How much should a small business website cost?

Quotes for a small business website vary by more than an order of magnitude, which makes the market almost impossible to read from outside. A designer can quote a figure that a builder subscription would take a decade to reach, and both can be reasonable. The difference is rarely the pages. It’s what surrounds them.

What you’re actually buying

A website has four components, and quotes differ mostly in how many of them are included.

There’s design, meaning how it looks and how the pages are laid out, which ranges from choosing a template to drawing something specific to your business. There’s build, meaning the pages themselves and anything they do: forms, booking flows, payment, integrations. There’s content, meaning the words and photographs, which is the piece most often assumed to be included and most often not. And there’s everything after launch: hosting, updates, security, backups, and the changes you’ll want within the first month.

A quote for a “five page website” that covers design and build only is not a comparable number to a quote that covers all four. Before comparing any two prices, find out which of these each one includes.

Four routes to a website

Do it yourself with a builder. You pay a subscription, choose a template, and do the work. The subscription is the smallest number in this article, and the real cost is your time, which for most owners lands somewhere between a long weekend and a project that never quite finishes. Builders have improved enormously and the results can be perfectly good. The constraint is that you’re now the designer, the copywriter, and the person responsible for it a year from now.

Hire a freelancer. A one-off fee gets you a site built to your brief by someone who does this professionally. Costs vary with their experience and your complexity. The two things to pin down are whether content is included and what happens after launch, because a freelancer who built your site in March may be booked solid in June when you need a change.

Hire an agency. Highest one-off cost, and you’re paying for process: discovery, design rounds, project management, testing, and a team that doesn’t disappear when one person gets busy. That’s genuinely worth it for a business with complex requirements. For a five-page site for a local trade, you’re buying a lot of process you won’t use.

Subscribe to a done-for-you service. Someone builds the site and then keeps running it, for a monthly fee, with no separate build cost. You trade a large one-off payment for an ongoing one, and you trade some control for not having to think about it. This is the model we run at Roogify; we quote per business rather than publishing one price, because the work varies with what the business needs.

One-off versus ongoing

This is the decision underneath the price, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about.

A one-off build looks cheaper if you compare it to a monthly fee over one year, and more expensive if you compare over five. But that comparison is only fair if the one-off site actually survives five years, and most don’t survive untouched. Software underneath it gets updated. Your prices change. Your services change. Either you pay for those changes as they arise, or the site slowly stops describing your business, which is a cost that never appears on an invoice and shows up in the inquiries you don’t get.

A monthly fee looks like a permanent bill, and it is. What you’re buying is that the site stays correct, stays online, and stays patched without you scheduling any of it.

Neither is the right answer universally. A one-off build suits a business with in-house capability, stable information, and someone who’ll own the upkeep. A subscription suits a business where nobody has spare hours and the details change often.

The costs that come after the quote

Whichever route you take, these turn up.

Your domain renews annually. Hosting is monthly or annual unless it’s bundled. Premium themes and plugins carry annual licenses, and lapsed licenses stop receiving security updates. Business email is usually separate from web hosting. Stock photography is licensed, not bought. Changes after launch are billed unless your arrangement says otherwise, and there are always changes after launch.

Add these up before deciding which quote was the cheap one. The gap between a bundled monthly figure and an itemized build plus five separate annual bills is narrower than it looks on day one.

What makes a build cost more

Complexity, mostly, and not the kind you can see. A booking system that has to reflect real availability. Payments, which drag in compliance and testing. Multiple languages. A product catalog. Integrations with software you already run. Any of these can cost more than the rest of the site combined.

Content is the other one. If you supply finished copy and usable photographs, you’re paying for build. If someone else has to write your services page and source your images, you’re paying for that too, and it’s skilled work.

Page count barely matters by comparison. Ten pages of the same kind of content is not much more work than five.

How to judge whether a price is fair

Ask what the money buys, not what the pages cost. Ask who owns the domain and the hosting account at the end, and get the answer in writing. Ask what happens the first time you need a change. Ask to see two or three sites they’ve built for businesses roughly your size, then load those sites on your phone and see how they feel.

Then apply the only test that matters commercially. A website earns its cost by turning people who are already looking for your service into people who contact you. Against one additional customer a month, the difference between two quotes usually stops being the interesting question. Against zero inquiries, no price is cheap.

If you’d like a figure for your own business rather than a range, describe what you do and we’ll come back within a business day.