The short answer
A small business website costs roughly $200 to $500 a year if you build it yourself on a platform like Squarespace or Wix, $1,000 to $5,000 if you hire a freelancer, $2,500 to $10,000 for a done-for-you build from an independent specialist, and $5,000 to $30,000 or more through an agency. Running costs after launch land around $200 to $1,500 a year.
Those are the bands the quotes actually fall into. Inside each one the spread is wide, and the spread is not random. It comes down to who writes the words, whether the design is custom or a good template wearing your brand, what the site has to do besides sit there, and what happens to it after launch.
A five-page site for a business with photos, reviews, and a clear offer already in hand is a genuinely different job from a five-page site for a business that has none of that. Same page count, very different price, and any quote that ignores the difference is guessing.
The rest of this page is the detail: what each route really costs, what you pay every year no matter who builds it, what moves the number up or down, and how to look at a quote you have been given and tell whether it is fair.
The four ways to get a website, and what each really costs
Build it yourself on a website builder. Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Framer, and Shopify all sell a subscription that includes hosting, security certificates, and an editor. Business tiers usually sit somewhere between $16 and $45 a month when you pay annually, and a .com domain adds $10 to $20 a year. Call it $200 to $500 a year in cash. The real cost is your time, and it is the cost everyone leaves out.
Hire a freelancer. For a straightforward small business site this usually runs $1,000 to $5,000 as a one-time build. Under $1,000 you are almost always getting a template filled in with whatever you send over. Above $5,000 you should be getting strategy, copywriting, and someone who asks about your customers before they open a design tool. Experienced freelancers in the United States commonly bill $75 to $150 an hour, and a small site is usually a 20 to 60 hour job.
Done-for-you from an independent specialist. Typically $2,500 to $10,000 for the build, often with a monthly for hosting, updates, and changes. This is the middle route: one accountable person, agency-level output, no account manager between you and the work. It is what I do, and I will come back to the pricing honestly at the end of this page.
Hire an agency. $5,000 to $30,000 and upward for a small business site, with mid-market agencies commonly landing in the $8,000 to $25,000 band. You are paying for a team, a process, and overhead. Sometimes that buys real depth. Sometimes it buys a project manager, a discovery deck, and the same template a freelancer would have used. I wrote about how to tell those apart in when to fire your marketing agency without losing leads.
What you pay every year, no matter who builds it
The domain. A .com is usually $10 to $20 a year. Watch the renewal price rather than the first-year price, because cheap first years are standard and the renewal is often two or three times higher. Add privacy protection if it is not free. One rule matters more than the price: the domain must be registered in your name, in an account you can log into. Not your builder's account, not your nephew's.
Hosting. Shared hosting is $3 to $15 a month. Managed WordPress hosting is $20 to $50. Static hosting on the modern platforms can genuinely be free for a small business site. If you are on a builder like Squarespace or Wix, hosting is already inside the subscription and there is no separate bill. Security certificates should cost you nothing at this point, and anyone charging you for basic SSL is charging you for something the whole internet gives away.
Business email on your own domain. Roughly $6 to $9 per user per month for the entry business plans from the major providers. This is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy. A quote sent from a free webmail address reads as a side gig, and a quote sent from your own domain reads as a company, and the difference costs you less than a tank of gas per year.
Maintenance. On a builder, near zero. On WordPress, either your own time every month or $50 to $200 a month to someone who keeps plugins current and backups running. On a custom build, whatever your maintenance agreement says. Add whatever changes cost, and get that number in writing before you sign, because ongoing change requests are where a cheap build turns expensive.
What actually moves the price
Who writes the words. This is the single biggest swing and it is almost never discussed at quoting time. If the quote assumes you supply the copy, you are the bottleneck, the project stalls for six weeks, and you end up writing it at midnight anyway. If it includes real copywriting, expect $500 to $3,000 of the total to be that, and expect it to be worth it, because the words are what convert, not the layout.
