How much does a small business website cost?
A DIY builder can cost next to nothing beyond a monthly subscription, a freelancer commonly charges roughly €800–3,000 for a small business site, and an agency often starts from €3,000 and climbs well past €10,000 for larger projects. What you get for the price varies more than the headline figure, so check pages, copy, SEO set-up and ongoing care before comparing two quotes.
Three levels, and what each one includes
A DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and similar) costs mainly a monthly subscription, roughly €15–40 a month depending on features, plus your own time to design, write and maintain it. It suits a very tight budget or someone genuinely comfortable building it themselves, but the time cost is real and often underestimated.
A freelancer typically charges a fixed project price for a small business site: commonly somewhere between €800 and €3,000 depending on the number of pages, whether copy is written for you, and whether photos or video are included. This is where most small businesses land, since it balances a fair price against a site actually built and set up properly by someone who does it regularly.
An agency brings more people to the project, account management, design, development and often a strategist, which shows up in the price: quotes often start from €3,000 and rise well past €10,000 for a larger, more complex site. This tier makes sense for a business with genuinely complex requirements, but it's overkill for a straightforward service business site.
What's actually included at each level
Beyond the headline price, the details decide whether a quote is good value:
- Number of pages and whether they're template pages filled with placeholder structure or genuinely built for your business.
- Copy: written for you by someone who understands your business, or left for you to write yourself.
- SEO set-up: basic technical foundations (page titles, structured data, a sitemap) done properly from the start, rather than added later.
- Photos and video: stock imagery versus real photos and video of your actual business, which make a noticeable difference to trust.
- A booking or enquiry form that actually reaches your inbox, tested before launch.
Ongoing costs nobody mentions upfront
The build price is rarely the whole story. Hosting typically runs a modest monthly or annual fee, a domain name renews yearly at a small cost, and most sites need occasional updates: security patches, a plugin update, a new page or a seasonal change. Some freelancers and agencies offer a website care plan that covers this for a monthly fee; without one, updates get billed individually or, more often, simply don't happen and the site slowly falls behind.
It's worth asking upfront who's responsible for these ongoing tasks and roughly what they cost, rather than discovering the gap a year after launch when something needs fixing urgently.
A site left completely unmaintained for a couple of years usually shows it: outdated prices, broken plugins, a contact form nobody's tested in months. Budgeting a small ongoing amount, even without a formal care plan in place, tends to work out cheaper in the long run than a much larger fix later, once something has actually broken.
What actually makes a website expensive
It's rarely the page count alone. The things that genuinely add cost are custom functionality (a booking system, an online shop, a members' area), multilingual content that needs proper translation rather than an automated plug-in, bespoke design work rather than an existing template adapted to your brand, and copywriting done from scratch across many pages. A ten-page site with none of these can cost less than a five-page site with all of them.
It helps to separate the pages you genuinely need from the pages that just feel like they should exist because competitors have them. Cutting a site down to what actually serves visitors often reduces the price more than negotiating the rate itself.
Fixed quote or hourly billing
A fixed quote, agreed before work starts, is easier to budget against and puts the risk of the job running long on the person you're hiring, not you. Hourly billing can work for ongoing, open-ended work, but for a first website build it's harder to compare between suppliers and easier for the final bill to drift upwards.
My own website pricing is fixed: a one-page site from €490, a full business website from €1,200, and a website with photography and video included from €1,900, with website care from €60 a month afterwards. That structure, plus a fixed quote for anything custom, is what I built for both Vanya Velkova's 60-page psychologist site and Danini Correct's 39-page bilingual accounting site. The full breakdown is on my prices page, and I've written a broader checklist in what a small business website needs.
Questions people also ask
Is a free website builder good enough for a small business?
For a very early-stage or side business, it can be a reasonable starting point. Once you're relying on the site for enquiries, the limits (template designs, weaker SEO control, your own time spent building it) usually make a professionally built site better value.
How many pages does a small business website need?
Most service businesses do well with five to ten: home, about, one page per service (or one combined services page), a portfolio or gallery, and a contact page. More pages help only if each one genuinely answers a question a visitor has.
Should I budget separately for copywriting?
If you're not confident writing it yourself, yes. Some freelancers and agencies include copy in the project price; others quote it separately. Ask before you compare two quotes, since it can be a meaningful share of the total.
How often does a website need updating?
Plugins and security patches typically need attention every few weeks to months, and content (prices, services, testimonials) is worth reviewing at least twice a year. A care plan, or a reminder in your own calendar, keeps this from being forgotten.
Want an exact price?
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