Plenty of roofers pay somebody every month for their website and could not say what the money does. That is worth ten minutes, because a monthly fee is the one line on your books that renews itself whether or not anybody touched anything.
Here is what the money can legitimately be buying, roughly what each part is worth on its own, and how to tell which of them you are actually getting.
Hosting is the small part
Hosting a site like yours costs very little. Ordinary shared hosting is a few dollars a month, and the modern platforms host a small business site for free or close to it. The domain is roughly the price of a bag of nails per year. A certificate, the padlock in the address bar, is free and automatic almost everywhere now.
So if your monthly fee is a hundred dollars and the answer to what it covers is hosting, you are paying a large markup on a small thing. That does not automatically make it a bad deal, but it means the value has to be somewhere else, and you are entitled to ask where.
What else the fee can be buying
All of these are real work, and all of them are worth paying for if you are getting them:
- Changes. New phone number, a service added, ten job photos up, prices adjusted. This is the one that matters most to a working roofer and the one most likely to be vague in the contract.
- Backups, and a tested way of putting the site back. Untested backups are not backups.
- Updates. Platforms, plugins and themes need patching, and an unpatched site is how a small business site ends up serving somebody else's spam.
- Monitoring. Somebody notices the site is down before your customers do.
- Somebody who answers. A person to ring when the form stops arriving in your inbox.
- Reporting, if you asked for it. How many calls and form messages came in, in plain numbers.