What's the ROI of a better website for a service business?

There is no citable industry ROI figure for this, and the ones quoted are vendor marketing. What there is, is a calculation you can run in two minutes: monthly cost divided by (average job × gross margin × close rate) gives the extra leads per month you need to break even.

Break even on gross profit, not on revenue. A retainer is paid out of margin, and dropping margin from the arithmetic is what makes these numbers look better than they are. Gross margin is the one input you supply yourself — the 40% below is a worked example, not a benchmark.

At a $4,000 average job, 40% margin and a 30% close rate, Foundation at $4,000 a month needs 8.3 extra leads; Framework at $6,500 needs 13.5. At a $12,000 average job and a 25% close rate, Framework needs 5.4. At an $800 average job and a 40% close rate, Foundation needs 31.3.

That last figure is the useful one: an $800-job business needs roughly four times the lead volume of a $4,000-job business to carry the same retainer, which is why the honest answer to "is this worth it" depends on your numbers rather than on our persuasion. Our build pricing is per page — $300, or $400 where a page carries custom artwork or engineered interaction — so the capital side is a quantity you can audit too.

Ask yourself the five inputs. If you cannot answer close rate on web leads and leads per month, attributed, the ROI question is unanswerable — not pessimistic, unanswerable. That gap is the first deliverable, before any build.

Call tracking, because a number rendered as text and dialed from a phone produces a call with no record. Form submissions landing somewhere countable, not only in an inbox. And Search Console's performance report for the queries and pages actually earning clicks.

What we will not claim: a percentage lift. We have not measured one we can defend across clients, and the figures circulating for website redesign ROI are vendor studies.