How much does a website cost for a small business?
A small business website has two costs: the one-time build, which depends on how many pages you need, who writes the content and what it connects to, and the running costs, which can be as little as a domain name (about $10–20 a year) plus low-cost hosting. Be wary of anyone who charges a big monthly fee without telling you what it buys.
Every week a business owner asks us some version of this question, usually after getting three quotes that are wildly different. Here’s how to read those quotes, from someone who has paid for websites, been burned by a few, and now builds them.
The two costs: building it and running it
The build is the design, the pages, the writing, the forms and the setup. It’s a one-time cost, and it’s where quotes vary most.
The running costs are what keeps the site online: the domain name, hosting, and any paid tools the site depends on. For a fast, simple site these can be very small. A domain typically costs about $10–20 a year. Modern hosts like Cloudflare and Netlify have free tiers that comfortably serve many small business sites, and paid plans start at a few dollars a month.
What actually drives the price of the build
- Number of pages. A one-page site and a 20-page site with a page per service are different jobs.
- Who writes the words. Good service pages take real work. If you write them, it costs less; if we interview you and write them, it costs more, and is usually worth it.
- Photos. Real photos of your team and your work beat stock photos every time, but someone has to take and edit them.
- Integrations. Booking calendars, quote forms that feed your CRM, payments, chat or a customer portal each add work.
- Moving an old site. If your current site ranks, moving it needs redirects and care so you don’t lose what you’ve earned.
Fees you should question
- A monthly fee you can’t explain. “Website maintenance” should mean something specific: updates, backups, edits, reports.
- Renting a site you don’t own. If you stop paying and lose the site, the domain or the content, that’s a lease, not a website. Make sure the domain is registered in your name.
- City pages for places you don’t serve. Some agencies sell dozens of near-identical location pages. They can hurt you. We learned that the hard way.
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody can honestly promise first place on Google.
What a good small business site includes
- A clear headline that says what you do and where.
- A page for each main service, written for your customers, not for search engines.
- Your phone number and a booking or quote button on every screen.
- Fast loading on a phone, because that’s where most local searches happen.
- Basic local SEO: accurate titles and descriptions, structured data, a sitemap and a matching Google Business Profile.
- A form that actually reaches you, with spam protection.
How we price it
We give a fixed price in writing after a free 30-minute call, based on the pages, content and integrations you actually need. You own the domain, the site and the content. If you just need a simple site, we’ll tell you, and we’ll tell you when you don’t need us at all.