Custom design versus a customized template. A genuinely custom design costs thousands more and is worth it for a small number of businesses. For most local service businesses a strong template with your real photos, your real reviews, and your real offer will outperform a custom design built on thin content. Pay for content before you pay for uniqueness.
What the site has to do. A brochure site is one price. Add online booking, payments, a client portal, a quote calculator, a members area, or a multi-step intake form, and each one is a system with its own edge cases, its own failure modes, and its own testing. Every feature that touches money or the calendar roughly doubles the care required.
Integrations and photography. Wiring forms into your follow-up, your calendar, and your invoicing is where a website stops being a brochure, and it takes real work. Photography is the other underrated line: a half day with a photographer costs a few hundred dollars and does more for conversion than another round of design revisions. Stock photos are free and every visitor knows exactly what they are looking at.
Page count matters less than people think. A twelve-page site is not three times the work of a four-page site, because the hard part is the first page and the system behind it. Rush timelines, unlimited revision clauses, and multi-language versions all move the number more than page count does.
How to tell if the quote you received is reasonable
Read it for these eight things, in this order. First: does it say who writes the copy? If it does not, you write it. Second: does it name a page count and a revision limit? Unlimited revisions are never free, they are priced in, and open-ended revision rounds are how projects die. Third: what happens after launch? Who hosts it, who updates it, what does a change cost, and how fast do they respond?
Fourth: do you own everything? The domain, the hosting account, the analytics property, and the content should be in your name, in your accounts. Fifth: can you leave? If the site cannot be exported or moved, the low monthly price is a lease, not a purchase, and you will find that out on the day you want to go somewhere else.
Sixth: is there a launch date, and does it mean anything? Seventh: does anything in the quote connect the site to how you actually get paid, or does the scope end at the words 'site is live'? A site that does not feed your follow-up is a business card that costs four figures. Eighth: ask for two sites they built more than a year ago, then check whether those sites are still live, still fast, and still turning up in search.
The red flags are just as useful. A five-figure quote with no copywriting line item. A $500 quote from someone who never asked what you sell or who buys it. A monthly plan with no exit and no export. 'SEO included' with no specifics attached to it. And any quote that arrives before anyone has looked at your current site or asked how you currently get customers.
If a quote clears those eight questions, the number is probably fair for what it is. If it fails four of them, the number is irrelevant because you are not buying what you think you are buying.
Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Framer, Canva, and WordPress
Squarespace and Wix are the default DIY answer for good reason. Business plans generally sit in the $16 to $45 a month range on annual billing, hosting and certificates are included, and the templates are genuinely good now. The limits are structural: you are working inside their system, deep customization gets awkward, and moving off later means rebuilding.
GoDaddy's builder is cheap on the headline and the money is in the additions. Email, security, backups, privacy, and marketing tools are frequently sold separately, and a $10 a month plan can quietly become $40. Read the renewal terms specifically, because the first-term discount and the renewal rate are often very far apart.
Framer and Webflow are the designer-grade options, usually $15 to $40 a month per site, and they give you real control over how the thing looks and behaves. They also have a learning curve that most owners will not enjoy climbing on a Sunday. Canva's website feature is free with a subscription you may already have, and it is fine for a single landing page. It is weak on the structure search engines want, so treat it as a placeholder rather than a foundation.
WordPress is the most misunderstood number in this whole category. The software is free. The website is not. You pay for hosting, usually a premium theme at $50 to $100 once, plugins that are often billed annually, and either your time or someone else's on maintenance. It is enormously capable and it is not the free option people think it is.
And on Google specifically: Google Sites is free and is a reasonable internal tool, not a storefront. Google retired the free websites it used to generate from Business Profiles, and those addresses now point back at the profile itself. So if that was your plan, it is not on the table anymore. What is still on the table, and still free, is the Business Profile, which I covered in do I need a website for my business.
