How much should a small business website cost?
What you actually pay for when you buy a website, the three price bands you will see, and how to tell which one your business needs.
Ask five people what a small business website costs and you will get five answers between “free” and “twenty thousand dollars”. All of them are right for someone. The trick is knowing which one is right for you.
What you are really paying for
A website price is made of four things:
- Pages and content. How many pages, and who writes the words and finds the photos.
- Things the site has to do. Showing information is cheap. Taking bookings, quotes, payments or uploads costs more, because each of those has to work every time.
- How fast and findable it is. A site that loads in one second on a phone and shows up when people search your town and trade takes more care than one that just exists. Google publishes the speed measures it uses, called Core Web Vitals, so this part can be checked rather than promised.
- Who looks after it afterwards. Hosting, updates, small text changes, and someone to call when something breaks.
Most price confusion comes from comparing quotes that include different amounts of these four.
The three bands you will see
DIY builders (roughly $0 to $40 a month). You drag blocks around and write everything yourself. Good for testing an idea. The cost is your time, and the result usually looks like everyone else’s.
A focused build (a few hundred to about two thousand dollars). A developer builds a small, fast site around one job: getting calls, getting quote requests, or showing your work. Usually one to five pages, a contact or booking form, and basic search setup. This is where most small service businesses should start.
A larger build (several thousand and up). Many pages, custom features such as client logins, online ordering or integrations with your other software, and more design work. Worth it when the site is part of how the business runs, not just how it is found.
Questions that make quotes comparable
Before you accept any quote, ask:
- How many pages are included, and who writes the text?
- What happens when someone fills in the form? Where does it go?
- How fast will it load on a phone? Can you show me another site you built and its speed?
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the code? (Our six ownership checks cover this in detail.)
- What does a small change cost after launch, and how fast is it done?
If the answers are vague, the price is not really fixed. There is more on that in fixed quote or hourly, and you can see how we price each band in our pricing section.
The cheapest site is the one that pays for itself
A site that brings in two extra jobs a month is cheap at almost any price in the focused band. A site nobody finds is expensive even when it is free. Start with the one job your site must do, buy only what that job needs, and add the rest when the first version is earning.
If you want a second opinion on what you have now, read what a website audit should tell you, or send us your site for a free written review, with no call needed.