How much does a small business website cost?

Most small business websites cost between $500 and $15,000 to build, plus somewhere between $200 and $1,500 a year to keep online. Where you land depends on who builds it and on how much of the work you do yourself. Our own builds start at $499, and the full numbers are on the pricing page. Below is what the rest of the market charges, and what you get at each price.

The four ways to get a site, and what each costs

A DIY website builder: a monthly fee, plus your time

Squarespace, Wix and similar tools charge a monthly subscription and give you templates. The cash cost is low. The real cost is your time, and the fact that you rent the site rather than own it: stop paying and it goes offline, and you can’t take the design with you. For a brand-new business that just needs to exist online, this is often the right answer.

A freelancer: roughly $1,000 – $5,000

Quality varies more here than anywhere else. A good freelancer can be excellent value. The risk is what happens after launch: who fixes it when it breaks, and whether you have the logins and the code if they move on. Ask before you hire.

A small studio: roughly $500 – $5,000

This is where we sit. A small team with modern tooling and no account managers can build a custom site for far less than an agency. What you should still expect at this price: a written quote, a written list of what isn’t included, and a proper handoff.

An agency: roughly $2,500 – $15,000 and up

You pay for more people: a strategist, a designer, a project manager and developers. That’s worth it when you need brand strategy, a large content programme, or complex integrations. For a five-to-ten page site for a local business, most of that team isn’t needed.

What moves the price

• Page count. Five pages and twenty-five pages are different projects. Each page is design, build, content and testing.
• Who writes the words. Copywriting is often the line item people forget. If you supply the text, the price drops.
• Custom design versus a starting template. Fully custom design costs more, and is worth it when the site has to stand apart from competitors.
• Features. Online booking, payments, a members area or a live chat each add cost. Each one should be priced as its own line item in a quote.
• Moving from an old site. Redirects from old addresses to new ones are where search rankings usually get lost. Doing it properly takes time, and it should be in the quote.

What a website redesign costs

A redesign usually costs about the same as a new build of the same size, and sometimes more. The extra work is the migration: mapping every old page to a new address, keeping what already ranks in search, and moving content across without breaking it. If a redesign quote doesn’t mention redirects, ask about them before you sign. A redesign done without them can wipe out years of search traffic in a week.

Before paying for a redesign, check whether you need one. If the problem is that nobody can update the site, or that it’s slow on a phone, a smaller fix can sometimes solve it for less.

The costs after launch

• Domain name: usually $10 – $30 a year.
• Hosting: from a few dollars to a few hundred a year for a small site, depending on the host and the traffic.
• Upkeep: security updates, backups and small edits. You can do it yourself, pay by the hour when something breaks, or pay a monthly plan. Our care plan is $99 a month and covers hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, a few small edits, and a monthly report on leads. It’s optional, and the site is yours either way.

What a fair quote includes

Whatever the number, a quote should say in writing what you’re getting: the pages, the features, who writes the content, what happens to the old site, and what’s excluded. It should say you own the domain, the content and the code. Compare quotes on that list, not on the bottom line. The checklist in what you should get at handoff is a good thing to hold any builder to.