Ecommerce is a different question
An online store is a different animal from a brochure site, and the price reflects it. Shopify's standard plans run roughly $29 to $79 a month depending on tier, and WooCommerce on WordPress is free as software but carries the hosting and extension costs described above. A serious custom store build usually lands in the $3,000 to $15,000 range, and complex catalogs go well past that.
The cost driver in ecommerce is almost never the design. It is the products. Photography, descriptions, variants, sizing, shipping rules, and tax setup are per-product work, and a store with 400 SKUs is a data project with a website attached to it. Budget for that work or you will launch a beautiful store with twelve products in it.
Then there is the cut on every sale. Card processing across the major providers sits right around 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, and marketplace or platform fees stack on top of that depending on where you sell. That is not a build cost, it is a permanent margin cost, and it belongs in your math from day one.
If you are selling a service rather than products, you almost certainly do not need a store. You need a booking flow and an invoice, which is a much smaller build and a much smaller bill. I went through the sane version of that in how to automate your invoicing.
The costs that never appear on the invoice
Your time is the big one. A first-time DIY build realistically takes 40 to 80 hours once you count the writing, the photos, the fiddling, and the second attempt after you decide you hate the first one. Put your own hourly value on that. If an hour of your time in the field is worth $75, a 60 hour DIY build cost you $4,500 of billable capacity to avoid a $3,000 invoice. That math flips for a lot of owners once they actually run it.
The second hidden cost is the site that exists but does not convert. It is not a one-time loss, it is a small leak every single week, and it compounds quietly for years. Nobody sends you an invoice for the enquiries you did not get.
The third is delay. Every month without a working presence is a month of people checking you out, finding nothing or finding something stale, and calling someone else. That cost is invisible because the person who did not call you never told you they existed.
The fourth is the money that goes out the back once traffic starts arriving. Leads with no follow-up, quotes that never get chased, invoices that go out late. I put the full list in where small businesses actually leak money, and it is worth reading before you spend anything on a website, because a site that doubles your leads also doubles whatever you were already dropping.
A website is not the purchase. The pipeline is.
Here is the reframe that saves people the most money. A website is one component in a chain: someone finds you, decides you are credible, reaches out, gets a fast answer, gets a quote, pays, and gets updated. A beautiful site attached to a broken chain produces nothing. A plain site attached to a working chain produces work.
So the right question is not how much a website costs. It is which link in your chain is weakest right now. If nobody can find you, the money goes to search presence first. If people find you and do not reach out, the money goes to the site and the proof on it. If people reach out and you answer three days later, the money goes to follow-up before either.
The only numbers I have any right to show you come from a real California field-services company where I built and ran all of this before offering it to anyone: 705 jobs coordinated through the system, and organic traffic up 60 percent in 28 days with no ad spend. Those are that company's numbers, not this site's, and I say that plainly because most people quoting results are not that specific about whose results they are.
The point of that example is not the percentage. It is that the site, the search presence, and the follow-up were built as one thing. Bought separately, in the wrong order, from three different vendors, they cost more and do less.
What I charge, and why there is no price list on this page
I quote per project after looking at the business, and I am not going to put a fake number here to win a search result. The same five-page site is a $2,000 job for one business and an $8,000 job for another, and the difference is real: whether the copy exists, whether there are usable photos, whether anything has to connect to a calendar or an invoicing system, and whether the current site can be improved instead of replaced.
What I can tell you is what I refuse to do. I do not quote before I have looked at what you already have. I do not sell a site that ends at 'it is live'. And I do not build a site that you cannot take with you, because the domain and the accounts are yours from the first day.
What the build includes is on the websites page: a conversion-first site, wired into your follow-up, set up to be found, hosted and maintained so you never open a code editor. One person builds it, and that person answers the email.
If you want to know what your specific site should cost, send me the URL or tell me what you do, and I will tell you straight whether you need a rebuild, a tune-up, or nothing at all. That is free, and sometimes the honest answer is that you should spend the money somewhere else. Start here, or email [email protected].