The short answer. In September 2026 a website for an excavation, land clearing, or demolition company costs anywhere from $49 a month for a rented template to $9,000 and up for an agency build with a monthly retainer. Ours is $2,497 one time for up to seven pages, $250 for each page after that, and $199 a month for care, and you own the finished site. What you should pay depends on one question: does the site need to make a stranger who found you at 9 p.m. call you instead of the next result? If the answer is yes, the site has to do eleven specific things, listed below, and most sites in this trade do fewer than four of them.
This guide is written so you can judge any quote, including ours. It covers what each price level actually buys, the eleven things a dirt-work site must have, the three things that are usually wrong first, and what a site should be expected to do in its first 90 days.
What each price actually buys
The market for contractor websites in 2026 has four tiers. They are not the same product at different prices. They are different products.
$0 to $150 a month, rented template. Priebe Bridge at $49 a month with a six-month minimum, Nesta Sites at $59 to $89, USA Contractor Websites at $299 setup plus $99 a month. You get a template with your name and photos dropped into it, hosting, and some updates. The domain is sometimes in your name and sometimes not. You do not own the site; if you stop paying, it is gone. This is fine for a one-machine outfit that needs a phone number to exist on the internet. It is a rental, and it looks like one.
$300 to $450 a month, no upfront, bundled subscription. Excavation Marketing at $300 a month for a five-page site, Conductive Web at $450 with local search work included, Airlocked at $650 plus $450. The build is financed inside the monthly fee. Over three years you pay $10,800 to $16,000 and usually still do not own the site. The bundle sometimes includes profile work and missed-call text, which is real value, but it is hard to see what each piece costs.
$950 to $3,000 one time, owned build. Iwebs at $950. Ours at $2,497 for seven pages. You pay for the build, you own it, and care is a separate monthly line you can cancel. The difference between $950 and $2,497 is usually who writes the words, whether the photos are yours or stock, whether the site is built for the trade or adapted from a generic template, and whether the person building it will still answer the phone in a year.
$5,000 to $9,000 and up, plus $1,500 to $9,000 a month. Blue Goat, Rise, Dirt2Dollars, and the other niche growth agencies. You are buying an agency relationship with the site as one piece. Appropriate for a company doing several million a year that wants someone running all of its marketing.
The question to ask any of them: who owns the site if I stop paying, and what do I get handed? A rental hands you nothing. A financed build hands you nothing until you have paid enough. An owned build hands you the files and the domain on day one. Get the answer in writing.
The eleven things a dirt-work site must have
These come from measuring what works on the sites we have built and from studying fourteen contractor sites across eight metros in September 2026 research. Count how many yours has.
1. Loads in about a second on a phone. Most of your visitors are on a phone, half of them at a job site with two bars. Google’s mobile speed test gives a score out of 100. One current client’s old site scored 24, with its main content taking 16.1 seconds to appear, measured September 1, 2026, ahead of its redesign. Shepard Excavating’s old site scored 64. Shepard’s new site scores 95 or better. Most people are gone by three seconds. If you do nothing else, fix this.
2. Your equipment, your crew, your finished work. No stock photos. A mulching head on your CTL with your lettering on the door says more than three paragraphs. A stock photo of a shiny excavator that is not yours says you did not have a photo of yours. Every hero image is your machine, your people, or your finished ground, with the town named in the caption.
3. A phone number a thumb can tap, at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom. Four placements minimum. On a phone it should be a button. If a visitor has to scroll to find the number, you lost a call.
4. The owner’s name and face. Owner-operators buy from owner-operators. New Wave Concepts does this. Most excavation sites do not. “Ryan runs the machine and answers the phone” with a photo is a trust signal no template can fake.
5. Your services named the way people search for them. Site prep. Grading. Septic installation. Basement excavation. Land clearing. Forestry mulching. Mobile home demolition. Pool removal. Each on its own page or at least its own section, with two or three sentences that say what it includes and what the ground looks like when you leave. The words on the page should match the services on your Google profile.
6. Your towns, as a list. Not “serving the greater area.” Bemidji, Cass Lake, Walker, Nevis, Park Rapids, and anywhere within an hour of the pit. Only one of the fourteen competitor sites in our research did this. The builder searching “excavation Park Rapids” needs to see Park Rapids on your site to believe you go there.
7. Reviews with a count and a link. “48 Google reviews, 4.9 stars” with a link to the profile. Buyers check. Make it easy.
8. Licensed and insured, in words, with the septic license number where you have one. And a response promise: “We call back the same business day.” None of the fourteen competitor sites had one.
