How much should a small business website cost?

The four ranges

Almost every quote falls into one of four buckets.

• DIY builder: $16 to $50 a month, plus however many evenings you spend on it. Real cost is your time.
• Freelancer, one-time build: $500 to $3,000. You own it. Hosting, updates and edits are yours to sort out afterwards.
• Agency, one-time build: $3,000 to $15,000 and up. More process, more people, usually a longer timeline.
• Build and maintain, monthly: $100 to $600 a month. The build and the upkeep are bundled, which sounds easy until you read the contract. Many require a year or more, and the site often stays with the vendor if you leave.

What actually moves the price

Design is rarely the expensive part. What moves a quote is how much has to be written, and how much keeps happening after launch.

A five-page brochure site with your logo and hours is a few days of work. A site with a real page for each service you offer, structured data so Google and AI assistants know what you do, and something answering enquiries when you cannot, is a different job entirely.

The second one is also the one that gets found. Which brings up the part most quotes leave out.

The cheap build that costs the most

The most expensive website a small business can buy is a $900 one that nobody ever finds.

It is not a bad deal because the work was bad. It is a bad deal because a site with almost nothing on its pages cannot rank, and a site that cannot rank produces no customers. You paid once and got a business card that lives on the internet.

When we crawl a local site and strip out the navigation and footer that repeat on every page, most come back under 4,000 words across the entire domain. The last one measured had 52 pages and two with enough on them to compete. That site looked finished.

Questions worth asking before you pay anyone

Whoever you hire, these four separate a real quote from a number someone made up.

• Who owns the domain, and is it registered in my name? The answer should be yes, on day one.
• What happens when I need a change in six months, and what does it cost?
• Is anyone writing content after launch, or is this a one-time build?
• Can I see a site you built that ranks for something competitive?

What I charge, since the page should say

The build is $2,500, half to start and half at launch. You own it outright: the domain in your name, the code, the content, all of it. Nothing monthly is required after that.

That puts it at the top of the freelancer range and under the bottom of the agency range. What it buys is closer to the agency end: a written page for each service you offer, structured data so Google and the AI assistants know what you do, a concierge that answers enquiries at any hour, and a live demo of your actual site before you pay anything. If the demo is not better than what you have, you do not take it.

If you want the site kept running and kept current, plans run $150 to $599 a month. Month to month, no initial term, cancel any time. They also run on a site I did not build, so a business happy with its current site can start there.

The last demo I built scored 97 on Google's mobile speed test. The site it was replacing scored 47.