How much does a website cost for a small business?

The two bills every website has

Every website, however it is built, has a domain name and somewhere to live. You pay for both every year for as long as the site is up, so look at the renewal price before the first-year price.

A .com domain at Porkbun is $11.08 a year to register and the same to renew. Cloudflare sells domains at the registry's cost with no markup. Namecheap advertises a first-year .com at $6.79 for new customers, and renewals cost more than that. Builder plans often throw in a free domain for the first year, which then renews at their standard rate.

Hosting is where intro pricing is most misleading. Hostinger's WordPress hosting is $2.99 a month if you prepay 48 months ($143.52), then renews at $10.99 a month. That is still cheap, but it is almost four times the number on the banner.

If you build it yourself on a website builder

Builders bundle the hosting, the editor and the SSL certificate into one monthly plan. These are the prices on their own pricing pages, billed yearly unless noted.

Wix and GoDaddy both have free plans, but they run on the builder's own address and show its branding. To put the site on your own domain you need a paid plan.

Selling online changes the math. Squarespace lists card processing at 2.9% plus 30 cents per sale on Basic, and a designer on r/smallbusiness said a client sat on the cheapest plan for a whole year before noticing the extra per-sale fee. Check the transaction fee before the sticker price.

The real cost of DIY is your time. One commenter in an Irish owner's thread put a simple few-page builder site at about a weekend of work, and it takes much longer if you are fussy about design. That is fine if you enjoy it and a bad trade if your hourly rate is high.

What owners actually paid for a built site

These figures come from owners and designers in recent r/smallbusiness and r/web_design threads (linked under Sources). They are individual reports, but they line up with each other well.

On r/web_design, the most upvoted answer to "what are you charging for a five-page small business site" put a reasonable freelance range at $3,000 to $6,000 for custom work. Designers from cheaper markets reported far less (around €700 to €1,000 in Italy for a simple site), and a Canadian designer said most local callers want five pages for under $1,000.

A US agency owner in another thread broke the market down roughly like this: under $500 usually means a $15 marketplace theme reskinned with your name, the middle range gets a template set up properly, and custom design starts in the thousands.

Monthly fees: what you should be getting

Monthly fees are where owners most often feel they are overpaying. In one thread a small plumbing company in British Columbia was paying CAD $800 a year for hosting plus $135 a month for maintenance, and nearly every reply said that was far more than a four or five person trade business needs. Another owner was paying GoDaddy about $180 a month for a one-page site with a contact form, which commenters called very high.

On the other side, an owner whose developer charged $0 up front and $60 a month for hosting, updates and fixes asked whether they were being ripped off. The replies said the opposite: that is cheap for a custom site with a real person on call.

The fee should match the work. If you are on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, hosting is already in your plan, so a developer should not bill you for it again. On WordPress, hosting and maintenance are separate jobs: hosting keeps the site online, and maintenance means plugin and theme updates, backups and security fixes.

• Ask for the last three months of changes: what changed, on what date, and why. A designer on r/smallbusiness suggested this test. An empty log means you are paying for availability, which is fine if it is priced and named that way.
• Ask who you call when the site is down on a Saturday, how fast they answer, and whether that is included.
• Make sure the domain is registered to you, on your card. More on that in our domain and hosting guide.

Costs that rarely show up on a quote

• Photos. One designer pointed out that for a brand that sells on looks, good product photography moves the needle more than the build itself.
• Copywriting. Many builders expect you to supply the text. If they write it, it is usually priced separately.
• SEO. Some quotes include basic on-page setup, others treat it as an add-on. Ask which.
• Redirects from your old site. If you are replacing a site, every old page address needs a redirect to its new one or you can lose search rankings. This is often left off quotes.
• Booking, payment and email tools, which usually carry their own subscriptions.

How to choose a budget

Start from what the site has to do. A local service business mostly needs people to find a phone number, see proof you are legit and call. That can be done well for a few hundred dollars a year in running costs and a modest build. A site that sells products, takes bookings or has to look like a premium brand justifies more.

Several commenters made the same point about trades: for a plumber or electrician, most calls come from the Google Business Profile and reviews, and the website's job is to back that up. Spend on a fast site with a tap-to-call button before spending on design flourishes.

If the build fee is the hard part, we design and build five-page WordPress sites for small businesses for free, and you pay only your own domain and hosting. The why it is free page explains the catch.