How much does a website cost for a small business?

These are advertised prices, not quotes for your job. We read them on each business's own site in October 2026, and Squarespace's on October 20. We only looked at New York, so take them as one real market and not a national average.

A website bill has up to six parts. Builders bundle most of them into one monthly price. Other options split them out, so ask what each part costs and who pays it.

• The build. The design and setup of the pages. You do it, a kit does most of it, or someone does it for you.

• The web address. Also called the domain. You pay for it every year. GoDaddy's guide lists domain names at $0 to $30 a year.¹ Squarespace includes the first year free on yearly plans and charges its standard rate after that.²

• Hosting. The computer that serves your pages to visitors. Builders include it. GoDaddy's guide gives $5.99 to $24.99 a month for its own hosting.¹ A simple site can also be hosted free. Cloudflare says requests for static files are free and unlimited on its free plan.⁴

• Email on your own address. Usually priced per mailbox, per month, by whoever provides it.

• Updates and care. Someone to change your hours, fix what breaks and keep the software current. The local care plans we checked ran $60 to $325 a month.³

• Extras. Booking, online payments or a store. The payment company takes a cut of each sale. Squarespace lists 2.9% plus $0.30 per card payment on its two lowest plans.²

The usual way is a website builder. Squarespace has no free plan, only a 14-day trial, and every plan includes hosting.² You pay for as long as you keep the site, so a builder is a monthly cost, not a one-time one. We price three years of builder plans in website kit or Wix and Squarespace alternatives with no monthly fee.

The other way is a template or kit: finished pages that you fill in and publish yourself. You buy the files once. Hosting and a web address are separate, and a simple site can be hosted for free.⁴ For three years of costs with no monthly fee, see can I get a website with no monthly fee.

Either way, your time is the bigger cost. You'll write the words, find or take the photos, and check every page on a phone. If you have the hours, building it yourself costs the least money. If those hours are worth more to you than the price of hiring, hire. To decide, see build your own website or hire a designer.

Around New York, the published prices come in three kinds: a flat price for a starter site, a setup fee plus a monthly plan, and a design made for you.³ The monthly plans are where totals get hard to compare.

One studio that serves New York publishes both ways to pay for a five-page site: $175 a month with a 12-month minimum, or $3,800 once plus $25 a month for hosting.³ After two years that is $4,200 against $4,400. After three years it is $6,300 against $4,700. The monthly plan costs less until about month 25, and then paying once costs less. That is our arithmetic from their published prices.

Before you sign a monthly plan, ask who owns the site, the web address and the logins if you stop paying. Get the answer in writing. We list what local designers and freelancers publish in kit, freelancer or local web designer, and compare a kit, a builder and a designer in kit, builder or web designer: which to choose.

It depends on what it covers. In the New York prices above, $1,500 sits between a $399 starter site and the $2,500 where a design made for you starts.³ It can be a fair price for a short site built on a template. It's a poor one if the words, the photos and the hosting cost extra.

Before you pay anyone, get these answers in writing:

• How many pages, and which ones.

• Who writes the words, and who supplies the photos.

• Whose name the web address and the hosting account are in.

• Who holds the logins, and whether you get them at launch.

• How many rounds of changes are included before launch.

• What changes after launch cost, and who makes them.

• What isn't included.

If you can't get clear answers, get a second quote.

Expect some of these, every year or every month depending on how the site was built:

• Your web address, every year.

• Hosting, unless your builder or plan already includes it.

• Care and updates, if someone else makes your changes.

• Search help. The local monthly SEO plans we saw ran from about $700 to $1,800 or more a month.³ Google says it costs nothing to appear in its organic search results and that it never takes money to include or rank a site. It also says no one can guarantee a first-place ranking, and that if someone does, you should find someone else.⁵

Watch for fake renewal notices. ICANN, the organization that coordinates domain names, warns about emails that copy its logo and ask for renewal fees. It says it does not collect fees from registrants. Don't click a notice you don't recognize. Log in to your registrar and check the date there.⁷

1. Put the web address and every login in your name, and keep the logins somewhere you can find them.

2. Get the pages, the price and what isn't included in writing.

3. Ask for a copy of the site's files when it's done, so you can move it later.

4. Open the finished site on your phone before you pay the last bill. Our free website check checks a site against industry standards from Google, the W3C and Mozilla.

5. Put the renewal dates in your calendar.

We sell 390 do-it-yourself website kits. A kit is a set of finished pages with spots for your name, hours, services and photos, plus a guide. Classic kits are $39.99, and Premium, Motion and Play kits are $59.99. You pay once, for one business.

The price covers the files and a guide to putting the site online. It doesn't cover a web address, which you buy from a registrar if you want your own. It doesn't cover hosting either, though a simple site can be hosted free.⁴ We charge no monthly fee for a kit. You do the setup and the updates yourself.

Pick the kit for your kind of business, then look at its looks. A few to start with: Plumber, Electrician, Heating & cooling, Landscaping, Cleaning service and Hair salon. The whole list is at website kits.

We also build sites, set up Google listings and set up AI tools. If you'd rather have it done for you, tell us about your business.

The U.S. Small Business Administration says it and its partners offer free or low-cost advice and training. Its local assistance tool finds Small Business Development Centers and SCORE mentors by ZIP code.⁶

We sell website kits and build sites, so we have a stake in some of these answers. We stuck to published prices and the pricing pages of the companies named. Every number above comes from a source below, from our own store (the kit prices and count), or from arithmetic on those numbers. GoDaddy and Squarespace sell websites, so their pages are not neutral. Google, ICANN and the SBA don't sell websites.