How much a small business website costs

The four routes, with numbers

Build it yourself on a rented builder

$200 to $600 a year, forever, plus twenty to sixty hours of your time. Best when the business is brand new and cash is the binding constraint.

Buy a template and hire someone to fill it in

$500 to $1,500 once, plus hosting. Best when you have the content written and you just need it placed well.

A freelancer or a small agency

A freelancer is $800 to $5,000; a small agency is $5,000 to $15,000, and a Canadian shop will quote at the lower end of that in Canadian dollars. Three to eight weeks either way. Best when you need something bespoke: a shop, a booking system, an integration with the software you run the business on.

Built and written for you

$199 once, $15 a month, address from $35 a year. Best when you need a good one page site quickly and would rather not manage any of it.

The running costs that are missing from most quotes

• Hosting: $60 to $600 a year, and the cheap end is slow.
• Domain renewal: $12 to $40 a year, depending on the ending.
• A security certificate: should be free and included. Question any bill for one.
• Plugin and theme licences: $0 to $500 a year on a self-managed WordPress site.
• Maintenance: $50 to $200 a month, or your own time.
• Changes after launch: $75 to $150 an hour, unless you can edit it yourself.

Add those up over three years and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive route is much smaller than the gap between the initial quotes. That is the arithmetic to do before choosing. None of these figures include sales tax, because it is set by your state or province and added at the end rather than built into the price.

Why the price of a website varies so wildly

Because "a website" describes a business card and a piece of software with the same word. A one page site for a plumber in Calgary and a booking platform for a clinic are different projects by a factor of fifty, and both get called a website in the same sentence.

The practical way to compare quotes is to ignore the total and ask what is being built: how many pages, who writes the words, who supplies the photographs, what happens when you want a change, and who ends up holding the domain.

What ours costs, in full

$199 once for the build. $15 a month for hosting, or $150 a year which saves two months. The web address from $35 a year, registered in your name, priced at what the registrar charges plus a small margin and shown to you exactly before you pay.

Nothing else. Changes are free because you make them, in plain language, from a private link.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.