9. Before-and-after photos with the town named. The most convincing thing on a land clearing or demolition site is the same corner of the same lot, before and after. Four pairs beat forty random photos.
10. A form that lands somewhere someone sees it, with spam protection, and a text that confirms it. A form that emails an inbox nobody checks is a hole. The form should drop into a pipeline you can see on your phone and trigger a text to the customer that says you got it. Turnstile or equivalent on every form; Shepard’s spam stopped the day it went on.
11. Tracking, so you know what the site is doing. Google Analytics and Search Console set up, and a way to tell which calls came from the site. Without this you will never know whether the site is working, and neither will anyone you hire to improve it.
If your site has fewer than six of the eleven, it is costing you the call from the stranger at 9 p.m., and no amount of ads or profile work fixes that.
The three things that are usually wrong first
When I review a dirt-work site, and I have looked at more than sixty in the Bemidji area alone in September 2026, the same three problems show up first.
It is slow on a phone. Usually a WordPress site on shared hosting with a page builder, a dozen plugins, and 4-megabyte photos straight off the camera. The fix is either a rebuild on a fast static stack or a serious cleanup. The rebuild is usually cheaper than the cleanup and lasts longer.
Google cannot tell what the pages are about. A signed client’s site, measured September 1, 2026 before its redesign, had 8 of 12 pages missing a main heading and 11 images with no alt text. That means Google cannot read what eight pages are for, and neither can a screen reader. It is invisible to the owner and obvious to the search engine.
The phone number is below the fold or not tappable. The site was designed on a desktop monitor and nobody checked it on a phone. The number is in the footer, in small text, not a link.
Those three are what “the three things I would fix first” usually turns out to be. Sometimes it is the stock photos. Sometimes it is a form that goes nowhere.
What a site should do in the first 90 days
A new site does not produce jobs on day one. Here is what a good one does, from the two we can show with dates.
Shepard Excavating, Laporte, Minnesota. Launched August 10, 2026. By August 31: site health 100 out of 100 with zero errors, up from 82 with 5 errors and 21 warnings on the old site. Mobile speed 95 or better, up from 64. In the 28 days through August 31, Search Console showed the site in 2,050 searches, with 81 clicks and 173 different phrases, including “septic pumping near me” and “class 5 gravel near me” from people who had never heard the name. Weekly impressions went 540, 711, 875, three record weeks in a row. Fourteen contacts landed in the pipeline, about five of them real local jobs asking for a price. Those are early and small, and they are the kind of early and small a new site should show.
New Wave Concepts, Cape Coral, Florida. Launched May 23, 2026. By August 11: pages indexed up from 5 to 9, number one on Google for “demolition contractor cape coral fl,” visitors from search staying 2 minutes and 13 seconds against 28 seconds for the site overall.
Both are labeled and dated on our results page. What they have in common is that neither company changed how it does the work. The site changed which company the stranger called.
How to judge a quote, including ours
Ask every builder these seven questions and write down the answers.
- Who owns the site and the domain, and what do I get if I leave?
- Will you show me the homepage before I pay the balance?
- Who writes the words, and have they written for this trade before?
- Are the photos mine or stock?
- What is the mobile speed score of the last three sites you built? Can I test them myself?
- What exactly happens each month for the monthly fee, and can I cancel it?
- Can I call two owners you built sites for?
A builder who answers all seven plainly is one you can hire. A builder who gets vague on number one or number seven is renting you something.
Here are ours. You own it, and the transfer terms are in writing. You see the homepage before the balance. I write the words and I have written for Shepard, New Wave, Storlie, and about forty other trade sites. The photos are yours, and stock is banned. The last three sites score 95 or better on mobile and you can test them. Care at $199 a month is: I check that your forms deliver, your tracking works, your domain and certificate are current, and the site still loads fast, plus up to 30 minutes of edits a month, with a written response time; cancel any month and the site comes with you. And yes, you can call Ryan at Shepard, the owners at New Wave, and Storlie.
What I do not promise: rankings, a number of calls, or a cost per call. Anyone who does is guessing.
The price, on one line
Dirtwork Website. $2,497 one time for up to seven pages. $250 for each additional service or town page, and you approve them first. Website Care, $199 a month. A typical nine-page site is $2,997 one time plus $199 a month. Every price is on the pricing page and there is no bundle, no founding discount, and no long contract.
Start with the review
Before you spend anything, with us or anyone, send me the site you have. I will look at it on a phone, run the speed test, check what Google can read, and send you the three things I would fix first, in plain words, within two business days. No charge, no obligation, and I will not call you unless you ask. Show me what you would fix.