How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost?

A small business website costs between $500 and $8,000 to build in 2025, plus $150 to $500 per month to keep running. Where you land depends on one choice: template or custom. Basic template sites run $500 to $2,000. Custom professional sites run $3,000 to $8,000 (Source: Adra Tech Systems). If you build it yourself on a platform like Squarespace or Wix, your cost drops to the monthly subscription, often under $40 a month. Here is what each path actually buys you, and how to pick the one that fits your budget.

The Real Price Tiers in 2025

There are three honest price brackets for a small business site.

The DIY tier costs $200 to $500 a year. You pay for a website builder subscription, a domain, and your own time. No designer, no developer. You pick a template and fill in your own words and photos.

how much does a small business website cost, photo by Faruk Tokluoğlu — Photo by Faruk Tokluoğlu on Pexels

The template-build tier costs $500 to $2,000 one time. A freelancer or small agency takes a pre-made theme, swaps in your branding, writes a few pages, and launches it. Fast and cheap, with limited custom work.

The custom tier costs $3,000 to $8,000 one time (Source: Adra Tech Systems). This buys a site designed around your business, custom layouts, copywriting, basic SEO setup, and features like booking, quoting, or e-commerce.

Pick your tier by what the site has to do, not by what looks impressive. A plumber who needs a phone number and five service pages does not need an $8,000 build. A clinic taking online appointments and payments does.

DIY Builders vs. Hiring a Pro

The cheapest route is a website builder. Squarespace plans range from $16 to $99 per month across four tiers, billed annually (Source: Website Builder Expert). Wix restructured its plans in 2025 into four tiers running $17 to $159 per month (Source: Craftybase). Both include hosting, security, and templates, so you avoid most of the costs a pro would charge for.

Go DIY if you have 15 to 20 hours to spare, your business is simple, and you are comfortable typing your own content into a template. Most owners can launch a clean five-page site in a weekend.

Hire a pro if your time is worth more than the savings, if you need custom features, or if a sloppy site would cost you customers. A professional build saves you the learning curve and usually ranks better in search because the structure is done right from day one.

Here is a quick test. Write down your hourly rate. Estimate 20 hours for a DIY build. If that number is higher than a $1,500 template build, hire it out.

What Goes Into the Price

Five things drive the cost of any paid build.

Page count. Most quotes assume five pages: home, about, services, contact, and one more. Each extra page adds $100 to $300.
Design work. A stock template is cheap. Custom layouts, custom graphics, and brand design push the price up fast.
Features. A contact form is free. Online booking, payments, a customer login, or a product catalog each add hundreds to thousands.
Content. Words and photos cost money if you do not supply them. Professional copywriting runs $100 to $400 per page.
SEO setup. Basic on-page SEO is often included. Keyword research and local search optimization usually cost extra.

When you get a quote, ask the builder to itemize these five. A vague flat number hides where your money goes and makes it hard to compare bids.

Domain and Hosting Costs

Two costs hit every website, no matter who builds it.

A domain name costs $10 to $20 a year. Buy it yourself through a registrar and keep it in your own account. This is the single most important asset to control, because it is your business address online. Never let a contractor register it under their name.

Hosting costs $5 to $30 a month for a standard small business site. If you use Squarespace or Wix, hosting is bundled into your subscription, so you pay nothing extra. If you use WordPress, you pay a separate host.

Budget $150 to $300 a year for domain plus hosting on a self-hosted setup. That is the floor. Everything else is optional.

The Ongoing Monthly Cost Nobody Mentions

A website is not a one-time purchase. Ongoing upkeep for a professionally built small business site, covering the domain, hosting, and routine updates, averages $150 to $500 per month (Source: Adra Tech Systems).

That figure surprises people. Here is where it goes: software updates, security patches, plugin renewals, backups, small content changes, and the occasional fix when something breaks. Skip this work and your site slows down, breaks, or gets hacked.

You have two ways to handle it. Pay a maintenance plan and let someone else watch the site, which fits the $150 to $500 range. Or do it yourself on a builder platform, where the company handles security and updates as part of your monthly fee. The second option is why so many small businesses stay on Squarespace or Wix even when a custom site would look better.

Before you sign any build contract, ask one question: what does month two cost? If the builder cannot answer, you are about to be surprised.

Why So Many Owners Still Skip a Website

In 2025, 27% of small businesses still did not have a website (Source: SonataSites). That is more than one in four, in a year when customers check online before they buy almost anything.

The top reason is money. Among businesses without a site, 26% say cost is the main thing holding them back (Source: Network Solutions). They assume a website means thousands of dollars they do not have.

That assumption is wrong, and it costs them customers. A working five-page site on a builder platform costs less than $40 a month. For a local business, that site pays for itself the first time someone finds you on their phone and calls instead of scrolling to a competitor. The real risk is not overspending on a website. It is being invisible to the customers already searching for what you sell.

How to Pick Your Budget

Match your spend to your stage.

Brand new, tight budget. Start on a builder. Pay $16 to $40 a month, do the work yourself, and launch in a weekend. Total first-year cost under $500.

Established, need credibility. Pay for a template build at $1,000 to $2,000. You get a professional look without custom-build prices, and you can launch in two to three weeks.

Growing, need features. Invest in a custom build at $3,000 to $8,000. Justify it only if the site drives revenue directly through bookings, quotes, or sales.

Whatever tier you choose, set aside a maintenance budget on day one. Plan for $20 to $40 a month on a builder, or $150 to $500 a month for a managed custom site. A website you cannot afford to maintain is worse than no website, because a broken site tells customers you went out of business.

Open a spreadsheet today. List your build cost in one column and your monthly upkeep in another. Add twelve months of upkeep to your build number. That total is your real first-year cost, and it is the only figure worth comparing across quotes. Once you see it written down, the right tier for your business gets obvious, and you can stop guessing and start getting found.