What a small-business website really costs

Quotes vary wildly mostly because they bundle different things under one number. Naming the parts is what makes two prices comparable in the first place.

1. Write five headings: domain, hosting, design and build, maintenance, and redesign. Every line of every quote or plan you look at belongs under exactly one of them.
2. Mark each part as one-time or recurring. Design and build is paid once; the domain and hosting come back every year; maintenance is ongoing; a redesign returns every few years.
3. When a quote gives a single number, ask which of the five it covers and for how long. A price that includes the first year of hosting is a different price from one that does not.

These are the smallest numbers on the list, and the ones vendors most often make sound complicated. The domain is your address; hosting is the machine that serves the site. They are priced separately, and only one of them is worth worrying about.

1. Expect a common domain extension like .com to cost roughly US$10–20 a year at list price — restaurant-meal money, not rent money. Compare the renewal price rather than the first-year offer, and treat a much larger domain line on a quote as a question to ask.
2. Register the domain in an account you own, whoever builds the site. If a vendor registers it under their own name, changing providers later means negotiating to get your own address back.
3. Check how hosting is paid in each option: inside a builder's subscription, as a separate yearly hosting bill, or as a server you manage yourself. With a builder like Naratake, publishing to a hosted address with automatic HTTPS is part of the service, and every cloud plan connects one custom domain.

This is the largest and most variable number: between doing it yourself on a builder and commissioning a custom agency build, the spread runs from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. What moves it is not page count but how much custom development and content production you are paying for.

1. List what the site must do, not how it should look: show hours and location, take reservations or orders, present a menu or price list, collect quote requests. Features drive cost more than pages do.
2. Before paying for custom development, check whether the features on your list are standard in a template. Builders made for a trade already include its everyday machinery — a reservation form should not be a custom project by default. Compare what each plan actually includes before you price custom work.
3. Budget content separately from construction: photos, menu text, and translations are work someone pays for whether the site is DIY or commissioned.
4. Get every quote to state what happens after handover — who fixes things and at what rate — because the build price is not the whole price.

Monthly plans and one-time builds look incomparable because one is small and repeating while the other is large and singular. Over a fixed horizon they become the same kind of number: a subscription usually includes hosting, security updates, and the tool itself, while a one-time build hands you the asset and the recurring costs continue on your side.

1. Multiply each monthly plan by thirty-six and add the domain to get a three-year total. Ours, already multiplied: Storefront is $49 a month — $1,764 over three years, or $468 a year paid annually, which is $1,404 — with hosting, automatic HTTPS and one custom domain inside it. Storefront Pro is $79 a month — $2,844 over three years, or $758 a year, which is $2,274 — and adds live ordering, bookings, reservations, customer tools and a download of the complete source.
2. For a one-time build, add three years of hosting, the domain, and a realistic maintenance arrangement to the build price before comparing.
3. Match the mode to who maintains the site: a subscription suits a shop that wants hosting and updates handled; a buyout suits one with someone to own the files and the hosting. You do not have to choose one forever — Storefront Pro is a subscription that also downloads the complete source, so the files sit on your own machine while somebody else keeps the servers patched.

The second-largest lifetime cost is the one missing from most quotes. A site needs small ongoing changes — hours, menus, photos, seasonal pages — and after a few years the accumulated drift forces a redesign. Both are cheaper planned than forced.

1. Decide who makes routine edits and price it honestly: your own time on a builder, a monthly retainer with an agency, or per-change invoices.
2. Ask each option what a routine change costs and how fast it happens. A price of zero with a wait of two weeks is not zero.
3. Plan for a refresh every few years and treat it as a known future cost, not an emergency. On a template-based builder, restyling means switching design styles rather than rebuilding; on a custom site, a redesign is priced as a new project.

Half the answer to what a website costs is a list of things it should not cost. Small-business quotes accumulate line items that only made sense for larger companies, or for the web of ten years ago.

1. Skip custom development for standard features. Ordering, reservations, appointment booking, and contact forms are solved problems in industry templates; pay for custom code only when your workflow genuinely is not standard.
2. Skip guaranteed-ranking SEO packages. Nobody controls a search engine's results, and honest SEO work is content and structure you can see, not a promise.
3. Skip buying a portfolio of domains to protect the name. One good domain that you control does the job; add more only when a concrete confusion problem exists.
4. Skip paying separately for HTTPS or an SSL-certificate line item — a service that hosts your site should include it automatically, the way any modern platform does.