How much does a small business website cost?
From nothing on a builder to tens of thousands at an agency. What you pay for at each level, the running costs nobody quotes, and what we charge.
12 October 2026 · 2 min read
The range
A website can cost nothing but your evenings on a builder like Wix or Squarespace, somewhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars with a freelancer, and from the low thousands up to tens of thousands with an agency or agency. As with logos, the build is rarely what the difference pays for.
What the money buys
Structure: which pages exist and what each one has to say. Design for desktop and mobile, drawn on your brand rather than a theme's. A component set, so new pages are made from the same parts. And a build your team can edit after launch. Cheaper options usually skip the structure and the components, which is why a site can look fine on launch day and worse every time someone adds a page.
The running costs nobody quotes
Hosting and the domain are paid every year, usually to the provider rather than the designer. Paid themes, plugins and fonts can carry licence fees of their own. Ask for all of these in writing before you start, because a site that is cheap to build and expensive to keep is a common surprise. With us, hosting, the domain and any third-party licences stay in your name, so nothing is rented back through us.
Design and build are two jobs
Some agencies design a site and hand the files to a developer; some build what they designed. Ask which one you are buying. Our web design covers the structure, the design and the component set, and development builds it, launches it and hands over templates your team can edit.
What we charge
We design and build the identity and the site in the same three-week run, one-off, with every file owned outright. The scope says what is and is not included, and the number comes with it.
Questions to ask any designer
Who owns the site and its files after launch? Can my team edit it without you? What will hosting and licences cost each year? Is it designed for mobile, or only checked on it? And what happens when we need a new page in six months?
