at its $50–$200 a month, plus the same domain and email.
• Subscription site at $249 a month: $2,988 a year, before email if it isn't bundled, and the same again every year after. Published contractor subscriptions run anywhere from $97 to $2,000 a month. Stop paying and what you keep is whatever the exit clause says.

04

What's padding

Some charges land on maintenance invoices because they sound responsible, not because a small static site needs them. Question these before you sign:

• A fee for the SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt issues certificates free, and Elementor, which sells hosting, notes that most hosts provide one. A yearly charge for the padlock on a small site is margin.
• Plugin licenses and "premium security" on a site with no plugins. Malware scanners and firewall add-ons watch software running on a server. A static site has no plugins, no database and no login page for them to watch. If a quote lists them for a static build, ask what exactly they scan.
• Hosting upgrades for traffic you don't have. A local service site is not a national store. Cloudflare's free tier, to take one example, puts no cap on requests for static pages, so "you've outgrown your plan" deserves a look at the actual numbers.
• Monthly reports nobody asked for. A PDF of traffic charts isn't upkeep. With a login to your own analytics, you can see the same numbers whenever you want.
• SEO tucked inside "maintenance". Ranking work is real, but it's marketing and it's priced like marketing: Elementor puts professional SEO retainers at $500–$2,500+ a month. Folded into upkeep, it's hard to tell what you're paying for, and harder to drop one without the other.

05

HVAC, roofing, plumbing: where the real upkeep is

Searches like "HVAC website maintenance" and "HVAC web hosting" assume a heating and cooling site needs something special. On the hosting side, it doesn't. To a server, a furnace company's site and a gutter company's site are the same thing: a handful of pages and a contact form.

Where trades differ is content, and that's the maintenance worth paying for. An HVAC shop swaps its spring AC tune-up offer for a fall furnace check, then pushes emergency no-heat service when the first cold snap hits. A roofer adds storm-damage and insurance-claim pages after hail season. A plumber rewrites the service-area list when a second truck starts covering the next county. New financing terms, a new license number, fresh job photos, holiday hours. Those edits keep the site honest, and they're the only part of maintenance that has much to do with the phone ringing.

So when you price maintenance, price the edits. Ask how fast a change goes live and what counts as a small one. A plan that keeps the server patched but takes two weeks to swap a seasonal offer is maintaining the wrong thing.

06

Care plan, subscription, DIY or retainer: the cancel test

Every option below can show up as "maintenance" on an invoice. One question separates them: what happens the day you stop paying?

With a care plan on a site you own, you lose the help and keep the site. The code, the domain and the analytics are already yours, so you put the site on a host you pick and carry on. With a subscription, the monthly fee is the price of the site existing at all. Elementor, which sells its own hosting, says this about all-in-one builder plans: "You never stop paying. If you stop, your site disappears." Subscription agencies vary; some hand over files on the way out, some don't. Read the exit clause before month one, not month thirteen.

07

Red flags in a maintenance quote

Most of these have nothing to do with price. They're about who holds the keys.

• Your domain sits in the vendor's registrar account. It's the address on your trucks, your yard signs and every review. If it's in their account, renewing it, moving it and leaving are their call. At about $11 a year there's no reason to share it, so ask them to transfer it to an account in your name.
• "Maintenance" that's really a rental. If the contract never says you own the code, and nothing gets handed over when you cancel, you aren't paying for upkeep. You're paying rent under a nicer label.
• A 12-month minimum or an annual prepay for upkeep. Maintenance is a service, and you should be able to drop it when it stops earning its keep. Upkeep you can't cancel is upkeep that doesn't have to be good.
• No login to your own analytics. If you can't see your own traffic, you can't check what the monthly fee is buying, and the history stays behind when you leave.
• A hosting fee with no named host. You're entitled to know where your site lives. A vendor who won't say is either marking up something cheap or making it hard to leave.

08

How our care plan fits into this

We build sites once, for a flat price: Starter $1,490, Growth $2,490, Pro $3,490. There's no deposit. You see the finished site live on your own phone and pay when you approve it, with the scope agreed in writing first and two rounds of changes included. On payment, the domain, the code and the analytics are yours.

The care plan is optional and month-to-month: $99 a month on Starter, $149 on Growth and Pro. It covers hosting, backups, security updates and small edits. It doesn't cover your domain renewal, which you pay your own registrar, or your email, which you pay Google or whoever runs your mailboxes, and it isn't an SEO plan. Cancel it with an email and the site stays yours. The hosting that came with the plan ends, and because you hold the code, you or any developer can put the site on a host of your choice. Our builds are static sites, so that can be a free tier.

The quote carries a guarantee: Lighthouse 95+ on every page and under 2 seconds on a real phone. If a page misses, we get one chance to fix it; if we can't, no invoice goes out. Run the illustrations above with your own numbers before you decide on the care plan. If you change your site twice a year, you may not need it, and we'd rather you knew that before you sign up.