What a small business website actually costs

Almost nobody in this industry publishes prices, which leaves business owners trying to work out whether a quote is fair with nothing to compare it against. That is not an accident, and it is not in your favour.

I cannot quote your project in a blog post, because the honest answer depends on what you need. But I can tell you what actually drives the number, which is more useful than a fake price range.

What you are really paying for

Very little of a website's cost is the building. Most of it is the deciding.

Working out who your customers are, what they need to see before they trust you, what the site should get them to do, and how to structure it so that happens: that is where the time goes. The building is comparatively quick once those questions are answered. A cheap site is usually cheap because nobody asked them.

What pushes the price up

Number of unique page types. Not pages, page types. Fifty blog posts using one template is cheaper than five pages that all look different.

E-commerce. Product pages, variants, stock, shipping rules, tax, checkout and payment testing. A store is a different category of work from a brochure site, not a brochure site with a buy button.

Integrations. Booking systems, CRMs, mailing lists, membership and logins. Each one is a system that has to be connected, tested and maintained.

Content that does not exist yet. If photography and copy need creating, that is real work. Many projects stall here, not in design.

What brings it down

Knowing what you want. Having your content ready. Being reachable for decisions. Trusting the process enough to let the build finish before reacting to it.

That last one is worth more than people realise. Projects that stretch out do so because of rounds of changes to unfinished work, not because building takes long.

The ongoing costs nobody mentions

The build is one number. Then there are the recurring ones, and they are smaller than people fear.

Domain. Usually somewhere around fifteen to twenty dollars a year. This is your address and you should own it personally, not through anyone else's account, including mine.

Hosting. For a typical small business site this is a modest monthly cost. It should be billed to you at cost, going directly to the provider. If someone is marking up your hosting, ask why.

Maintenance. Optional but sensible. Updates, security, backups and someone to call when something breaks. My own plans start at seventy-five dollars a month.

The real question is not price

A website is not a purchase, it is an investment with a return you can estimate. If your average customer is worth a few hundred dollars and the site brings in even one a month that you would not otherwise have had, the arithmetic answers itself fairly quickly.

The better question is not "what does a website cost" but "what is a customer worth to me, and how many would this need to bring in". That is a question you can actually answer, and it makes any quote easy to evaluate.

What to ask anyone who quotes you

• What exactly is included, and what is extra?
• Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the content when we are done?
• Can I update the site myself without paying you?
• What happens if I need a change in six months?
• What happens if you disappear?

That last one sounds rude. Ask it anyway. A large share of the redesign work I am brought in on exists because the previous person vanished and nobody could get into anything.