What a Small Business Website Really Costs

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and WordPress.com let you build a site yourself from a template. On a yearly plan, the plans a typical small business site needs cost roughly $10 to $40 a month as of September 2026 (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, WordPress.com). Paying month to month costs more, discounted first-year prices often rise at renewal, and extras such as online booking can be a separate subscription.

The monthly fee is only part of the cost; the rest is your time. You spend evenings choosing a template, fighting the layout, writing the copy, resizing photos and working out why the contact form isn't sending. Once it's live, keeping it right is your job, from updating your hours before a holiday to noticing when the booking link breaks, and the design will look like every other site built on that template. For an owner with time and patience that's a fair trade. If your evenings are already full, the savings come out of time you don't have.

A freelancer builds you a custom site for a one-time fee, and it works the day it launches. If your site rarely changes, say a single page with your hours and phone number, that may be all you need. Freelance quotes vary too widely for one reliable range, so when you get one, ask for the build price, what a change costs after launch, and whether hosting and a domain are included.

A one-time build is finished when it's delivered. When your prices change, you add a service or a plugin breaks, the fix is your job or a new invoice, sometimes from someone who has moved on to other work. Many freelancers also sell a monthly maintenance plan. If yours does, compare the build fee plus that plan with a managed plan, and ask what it covers: content changes, fixes and hosting, or only software updates.

A managed website comes with someone responsible for it after launch. Our prices:

• Self-serve: $149 to set up on any plan. An AI builds a starter site from a few details, and it's live in minutes. On Growth and Premium you can edit the content yourself from there; on Launch, we make one content update for you each quarter.
• Full service: we build it for you for a one-time fee of up to $499 (Launch), $1,250 (Growth) or $2,000 (Premium), depending on what your site needs. It covers strategy, design, the build, your forms, SEO and analytics setup, and pre-launch testing.

After setup, plans run month to month with no long-term contract: Launch $99, Growth $199 and Premium $449 a month (see what each plan includes). The monthly fee pays for hosting and keeping the site current. On Growth and Premium we also set up online booking: a Book button on your site connected to your own booking account, such as Square Appointments.

Many ROI figures passed around online don't trace back to any study, so this section uses arithmetic you can do with your own numbers. The number you need is what one new customer is worth to you after costs.

Count a full year of the site, not just the setup fee. Self-serve setup plus twelve months of Launch comes to $1,337 ($149 + $1,188), and on Growth it's $2,537. If you're a contractor and a typical job leaves you $500 after materials and labor, three jobs a year that came through the site cover Launch. If you run a salon and a regular client brings in $700 a year after product costs, two new regulars cover it.

Your reputation already sends people looking for you. A website pays for itself if a few of them find you instead of moving on. Our guide on how word of mouth moved to Google explains where those customers come from.