It's one of the first questions owners ask us, and the honest answer is: it depends on what the website needs to do. A simple site that tells people who you are and how to call you is a very different job from one that takes bookings, sells products or connects to the software you run your business on.
Here's what drives the price, the typical options and their ranges, the ongoing costs people forget about, and the questions worth asking before you hire anyone.
The short answer
Broadly, small business websites fall into three bands:
- Do it yourself on a website builder: roughly $20 to $50 a month, plus your own time.
- A professional site built on a template: roughly $1,500 to $5,000.
- A custom-designed site, or one with booking, a store or connections to your other software: roughly $5,000 to $15,000 and up.
Those are typical market ranges, not quotes. Where your site lands depends on the things below.
What drives the price
- How many pages, and how different they are. Ten pages that share one layout cost less than five that each need their own design.
- Custom design or a template. A template is faster and cheaper; a custom design fits your brand exactly and stands out more.
- Who writes the words. Good copy is a big part of whether a site turns visitors into calls. If it needs writing from scratch, that's real work.
- What the site has to do. Online booking, quote requests, payments, a store, client logins or connections to your scheduling or accounting software all add time.
- Being found in search. Pages planned around what local customers actually search for take more thought than pages that just look nice.
- Photos. Professional photos of your team and work make a big difference, and they're a separate cost from the build.
The ongoing costs people forget
- Your domain name: usually $10 to $25 a year.
- Hosting: from free on some modern platforms to $50 a month or more.
- Updates and changes: new photos, prices and pages over time. Some designers charge per change, some include a set amount each month.
- Builder or plugin subscriptions, if the site depends on them.
Costs that hide in the fine print
Before you sign anything, check who owns the domain name and the website itself. Some agencies register the domain in their own name or build on a platform that only they can edit, which makes leaving expensive. You should own your domain, your content and your accounts, full stop.
Also watch for long contracts with monthly fees that never end, and "cheap" sites where every small change is billed separately.
How AI changes the price
AI hasn't made good websites free, but it has changed how much a budget buys. Drafting, building and testing go faster, so the same budget can stretch to features that used to be out of reach for a small business, like online booking or a quote form that sends leads straight into your systems. It also means changes can take days rather than months.
Questions to ask any web designer
- Whose name will the domain, the site and every account be in? (It should be yours.)
- Who writes the words, and is that included?
- What does it cost to make changes after launch?
- Will it work well on phones, and load quickly?
- How will local customers find it in search?
- If you ever leave, can you take the site with you?
How we price websites
We quote every website as a project, in writing, after we understand what it needs to do. Everything is built in accounts you own. After launch, updates can be covered by a monthly retainer or paid as you go; our pricing page shows the hourly rates. You can see what we build on our websites page, or ask for a free assessment and we'll tell you what your site needs, and what it doesn't.