What should a small business website cost?

The honest answer is that page count is the wrong unit. What drives the price is how much of your business has to be figured out and written from scratch before anyone opens a code editor.

What you are actually paying for

A website for a local business is mostly three jobs, and only one of them is code.

• Research and writing. Reading your reviews and your competitors' reviews to work out which questions decide a booking, then answering them in your customer's words. This is the part that makes the site work, and the part templates skip entirely.
• Design. Making a small business look considered rather than cheap, without stock photography doing the lying.
• The build. Turning that into fast, accessible, structured pages. For a hand-coded static site this is the quickest of the three.

Why the monthly-fee model costs more than it looks

A builder platform at $25 a month sounds cheaper than a one-time build. Over four years that is $1,200, and at the end of it you own nothing. Stop paying and the site disappears. Want to move it somewhere cheaper and you are rebuilding, because the layout only exists inside their editor.

A hand-coded static site inverts that. You pay once, you own the files, and hosting on a static host runs free. Every project on this site runs on GitHub Pages at no hosting cost. More on how that works.

How to tell a fair quote from a bad one

Four questions worth asking anyone quoting you:

• Do I own the files? If leaving means rebuilding, you are renting, not buying.
• Is the price fixed and in writing? An hourly meter transfers all the risk of a slow month onto you.
• Who writes the copy? If the answer is you, the quote is for a shell, and the shell is the easy part.
• What happens on launch day? A site that ships without a sitemap, structured data, or Search Console connected is a brochure nobody will find.

The cheapest thing you can do first

Before spending anything on a site, find out whether a site is your actual problem. Plenty of businesses rank poorly because their Google Business Profile has the wrong primary category, which costs nothing to fix. The free audit tells you which problem you have, and it has talked people out of hiring me.