Questions worth asking before you hire anyone.

It probably is — most quotes you're comparing against are for a website. You're not just buying a website here, you're buying the thing that makes the website produce leads you can trace. If you just need a site with no ranking or reporting work behind it, a lower-cost builder is the honest answer for you.

Yes, and it'll probably look fine. The difference is what it's built to do: a low-cost site is built to launch. This is built to rank and to be measured. If a cheaper site brings in one extra job a year and this brings in one a month, the price difference stops being the interesting number.

Yes — the Care retainer at $500/month with Google Business Profile optimization, no rebuild required. Give it 90 days and you'll see whether the local search side moves. If it does, we can talk about the site.

A build is a project with a defined scope, not a contract. A retainer runs month-to-month after an initial 90 days — that window exists because SEO doesn't produce meaningful data faster than that, and neither of us should judge it on incomplete information. After that, if it's not working, you leave. No exit fee, and you keep everything.

WordPress is fine, and I've worked in it for years. The tradeoff is maintenance — plugins, updates, and security patches are where most small business sites get compromised. This build has no database and no plugins, so there's nothing to exploit and nothing to patch. It also loads in under a second, which WordPress usually doesn't without significant extra work.

Yes. You'll log in through a simple content editor, change a headline or add a post, and hit publish — no developer, no ticket, no invoice. Every change is versioned, so if something breaks, it can be rolled back in a minute.

No. Everything lives in your own GitHub account, not mine — you own the code, the content, and the domain outright. Any developer can pick it up because it's built on a standard, well-documented framework, not something proprietary. That's specifically why it's built this way instead of on a platform you can't leave.

The structural difference here: agencies usually have account managers, so the person who sold you isn't the person doing the work. I'm one person — I scope it, I build it, I report on it. When something isn't working, there's no one else to point at.

Technical improvements — speed, indexing, attribution — show up within weeks. Ranking movement is typically 90 to 180 days depending on your category. Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either lying or doing something that'll hurt you later. What you will know within 30 days is exactly where every lead came from, which most businesses never have.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a recommendation in your trade and city, there's an answer forming right now. For most local categories that's still a channel with almost no competition. The businesses structuring their content for it now are the ones that get cited once it isn't.