The short answer
A plumber's website is a handful of files. It gets a few hundred visitors a month. Hosting that is free on Netlify — not a trial, not a free first year — and the security certificate that puts the padlock in the address bar is free and automatic too.
That is not a secret you keep from the client. You charge for looking after the thing, not for the disk space. Every agency on earth does it this way.
Putting a site live
No code, no command line, no card. You drag the site's folder onto a web page.
Go to the drop page
app.netlify.com/drop — you can do this before you even have an account.
Drag the folder in
The whole folder — index.html, images, everything. It publishes as you
watch and gives you an address ending in netlify.app.
Claim it
Sign up free to keep it. Until you do, the site sits behind a temporary password, so claim it before you send the link to anyone.
Send that link to prospects
It's a real working site they can open on their phone, and it costs you nothing to leave up. This is what you attach to the outreach email or text after a call.
To change anything later
Open the project, find Production deploys, and drag the updated folder into the drop area. It publishes over the old version automatically.
Pointing their domain at it
Three situations, and they are not equally risky.
They own a domain already
In the project: Domain management → Add a domain → Add a domain you already own. Then leave their DNS exactly where it is and add 2 records at their registrar:
| Record | Name | Points to |
|---|---|---|
| CNAME | www | your-site.netlify.app |
| A | @ (the bare domain) | 75.2.60.5 |
If their registrar offers ALIAS or
CNAME flattening, point the bare domain at apex-loadbalancer.netlify.com
instead of the A record. Netlify shows you the exact values on screen — trust those over
anything written here, and give it up to 24 hours to take effect everywhere.
They have an old site you're replacing
Same as B, but leave the old site up until the new one answers on their domain. Never cancel their old hosting before the new address works — if something goes wrong you want a way back.
Before you touch a single DNS setting
Ask: "do you get email at that domain?" If they use
joe@joesplumbing.com, their email runs on records attached to that domain.
Change the wrong one and their email stops arriving — for a business, that is the worst
possible first day of working with you.
Netlify will offer to run the domain's DNS for you, which means changing the nameservers. Don't take that option on a domain with email on it. Adding the 2 records above leaves their mail untouched, which is why it's the route on this page.
If you're ever unsure, write down every existing record before you change anything — especially the ones labelled MX — so you can put them all back.
The one limit to know about
The free plan includes 100GB of traffic a month across everything in your account. A local business site uses a tiny fraction of that, so you will not get near it with normal client work.
What matters is what happens if you ever do: sites are paused until the 1st of the next month rather than billed — and it pauses every project on the account, not just the busy one. You get warned by email at 50%, 75% and 100%, so you'd see it coming.
Two habits keep you far away from it: compress photos before you upload them, and put any video on YouTube and embed it rather than hosting the file.
One trap worth knowing
Vercel's free plan is everywhere in tutorials, and it is the wrong tool for client work. Their own docs say the Hobby plan "restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only". A client site is commercial by definition, and accounts do get paused for it — usually at the worst moment, with your client's site going dark.
Keep client sites where this page puts them. Vercel is fine for your own personal projects.
Before you say it's finished
- Open it on your phone, not just the laptop — most of their customers will
- Tap the phone number: it should dial, not select text
- Every link goes somewhere. No "coming soon" pages
- The padlock shows in the address bar — give the certificate a few minutes after the domain connects
- The contact form, if there is one, lands in an inbox they actually read — send a test and make them confirm they got it
- Their hours, address and phone match their Google listing exactly
- Ask them to add the new address to their Google Business Profile — it's free and it's where their traffic comes from
Now charge for keeping it there
This is the difference between a $1,500 job and a business. Hosting is the reason for the monthly invoice; looking after the site is what they're buying.
| What they get every month | Your cost |
|---|---|
| Hosting and the security certificate | $0 |
| Domain renewal | ~$1 |
| One content change — new hours, a new photo, a price | 10 min |
| You keep an eye on it and fix it if it breaks | — |
| What you charge | $49–99 |
Say it plainly when you hand the site over. Don't make a presentation out of it:
The site's live and it's yours. I keep it online, keep the security certificate current, back it up, and you get one change a month — new hours, a photo, whatever comes up. That's $75 a month, cancel whenever you like. Want me to start that today?
10 clients on $75 is $750 a month that arrives whether you sell anything new or not. Bill it with the Invoice Generator — set the same invoice to repeat monthly, or send them a Stripe subscription link.