Websites for local businesses
Save · 0Plenty of local businesses have no site, or one nobody has touched in a decade. You build something simple that loads fast and says the right things.
~480 people search this every month ↑ trending up · US, measured
The short playbook
- Find prospects in Google Maps: businesses with reviews and no website, or a site that breaks on a phone.
- Build on Durable or Wix rather than from scratch. The client is buying a working site, not your choice of framework.
- Get the basics right first: opening hours, a phone number that dials, the address, and what they actually sell. Most local visits are looking for one of those four.
- Register the domain in the client's own name at Porkbun or Cloudflare. A domain held in your name becomes a problem the day they leave.
Tool stack
The site buildermakes the actual website; pick one and get fast at it, because repeat speed is the whole service
Durable Built for exactly this trade: give it a business type and a town and it turns out a finished local-service site with copy, booking, invoicing, and a small CRM you can run the monthly care plan from. The Launch plan is $25 a month, or $22 a month billed yearly, and includes a free custom domain worth up to $20. The free plan cannot connect a custom domain, so paid client work starts at $25.
Hostinger Website Builder The cheapest way to run a stable of AI-built client sites when you keep hosting under your own account and bill the care plan yourself. The builder is $2.99 a month right now, but that rate means prepaying 48 months ($143.52 total), and it renews at $10.99 a month after.
Wix The builder local owners already recognize, which makes handoff simple: a client who wants to take over their own site later can run Wix without you. The Light plan is $17 a month billed yearly and includes a free domain for the first year. Yearly plans are paid in full upfront.
The domainthe web address each site lives at, bought separately so the client keeps it no matter what happens to you
Porkbun The registrar with the straightest pricing in the business, so a client's domain never becomes a surprise line item on your care plan. A .com is $11.08 a year and renews at the same $11.08, with WHOIS privacy and SSL included free.
Cloudflare Registrar Sells domains with zero markup, so renewals never creep: registration and renewal cost exactly what the registry and ICANN charge, nothing added. You manage the domain from a free Cloudflare account.
The words and picturesfills each site with copy and photos before the client hands you anything usable
ChatGPT Turns a five-minute phone call with the owner into homepage copy, a services page, and an about page written in the business's own words instead of template filler. The free plan handles a single site's copy, and Plus is $20 a month once you are producing sites every week.
Pexels Free stock photos and videos licensed for commercial use with no attribution required, for filling hero images and backgrounds until you shoot the client's real shopfront. It costs nothing. You cannot resell the photos as-is or imply the people in them endorse the business.
Canva Covers the small design jobs around each site: a logo cleanup, an open-hours graphic, a banner for the client's Google Business Profile. The free plan does all of that at $0. Background removal and brand kits sit behind the paid Pro plan.
The client finderbuilds your list of local businesses whose websites are missing or ancient
Google Maps Your prospect list is already public: search a trade plus a town, and every profile with no website link, or a Facebook page where a site should be, is a pitch. Free. The owner's phone number sits right on the profile, so first contact can be a call instead of a cold email.
Outscraper Pulls that same Google Maps search into a spreadsheet with names, phone numbers, and website fields, so you can filter for missing websites across a whole county at once. The first 500 places each month are free, then it is $3 per 1,000 records, pay as you go with no subscription. Email extraction bills separately at another $3 per 1,000.
Common questions
How do you start a web design business?
Pick one AI site builder from the tool stack above and get fast at spinning up a clean local-service site, then sell it as a package: a one-time setup fee plus a monthly care plan that covers hosting, small edits, and keeping the site current. Durable ($25/mo) can generate a full local-service site in minutes, so your real job becomes finding businesses and writing the copy, not hand-coding. Starting with one builder and one type of business beats trying to master everything at once.
How do you get web design clients with no experience?
Search Google Maps for local businesses in one area and one trade (plumbers, dentists, landscapers) that have no website or one that clearly hasn't been updated in years. Pull that list with Outscraper from the tool stack above, then reach out with a link to a sample site you already built for that trade. You don't need a portfolio: the sample is your proof, and a business with no site at all is the easiest first yes.
How much should you charge small businesses for a website?
Website Builder Expert puts a small-business site at $1,000 to $5,000+ upfront, with designers charging $50 to $200 an hour, and WebFX lists small sites of 1 to 75 pages at $1,000 to $3,000. The care-plan model splits that into a smaller setup fee plus a monthly retainer, and WebFX pegs ongoing web work for a small business at around $501 to $1,000 a year. Those are observed market ranges, not a promise: what you can actually charge depends on your area and your proof, and results vary.
How much does it cost to start a web design business?
Very little on the tools side: about $25 a month for a builder like Durable, plus around $11 a year for each client's domain at Porkbun ($11.08 a year). You register the domain in the client's name so they keep it, and you fold that into the setup fee. The real cost is your time getting fast with the builder and finding the first few businesses to say yes.
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Income and demand tiers reflect what we found in public reports and search data, verified to the level shown. Nothing here is a guarantee of earnings.