Key takeaways
- The biggest price drivers for a remodeler are the gallery, the number of service and area pages, copywriting and the CRM connection.
- Ongoing costs are small next to the build, but a monthly plan that keeps the site on the vendor's platform costs you the site if you leave.
- Judge the price against signed projects: one or two extra contracts a year usually decide whether a site paid for itself.
- Get ownership of the domain, hosting, code and gallery in writing before any work starts.
How much a website costs a remodeling company depends far more on what it has to do than on how it looks. A template with a few photos is cheap. A site that sells kitchen and bath projects needs a real gallery, a page per project type, a qualifying form wired to your CRM, and tracking. Pay for those, and own them.
What a website costs a remodeling company
A remodeler's website costs whatever it takes to produce qualified consultations, and the honest way to judge a quote is against signed projects, not against another quote. Remodeling is a business where a single contract is worth a lot. That changes the math compared with a trade that sells small jobs.
Here is an example with hypothetical round numbers; put your own in. Say a rebuilt site costs $10,000. Say your average signed bathroom project leaves you $10,000 in gross profit. If the new site produces one extra signed bathroom in a year, it has paid for itself. Two, and it has earned a return. A cheaper site that produces none was the expensive one.
That is also why many remodelers feel burned by their last site. They paid for pages and a design, the vendor reported traffic, and nobody could say whether a single contract came from it. You were paying for activity. Before you compare prices, decide what result you are buying: consultation requests from the right homeowners, traced to signed work.
Owned site vs rented site
| Question | Owned site | Rented site |
|---|---|---|
| The domain | In your name | Often in the provider's |
| Content and photos | Yours to move | Can stay with the provider |
| If you leave | The site goes with you | You may start over |
| What you pay for | The build, then hosting and care | A fee for as long as it runs |
What changes the price
The price changes with the amount of real work behind the pages. For a remodeler, these items move quotes the most:
| Driver | Lower cost | Higher cost |
|---|---|---|
| Project gallery | A grid of photos from your phone | Projects organized by room and style, with scope, before-and-after pairs and a short write-up each |
| Service pages | One page listing everything | A page each for kitchens, baths, cabinets and countertops, and full renovations |
| Area pages | None | A page for each area where you want more work, built on projects finished there |
| Copywriting | You write it | Written for you from interviews and past projects |
| Photography | Your existing photos | A photographer for finished rooms, scheduled around project completions |
| Forms and CRM | A form that emails you | A qualifying form that creates a lead in Buildertrend or JobTread with its source |
| Tracking | None | Calls and forms tracked by page and source (Google Analytics setup) |
| Migration | New domain, nothing to keep | Redirects from the old site, so existing rankings are not lost |
Two quotes that look far apart are often quoting different rows of this table. Ask each vendor which column they are pricing.
Ongoing costs
Ongoing costs for a remodeler's site are modest, but they are real and they should be written down.
- Hosting and domain renewal, in your own accounts.
- Security updates and backups, especially on a platform that needs regular patching.
- Adding projects to the gallery. This is the most valuable ongoing work on a remodeling site. Every finished kitchen is new proof, and fresh project pages give search engines new content to read (Google's SEO Starter Guide). Plan to add finished projects through the year, in-house or as a small paid task.
- Speed and mobile checks, because large gallery images slow sites down over time (Google on Core Web Vitals).
- SEO and content work, if you want the site to keep growing rather than stand still.
Watch for "free website" deals bundled into a monthly marketing fee. They often keep the site on the vendor's platform. Cancel the fee, and you lose the gallery that took years of projects to build.
Ownership and contract terms
Ask these questions before you sign, and get the answers in writing:
- Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be your business, with your login.
- Whose account is the hosting in? Yours, with the vendor added as a user.
- Do I get the code and design files if I leave? You should be able to hand them to any developer.
- Who owns the gallery photos and project write-ups? You do, including any photos the vendor's photographer took of your projects.
- Where do form submissions go? Into your CRM or your inbox, not a vendor dashboard you lose access to.
- What is the minimum term, and what does leaving cost? No long-term lock-in, and no fee to take your own site.
- What exactly is in the price, page by page, and what counts as a change order?
- What will you report after launch? Consultation requests and calls by source, not just visits.
- When does it launch? A date, set ahead of late winter planning season, with the milestones before it.
A vendor who hesitates on questions 1 to 6 is telling you how leaving will go. The website design guide for remodelers shows what a remodeling site should include, and the conversion checklist helps you judge whether your current site needs a rebuild at all.
How VETS Growth Marketing helps
We quote remodeling websites as fixed projects: a page-by-page list of what is included and a launch date. Everything in the ownership questions above is answered in your favor before work starts. After launch, the report shows which pages produced consultation requests and which of those signed, so the site is judged on what it earned, not what it cost. Book a growth consultation and bring the quotes you have; we will help you compare what each one includes.
Sources
- SEO Starter Guide, Google Search Central
- Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results, Google Search Central
- Set up Analytics for a website and/or app, Google Analytics Help