How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in 2026?

A small business website in the United States generally costs between $850 and $10,000 to build, with most owner-operated businesses landing between $1,200 and $2,400. The spread is wide because "website" describes a one-page landing and a fifty-page site with a booking system equally well.

Here is what each band actually buys, using published prices rather than ranges invented to sound reasonable.

What does each price band include?

At 3R Core the bands are: landing page from $850, corporate site from $1,200 with a range of $1,200–$2,400 by scope, and ecommerce from $1,750. Every proposal includes Figma design, responsive development, basic technical SEO, a contact form and Google Analytics, and the first year includes domain, SSL and hosting.

Type	Price	What it is for
Professional landing page	from $850	One offer, one action. Ads traffic, a single service, a launch.
Corporate website	$1,200–$2,400	5–8 sections. The default for an established small business.
Ecommerce	from $1,750	Catalog, payment gateway, inventory, admin panel.

Above $5,000 you are usually buying something specific rather than something bigger: a booking or quoting engine, a members area, a multi-location structure, an integration with software you already run. If a quote is above that band and cannot name which of those it is, ask.

What actually makes a website cost more?

Four things move the number, and page count is not really one of them.

• Custom design versus a configured theme. Designing in Figma and then developing that design is roughly twice the work of configuring a good theme well. Both are legitimate. Only one should be priced as the other.
• Functionality. A contact form is trivial. Booking with availability, quoting with logic, a customer portal, a payment flow — each is software, and software is where hours live.
• Content. Who writes the copy and sources the photography? "Client provides content" is the most common reason projects stall for months, and the most common thing missing from a cheap quote.
• Languages. A bilingual site is not a translated site. It needs separate URLs per language and hreflang declared in both directions, and the copy needs to be written in each language rather than run through translation. For U.S. businesses serving Spanish-speaking customers this is usually the highest-return decision on the whole project.

What are the recurring costs after launch?

Budget for domain, hosting, SSL and maintenance every year — commonly $100 to $600 annually for a small business site, more if the site runs a store. These rarely appear in the initial quote and they are not optional.

• Domain: typically $10–$20 a year for a .com.
• Hosting: from a few dollars a month on shared hosting to hundreds on managed hosting. WooCommerce publishes $25–$350 a month as the realistic range for a store.
• SSL: free through Let's Encrypt on most modern hosts. If someone is charging you separately for it, ask why.
• Maintenance: updates, backups and security. On WordPress this is real work, not a formality.

Is a cheap website a false economy?

Not always — a template site for a business that needs a presence and nothing more is a perfectly rational purchase. The false economy is specific and identifiable: a site built with no analytics, no conversion tracking and no way to edit it without going back to whoever built it.

We audit sites in that state regularly. The pattern is consistent: the business has been live for a year, has no idea which pages produce enquiries, cannot change a phone number without paying for it, and is about to pay again for a rebuild. The first build was cheap. The two years were not.

The concrete test before you sign: can you edit text yourself, is analytics installed and configured, and do you own the domain and the hosting account in your own name? Three yeses and the price is probably fine, whatever it is.

Should the site be bilingual?

If a meaningful share of your customers speak Spanish, a properly built bilingual site is usually the highest-return addition to the project — and it costs less than doing it later. Retrofitting a second language onto a site that was not planned for it means restructuring URLs, which is the expensive version.

Done properly means each language has its own URL, hreflang is declared reciprocally so Google serves the right version to the right searcher, and the Spanish is written rather than translated. That last part matters more than it sounds: a translated page inherits the English page's headings, and those headings were written for a query nobody typed in Spanish.

How long does it take?

A landing page runs one to two weeks; a corporate site three to six; ecommerce four to eight, depending on catalog size. The variable is almost never development. It is content and feedback: the fastest projects we run are the ones where the client has copy and photography ready and one named decision-maker.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a website cost per month for a small business?

Ongoing costs are typically $10–$50 a month for domain and hosting on a standard site, plus any maintenance retainer. Stores cost more because hosting requirements are higher — WooCommerce publishes $25–$350 a month for hosting.

Is it cheaper to build the website myself?

In cash, yes. Site builders are inexpensive and genuinely capable now. What you are spending instead is your time, and the parts that usually go wrong unsupervised are technical SEO, page speed and conversion tracking — none of which announce themselves as broken.

Why do website quotes vary so much for the same brief?

Usually because the briefs are not the same even when they read that way. Custom design versus configured theme, who writes the copy, whether tracking is included, whether hosting and domain are in the first year. Ask for those four line items on every quote and most of the spread explains itself.

What does 3R Core charge for a website?

Landing pages from $850, corporate sites from $1,200 (range $1,200–$2,400 by scope) and ecommerce from $1,750. Every proposal includes Figma design, responsive development, basic technical SEO, contact form and Google Analytics; the first year includes domain, SSL and hosting. Net prices in U.S. dollars.

Working out a budget? See how we build websites for U.S. brands, check the published pricing, or read what a Shopify store costs if you are selling online.