The short answer A small business website runs $500 to $8,000 for a five-to-ten page build, and $5,000 to $25,000 or more once ecommerce is involved. US agency hourly rates run $120 to $200. Budget another 15% to 30% of the build cost every year for hosting, maintenance and updates. What actually drives the number 1. What kind.
The short answer
A small business website runs $500 to $8,000 for a five-to-ten page build, and $5,000 to $25,000 or more once ecommerce is involved. US agency hourly rates run $120 to $200. Budget another 15% to 30% of the build cost every year for hosting, maintenance and updates.
What actually drives the number
1. What kind of site you are actually buying ($500–$100,000)
One Little Web’s 2026 website cost study breaks the market into four clear tiers, and most disputes over price are really disputes over which tier the buyer thought they were in.
| Tier | Build cost | Annual upkeep | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY / builder | $100–$1,600 | $500–$2,000 | Template, minimal customization, you do the work |
| Small business | $500–$8,000 | $600–$5,000 | 5–10 pages, mobile, basic SEO setup |
| Ecommerce | $5,000–$25,000+ | $2,000–$10,000 | Catalog, payments, integrations |
| Custom / enterprise | $20,000–$100,000+ | $10,000–$50,000 | Custom UX, compliance, systems integration |
2. Who builds it ($40–$200 per hour)
The same study puts offshore developers at $40 to $80 an hour and US or UK specialists at $120 to $200. That gap is real, and so is the difference in project management overhead, revision cycles and how the work behaves eighteen months later. Cheap builds are usually cheap because nobody is paid to think about what happens after launch.
3. Platform choice (from $0 to $2,300 a month)
Platform sets your ceiling and your recurring cost. W3Techs shows WordPress on 40.7% of all websites as of August 2026, Shopify on 5.3%, Wix on 4.2% and Squarespace on 2.4%. If you sell products, Shopify’s published pricing is $39 a month on Basic, $105 on Grow, $399 on Advanced and from $2,300 a month for Plus, plus card rates starting at 2.9% and 30 cents online.
4. Performance and accessibility work (usually $3,000–$15,000 of the build)
This is the line that gets cut and then paid for twice. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds are specific: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. Most sites do not clear the bar. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac found that in July 2025, only 48% of websites achieved good Core Web Vitals on mobile and 56% on desktop.
How to tell which applies to you
Use this rule: price the site against the revenue it is supposed to carry, not against the number of pages.
If the site is a brochure that supports a referral business, the $2,000 to $6,000 tier is correct and spending $40,000 is vanity. If the site is your primary sales channel, meaning it takes orders or generates the leads that fund the company, then a $4,000 build is the most expensive decision on this page. A site that converts at 1.5% instead of 3% costs you half your pipeline every month, forever, and no ad budget fixes it.
Three questions settle it. Does revenue arrive through this site or around it? Will you publish new pages monthly or leave it alone for three years? Does anything need to connect to it, such as a CRM, booking system, inventory or ERP? One yes moves you a tier up. Two moves you two.
If the answer is that the site needs to bring in leads, budget for conversion work as part of the build rather than as a later project.
What we’d do
TACK™ has built sites since 2009 out of Sherman Oaks, with studios in Northridge, across 300+ brands and 15+ industries. Engagements start at $5,000 a month. Our build order:
- Structure before design. Page inventory, URL map and the question each page answers, agreed before anyone opens a design tool. Rework at the design stage is where budgets die.
- Performance budgets set at the start. Target LCP under 2.5 seconds on mobile, on a real device, on real network conditions. Written into the brief, tested before launch, not diagnosed after.
- Machine-readable from day one. Schema, entity markup and answer-first page structure so both Google and AI assistants can quote you. That is the same foundation behind getting found in search and AI answers.
- Conversion instrumentation before launch. GA4 events, call tracking and form attribution live on day one, so month two is a decision rather than a debate.
- A CMS your team can actually use. If a page edit requires a developer ticket, the site will be stale in six months. See our capabilities.
Common mistakes
Paying for a redesign that ignores speed. A beautiful site that fails Core Web Vitals loses mobile visitors before they see it. With 52% of sites failing on mobile according to the Web Almanac, this is the default outcome, not the exception. Fixing it after launch typically costs more than building it right, because the fix usually means rebuilding the templates.
Buying pages instead of outcomes. A twelve-page proposal at $600 a page tells you nothing about whether any page will convert. Ask what each page is supposed to make a visitor do, and how that will be measured.
Forgetting the annual cost. One Little Web recommends budgeting 15% to 30% of the initial build cost every year for maintenance, hosting and updates. On a $15,000 build that is $2,250 to $4,500 a year. Sites that skip it become security incidents.
The bottom line
Budget $500 to $8,000 for a straightforward small business site, $5,000 to $25,000 or more for ecommerce, and 15% to 30% of the build annually to keep it healthy. What determines the right tier is whether revenue arrives through the site or around it.
If you want a scoped number for your site instead of a range, book twenty minutes: talk to an expert, or call 310-620-1141.
Sources
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