How much does a small business website cost?

A small business website in the US costs between $500 and $10,000 to build, and $300 to $3,000 a year to run. Where you land depends on one choice more than any other: whether you build it yourself, start from a template with a professional's help, or pay for a custom design.

Here is what each route costs, what the yearly bills look like, and how to work out a sensible budget for your business.

The three ways to get a website

Build it yourself on a website builder

Wix, Squarespace and Shopify let you drag and drop a site together with no code. Plans run roughly $17 to $50 a month, so $200 to $600 a year, with hosting and an SSL certificate included.

The cash cost is low. The real cost is your time, which is often 20 to 40 hours for a first site, and the ceiling you hit later. Builder sites tend to load slower, share the same handful of layouts, and make it hard to do more advanced SEO or move to another platform.

A builder is a reasonable start if you are testing an idea or need a page up this week. It is a poor fit if the website is meant to bring in most of your leads.

Hire a professional to customize a template

A designer or agency starts from a premium theme and adapts it to your brand, content and goals. For a site of five to ten pages, expect $1,500 to $4,000.

You get a professional result in two to four weeks without paying for design from a blank page. This is the route most small businesses should take first. Our Starter website package works this way: up to five pages, mobile-first, contact form, analytics and basic SEO for $1,499. If one to three pages are enough for now, our One-page website ($299) and Three-page website ($799) work the same way at a smaller size.

Pay for a custom design and build

A custom site is designed for your business from scratch and built to fit how you sell. US agencies usually charge $5,000 to $15,000 for a small business site, and $15,000 to $50,000 or more for a mid-sized company with many pages and integrations. Clutch puts typical US agency rates at $100 to $149 an hour, and a custom build is a few dozen to a few hundred of those hours.

Custom is worth it when your site has to do something specific: book appointments, quote jobs, sell online, connect to a CRM, or compete for search terms where the competition has strong sites.

What drives the price up

Two sites with the same page count can have very different prices. These are the things that move the number:

• Custom design. Designing every page from scratch takes longer than adapting a theme.
• Page count and templates. Twelve pages cost more than five, but twelve pages that share three layouts cost less than twelve unique ones.
• Integrations. Booking systems, CRMs, payment gateways and email tools each need setup and testing.
• Online sales. A store adds product pages, checkout, shipping and tax rules. See our guide to ecommerce website costs for those numbers.
• Content. If the agency writes your copy or moves 200 old blog posts, that is real work and it will be on the quote.
• SEO groundwork. Redirects from an old site, schema markup and a technical audit cost more upfront and protect the traffic you already have.

The yearly costs people forget

The build is one payment. These come back every year:

WordPress sites in particular need regular plugin and core updates. Skipping them is how small business sites get hacked. If you would rather not handle it yourself, a care plan covers hosting, backups and updates in one bill. Ours start at $49 a month on the hosting and maintenance page.

Sample first-year budgets

These assume US pricing in 2026.

A DIY builder site

• Builder plan: $300
• Domain: $20
• Your time: 30 hours
• First year: about $320 plus your time

A template-based professional site

• Build: $1,500
• Domain: $20
• Hosting and maintenance: $600
• First year: about $2,120
• Following years: about $620

A custom site with ongoing SEO

• Build: $5,000
• Domain: $20
• Hosting and maintenance: $1,500
• SEO retainer at $800 a month: $9,600
• First year: about $16,120
• Following years: about $11,120

The third budget is mostly marketing, which is normal. A website does not bring in traffic by existing; SEO, ads or social media do that.

How to set your own budget

Start with what the website has to do, not with a number:

1. Write down the one job the site must do. Get calls, book appointments, sell products, or prove you are legitimate to people who already heard of you.
2. List the pages that job needs. Most service businesses need a home page, one page per main service, an about page, a contact page and somewhere to show work or reviews. Our list of the pages a business website needs goes through each one.
3. List the tools it has to connect to. Your booking system, CRM, email list or payment processor.
4. Decide who will keep it updated. If that is you, ask for a CMS you can use without calling a developer.
5. Get two or three quotes against the same list. Quotes are only comparable when they cover the same scope.

If you are weighing an agency against a freelancer, our guide on choosing between them covers what each costs and where each goes wrong.

Should you pay less now and upgrade later?

Often, yes. A clean template site that loads fast and explains what you do will beat an elaborate site you cannot afford to finish. Start with the pages that bring in work, measure what visitors do, and spend more once you know what the site needs.

The exception is when you are replacing a site that already gets traffic. Then the cheapest option can cost you rankings, because moving URLs without redirects throws away years of search history. Pay for the migration work.

Getting a quote from us

Our packages are fixed price with the payment schedule listed, so you know the full cost before work starts. You can see everything included on the pricing page, or send us your list of pages and tools and we will tell you which package fits.