What a small business website costs

Start with the thing nobody selling websites will tell you: there is no trustworthy average.

I went looking for one. The most rigorous recent study of US small business websites — Clutch's, a survey of 406 owners fielded in August 2025 — publishes how sites get built but not what they cost. The figure everybody quotes as Clutch's ("61% spent under $10,000") does not appear anywhere in Clutch's report. Every other number you will find is an agency quoting its own rate card in a blog post designed to rank for this exact search.

So this article does the only honest thing available: it publishes real prices, says whose they are, and explains what moves them.

Do it yourself. Squarespace's entry plan is $19 a month billed annually — $228 a year — and Shopify's is $29, or $348. WordPress.com runs from $4 a month on Personal to $25 on Business, which is the tier that adds SSH and WP-CLI. That buys the software. You are the one who builds the site: your words, your photos, your evenings, your patience with a page builder.

Pay somebody to build it on a platform. This is the option that goes missing from these comparisons, and it is the one most people actually take. The platforms publish it themselves. WordPress.com charges $499 for a built five-page site, plus $120 a year for the Premium plan it requires, and starts custom work at $5,000. Squarespace and Wix hand it to independent designers who set their own prices; the Wix marketplace showed "starting at" figures from $100 to $1,800 the day I checked. Wix prints no unit beside those — they are a floor on one service, not an hourly rate and not a finished quote, and Wix tells you to agree the real price with the professional before hiring. Whatever that number turns into, the subscription carries on underneath it for as long as the site exists.

Hire me. My prices are published in full, and they are the same for everyone: $1,500 for a five-page Starter, $3,250 for Business — ten pages, a dashboard you edit yourself, and one system such as booking or payments — and $4,500 for Professional, at twenty pages with three systems. Right now there is a founding discount of 20% for the next five clients, running until 30 November 2026, which takes those to $1,200, $2,600 and $3,600. After that deadline the standard prices are the prices.

Hire an agency. Higher, and I am not going to invent a figure for it, because no credible published survey supports one. What I can point to is the maintenance end, where agencies do publish rate cards: WebFX lists $150 an hour for standard website work and $250 an hour for emergency support.

Those numbers are not comparable, which is the trap. Set them side by side properly and the gap is smaller than the headline suggests: a built template is $499 plus a subscription that never stops, and a Starter from me is $1,500 once plus about $6 a month. The difference is not really the money — it is that one of them repeats every year and stays a template, and the other is software written for how your business works. Here is the same comparison in the terms that decide whether a price was worth paying:

Four things, in roughly this order.

A page is design, writing, layout, responsive behaviour and testing — not a document. My tiers include 5, 10 or 20, and beyond that a page is $200.

This is the real driver, and it is where quotes diverge wildly. A "website" that takes deposits and prevents double-bookings is a piece of software with a database, not a brochure. Mine are priced individually:

Each is the same price whether it goes in at launch or two years later, so starting smaller costs nothing later. The only thing that changes is how long you wait for my calendar.

A site you change yourself needs an admin, permissions, image handling and somewhere to store it all. That is why the dashboard starts at the Business tier rather than being a checkbox.

The single most common reason a project drags is that the text and photos are not ready. That is unbilled time for me and delay for you, and it is entirely within your control.

Because the tiers are built so that it does. This is a rule I hold myself to: a tier must cost less than the same build bought piece by piece.

Business at $3,250 covers what would cost $3,400 assembled from the entry tier plus five extra pages and online booking. Professional at $4,500 covers $7,300 of parts — twenty pages with booking, a store and articles. And the à la carte figures understate it, because the dashboard is not sold separately at all.

One caveat, because the rule is only worth stating if I say where it stops: those sums use the dearer systems. Pair ten pages with the $400 automated email instead and the parts come to $2,900, which is under the tier. What the tier still has that the parts do not is the dashboard, so the rule holds whenever you want to edit the site yourself and not otherwise. If you do not, say so and I will quote the parts.

If you are close to a tier boundary, buy the tier.

Included: design, build, mobile, the security and speed work, SEO and AI-search indexing, a contact form that records every message, hosting set up and looked after, and 30 days of fixes after launch.

Not included, and priced separately or not at all:

• Your domain. You buy it, in your name, from a registrar that sells at cost. About $11 a year. Here is how.
• Monthly hosting usage, billed at cost with no markup — typically $5–15 a month. The full breakdown is here.
• Card processing. Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ per charge, paid to Stripe, not to me.
• Photography and copywriting. I will tell you honestly when a project needs a photographer, because it often does and it is usually the highest-return money in the whole budget.
• Ongoing changes, which are either a Care plan at $69, $129 or $249 a month, or $75 an hour with no plan.

A fixed quote in writing after a free 20-minute call, 50% to start by default, and the balance at launch. Nothing is charged before the quote is approved. You see the real site on a live preview link the entire way — not a picture of a site, the site.

1. Is this a fixed quote or an estimate? Get it in writing either way.
2. What is the monthly cost after launch, and what is the underlying bill? Hosting at $49 a month for something that costs $8 to run is a margin, not a service.
3. Whose name is the domain in? If the answer is not yours, fix that before anything else.
4. What happens if I want to leave? Ask specifically about the domain, the content, the photos and the customer data.
5. What does a change cost after launch, and how fast? A care plan that does not state an amount of time is a subscription, not a service.

My own answers to all five are published on the hire page and in what you own when you hire a web developer, which is the longer version of question 3 and 4.

For a local business that needs to look real and be findable, $1,200–$1,500 buys a proper five-page custom site from me today. For one that needs the site to do something — take bookings, take deposits, sell, publish — $2,600–$4,500 is the range, depending on how many of those things and how many pages.

If a template genuinely covers what you need — a brochure, nothing unusual — a DIY platform at $228 a year will do it, and I will say so on the call rather than sell you something bigger. Two things are worth knowing before you choose it. The first is that $228 repeats every year, rises with the plan the moment you need one more feature, and takes a cut of some sales on top: Squarespace's entry plan takes 2% of store sales and 7% of digital content and memberships, and Shopify takes 2% on Basic if you use any payment provider but its own. The second is that the subscription is the software only — you build the site, or you pay somebody to. WordPress.com charges $499 plus the plan for a built five-page site and starts custom work at $5,000; Squarespace and Wix leave it to independent designers, who set their own prices. Five years of subscription is about $1,140 against $1,500 once for a Starter — and at the end of it you still have a template that somebody still has to keep filling in.