What a website costs, and what moves the number

The five lines every quote adds up

Domain

A domain is rented from a registrar by the year, not bought once. An ordinary .com is about $10-20 a year at list price; a first-year offer can be a few dollars and the renewal comes back at list, so compare renewal prices rather than headline ones. Country domains usually cost a little more, and short, memorable names are a separate market where four figures is normal. Register it in your own name, in an account you control: whoever holds the registrar login holds the address.

Hosting

Hosting is the layer that serves your pages. A site that is pages and a contact form fits inside the free or near-free tiers of static hosting; shared hosting is commonly $3-10 a month; a builder folds hosting into its plan, commonly $16-30 a month all in, so no separate hosting bill exists. The price climbs when the site needs a database behind it — online orders, bookings, customer records — or when traffic is genuinely heavy. HTTPS should not be a line item: most platforms issue and renew the certificate automatically. A business mailbox is separate, usually a few dollars per person per month.

Design and build

The widest line, and the one worth getting three quotes on. Doing it yourself costs a plan plus 10-40 hours for a first site. A freelancer building a small-business site is commonly $500-5,000. A studio usually starts around $3,000, and a larger build with custom features reaches $10,000. Six things move the number: how many pages, template or original design, whether the site takes bookings, orders or payments, how many rounds of changes are included, who supplies the copy and photos, and whether anything after launch is in the price. Ask every quote to break those six out.

Photos and words

The line owners forget, and the one that most often holds up a launch. Stock images run from free libraries to roughly $10-30 each, and bought images make your shop look like every other shop. A local photographer for a half day is commonly $200-800 and leaves you a set you own and reuse for years. Copy is either your own evenings or roughly $50-200 a page. The cheap version that actually works is a shot list: the frontage, the room, three to five signature items, and one photo with a person in it — taken on a recent phone in daylight.

Upkeep

Three things recur: the domain once a year, hosting or the plan every month, and edits whenever the business changes. A care plan from whoever built it is commonly $50-200 a month, or you pay an hourly rate per change — get that rate before you sign the build, because that line, not the build fee, is what decides your third-year total. Software you host yourself trades a bill for a job: updates, backups, and a plugin that breaks at the worst possible moment. A managed platform absorbs that work; your own server does not.

Three routes to the same website

A website builder

You rent the software by the month or the year and do the work yourself; hosting and certificates come with it. The cash cost is predictable and the first version is live in a day or two rather than a month. What you are paying for is not the pages — it is not starting from an empty canvas. Three questions before you subscribe: can you connect a domain you already own, what happens to the site if you stop paying, and can you get the files out. Ours, so you have something to hold the others against: one custom domain on both cloud plans; building and previewing stay free and need no card, so nothing is billed until the day you publish; and Storefront Pro, $79 a month, downloads the complete source of the site.

Hiring someone

A freelancer or a studio builds it, and you buy judgment as well as hours — someone who has launched forty of these will not forget the opening hours or the phone view. It is the most expensive route in cash and the cheapest in your own time. The trap is the second year: get the build price and the edit price in the same conversation, agree whose name the domain and the hosting account are in, and put the handover of source files in writing.

Doing it yourself from scratch

Writing the code, or running a self-hosted CMS. In cash this is close to just a domain and a cheap host. In hours it is the most expensive route by a wide margin, and the hours do not stop at launch: updates, backups and security belong to you now. It is a good choice if you already build things, or if the site is honestly one page. It is a poor one if the real deadline is opening day.

Four lines you can cross out

• Extra domains. One good name is enough. Buying every misspelling and every extension is a habit from a different decade, and if a defensive registration ever matters, it will still be available to buy next year.
• A separately billed SSL certificate. HTTPS is issued and renewed automatically by most hosting today, ours included. If a quote carries a yearly certificate fee, ask what it is actually for.
• Any package that guarantees a search engine ranking. Nobody controls Google's results, so nobody can promise a position. The same money goes further filling in your Google Business Profile, which is free, and writing your address, hours and services as plain text on the page.
• Original design and a stock photo bundle on day one. The first version has one job: say what you do, where you are, when you are open, and how to buy or book. Real photos from a recent phone beat bought ones, and you can restyle later without touching the content.

Questions people ask about the price