A small-business website costs anywhere from about $17 a month on a DIY website builder to $10,000 or more for a custom site built by a professional, plus a monthly cost to keep it running. Where you land depends less on how many pages you need than on what the site has to do for your business.
Before the numbers, a disclosure most pricing guides leave out. When I checked Google's top results for this question in September 2026, nearly every guide in them was published by a company that sells website builders: GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix and Elementor. That doesn't make their numbers wrong, but it shapes their advice. I build custom websites, so I have a bias too, and I'll say plainly where the cheap route is the right one.
How much does it cost to build a website?
There are four common ways to get a website, and each has its own price range:
| How it's built | Upfront cost | Ongoing cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| A DIY website builder | $0 to $30 (a domain, often free the first year) | About $17 to $160 a month | New businesses, simple sites, tight budgets |
| A freelancer using a template | About $500 to $5,000 | Hosting, plus fixes billed by the hour | A professional look without custom work |
| A custom build from a studio or agency | About $10,000 to $60,000+ | A care or maintenance plan, often $100 to $1,000+ a month | Sites that must bring in leads or sales |
| A large custom platform | $60,000 into the hundreds of thousands | A development team or retainer | Complex software, large stores, many integrations |
The freelancer and custom-build ranges come from the builders' own guides: GoDaddy puts a freelancer or small agency at $499 to $5,000+ (opens in a new tab) and larger custom projects at $10,000 to $15,000 and up, and Squarespace's guide quotes a professional designer at "$500 to a couple of thousand dollars." (opens in a new tab) My own custom builds run from $15,000 to $60,000, which is why the custom row stretches as far as it does.
The gap between the freelancer and custom rows is real, too. Projects between $5,000 and $10,000 are usually an experienced freelancer or a small studio adapting a premium theme, writing some of the copy and connecting one or two tools: more than a template, less than a site designed from scratch around your sales process.
As of October 2026: Squarespace lists its website plans at $19 to $99 a month (opens in a new tab) billed annually ($25 to $139 billed monthly), with a free custom domain for the first year. Wix lists paid plans from $17.77 to $159.77 a month (opens in a new tab) billed yearly, and a free plan without a custom domain. Builder prices change often; check the pricing page before you decide.
Those ranges are wide because "a website" covers very different things. A five-page site that tells people your hours and phone number is a different product from a site that books appointments, takes payments, sends follow-up emails and reports where every lead came from.
What actually drives the price?
The number of pages matters less than people expect. These are the things that move a quote:
- What the site has to do. Booking, payments, member logins, quote forms that feed a CRM, and online stores each add design, development and testing time.
- Who writes the words. Copy is often the slowest part of a project. A quote that assumes you'll supply every word is cheaper, and often takes longer.
- How original the design is. A lightly adjusted template costs less than a design built around your brand and your customers.
- How many kinds of page there are. Ten service pages built from one layout cost far less than ten pages that each need their own design.
- What it connects to. Your CRM, email platform, calendar, payment processor and analytics all need wiring, and wiring needs testing.
- What it's replacing. Moving an existing site means moving its content, keeping its search rankings and redirecting old addresses, which takes real time.
- Rules you have to follow. Healthcare, finance and legal sites often carry privacy, security or accessibility requirements that add work.
When two quotes for "a website" differ by a factor of ten, it's usually because they are quoting different items from that list.
How much does a website cost per month?
The upfront price is the number everyone compares, and the monthly cost is the one that surprises people. Every website has some running costs:
| Cost | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | $10 to $30 a year | Watch renewal prices: a free or cheap first year often renews higher |
| Hosting or builder plan | $5 to $160+ a month | Builders bundle hosting; custom sites pay for it separately |
| Maintenance or care plan | $0 (you do it) to $1,000+ a month | Updates, security, backups, monitoring and small changes |
| Payment fees, if you sell online | A few percent of each sale | Card processing, plus any platform fee: Squarespace's Basic plan adds 2% on store sales |
| Your time | Hours a month | The cost DIY sites hide best |
The maintenance line is where the most money is lost, usually because it's skipped. A site that nobody updates or backs up works fine until the day it doesn't: a plugin conflict takes it down, a form stops sending leads without anyone noticing, or a known security hole gets used.
Here is what a care plan covers, using mine as a concrete example. Mine start at $225 a month for a brochure site with forms and $500 a month for a site with a store, courses or memberships, and the most complex sites pass $1,000 a month. That buys:
- Managed hosting sized to what the site needs
- Security at the network, server and application level
- Software and security updates, applied when they're safe to apply
- Backups every hour, day and week, kept in more than one place
- Uptime monitoring every two minutes
- Regular tests of the contact forms and booking links
- 30 minutes of changes every month, plus urgent response within four hours
You can buy most of those pieces separately, or do them yourself. The point of the list is to show what "maintenance" should mean, so you can compare plans on what they include rather than on price alone.
How much does a website redesign cost?
A redesign usually costs about as much as a new build of the same kind, because most of the work is the same: design, content, development and testing. It costs less when you keep the content and the structure and only change the look, and more when the old site has to be untangled first.
The cost people miss is protecting what the old site already earned in search. Every old page address that appears in Google results needs to point, with a permanent redirect, to the new page that replaces it. Skip that step and the new site can start from nothing.
I have seen what that costs from the inside, on purpose. My old site ranked for plenty of searches and drew about 12,000 search impressions a month. When I rebuilt it, I was repositioning the business for a different kind of client, so I started fresh and let the old pages go, knowing the rankings would go with them. They did: impressions fell to a few hundred a month. That was the right trade for me, and I later redirected the handful of old pages that still matched what I do now.
Most businesses redesigning a site are not repositioning, though, and for them that drop is pure loss. Ask anyone quoting your redesign how they will handle redirects; the answer tells you a lot.
Is a cheap website ever the right call?
Yes, and more often than an agency owner might like to admit. A DIY builder is a sensible choice when:
- You are testing a new business idea and need something live this week
- Your work comes almost entirely from referrals, and the site is a digital business card
- You enjoy doing it yourself and your time is not the bottleneck
- Your budget for the whole year is under a few thousand dollars
It becomes the expensive choice when the website has a job to do that it can't do well: bringing in leads from search, booking appointments, feeding a sales process, or earning trust in a crowded local market. Then the question stops being "what does a website cost?" and becomes "what does a website that doesn't bring in customers cost me each month?"
What should a website quote include?
Whoever you hire, a quote worth trusting answers these questions in writing:
- Who owns the site, the domain and the content when the project ends, and if you ever leave?
- What does it cost each month after launch, and what exactly does that cover?
- Who writes the copy, and how many rounds of changes are included?
- What does the site connect to (CRM, email, booking, payments), and is that wiring included?
- How will the old site be handled, including redirects for search?
- What happens when something breaks, and how fast is the response?
- When will it launch, and what do you need to supply to hit that date?
A cheap quote that is vague on these is often the expensive one by the end of the first year.
The short version
- DIY builders cost about $17 to $160 a month and fit simple sites and tight budgets.
- A freelancer on a template costs about $500 to $5,000 upfront.
- A custom build from a studio or agency usually runs $10,000 to $60,000 or more.
- Budget for the monthly cost too: domain, hosting and maintenance.
- A redesign costs about what a new build costs; redirects are the part not to skip.
- Compare quotes on what they include, who owns the result and what happens after launch.