Guide
What a small business website actually costs.
The sticker price tells you very little. What matters is whether you are buying a subscription you rent forever, a build you own outright, or ongoing work — because over five years those three diverge far more than the initial quotes suggest.
This is the question everyone asks first, and almost every answer online is either a range so wide it is useless or a number attached to a form you have to fill in.
So here is the honest version. I am not going to print a figure and pretend it applies to your business, because the same website is a different job depending on what you already have. What I can do is explain what moves the number, and show you where the real cost hides — which is almost never in the quote.
Three different things get called “a website”
Most confusion about price comes from comparing quotes that are not for the same thing. There are broadly three models, and they behave completely differently over time.
A **platform subscription** — Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and the rest. You pay monthly, forever, and what you are paying for is the software rather than the site. The monthly figure is small, which is the appeal. The catch is that the site is not portable: if you leave, you do not take it with you, you rebuild.
A **custom build you own** — a larger number once, then near-zero running cost. A domain renews annually and static hosting is often free outright. The site is files you own, so nobody can raise your rent or switch it off.
**Ongoing work** — SEO, content, changes, monitoring. This is genuinely a recurring service rather than rent on software, and it is the only one of the three where a monthly fee straightforwardly buys you continued work.
Comparing a monthly subscription against a one-off build on the first month's cost is the single most common mistake, and it reliably picks the more expensive option.
Run the numbers over five years, not one
A small monthly fee looks like nothing next to a build cost. Multiply it by sixty months and the comparison usually inverts — and that is before the renewal increases that most platforms apply after the first term.
Then add the part nobody prices in: at the end of those five years, the subscription has bought you no asset. If you want to move, you start again, and you often cannot even export the content cleanly. The one-off build, meanwhile, is still yours, and updating it costs a fraction of building it.
None of which makes platforms wrong. If you need something online this week and the site is essentially a business card, a subscription is a perfectly rational choice. It stops being rational when the site is expected to bring you work.
What actually drives the number on a custom build
**Unique page templates, not page count.** Twenty pages that share three layouts is a far smaller job than six pages that each need designing from scratch. When you get a quote, ask how many distinct templates it covers — that is the real unit of work.
**Who writes the words.** Content is usually the thing that stalls a project, and “client provides copy” in a quote quietly moves a large amount of work onto you. If writing it is not realistic, it needs to be in scope and priced.
**Photography.** Real photographs of your actual work outperform stock comprehensively, and if you do not have any, someone has to take them.
**Integrations.** Booking, payments, inventory, a CRM. Each one is a system that has to keep working, not a one-off piece of design.
**Whether search is built in or bolted on.** A site structured for search from the start costs no more to build than one that is not. Retrofitting it later means redoing the structure, which is why it is cheaper to get right first.
What should be in scope and often is not
These are the omissions that turn a cheap quote into an expensive project, and they are worth checking line by line before you sign anything.
Redirects from your old URLs. If your existing site has pages that rank, and the new site changes their addresses without redirecting, you lose that ranking on launch day. This is the most damaging and most commonly skipped step in a redesign.
Analytics and Search Console set up and verified, so you can actually tell whether the thing worked.
Image optimization. Unoptimized photographs are the usual reason a new site is slow, and slowness costs you visitors before they have seen anything.
Ownership of the domain and the code, in your name. Ask explicitly. The answer occasionally surprises people.
The cost of the cheap option
There is a version of this decision where you spend very little and get very little, and it does not show up as a bad website. It shows up as a website nobody finds.
A site that does not rank is not a cheap site. It is a cost with no return, and it keeps costing while it sits there. Set against that, the difference between the cheapest quote and a considered one is usually smaller than a single job you did not get.
That is the actual calculation, and it is worth doing honestly in both directions: if the site genuinely is not going to bring you work, do not spend much on it.
Common questions
Why will nobody give me a straight price?
Some of it is sales technique. Some of it is genuine — the same brief is a different amount of work depending on how much content exists, how many distinct layouts are needed, and what has to be migrated. A fixed number quoted before any of that is known is a guess, and guesses get corrected later in your direction.
Is a monthly plan ever the right answer?
Yes, when you need something online quickly, the site is essentially a listing, and you are not depending on it for work. It becomes the wrong answer once the site is expected to bring in customers, because you are paying rent on something you can never own.
What is the cheapest thing I can do that still works?
Fill in your Google Business Profile properly. For most local businesses it drives more enquiries than the website does, it costs nothing, and it takes an afternoon. Do that before spending anything on a site.
Does a more expensive site rank better?
Not by itself. Price and ranking are only related where the money went into structure, speed and content. A costly site with a poor structure ranks worse than a modest one with a good one.
What does it cost to keep a site running?
On a custom build, usually just the domain renewal, since static hosting is frequently free. On a platform, the subscription continues for as long as the site exists. That difference compounds every year.
If you have quotes in front of you and want a second opinion on what they actually cover, send them over. I will tell you what each one is really buying, including when the cheapest is the right call.