Business Website Cost in 2026: What You Pay For

A business website costs $1,500 to $3,000 with us and takes one to two weeks. That covers design, a CMS your team edits, enquiry forms that reach sales, spam protection, and search setup. Large catalogues, custom admin tools, and integrations push a site toward the top of the range or beyond it, and hosting continues after launch.

TL;DR: Budget $1,500 to $3,000 to build a business website, one to two weeks, plus domain and hosting each year. Maintenance is optional at $100 to $300 a month. What moves the price is scope: a custom admin, a catalogue, or integrations cost more than a brochure site.

A quote alone tells you little, because two studios can mean very different things by "a website". This post breaks down what our range includes, what moves a site up or down within it, what you'll pay in the first year, and the questions that make quotes comparable.

How much does a business website cost?

With us, $1,500 to $3,000 for the build, delivered in one to two weeks when the scope is clear and the content is ready. Where a site lands depends on how much it has to do: a brochure site sits at the bottom, a site with a custom admin or a catalogue sits higher, and integrations can take it beyond the range.

Every site in that range should include the same base:

Part	What it covers
Design	A layout built for your business, on desktop and phone
Pages	Home, services or products, about, contact, and the pages your buyers need
CMS	Your team edits text, images, and pages without a developer
Enquiries	Forms that save every enquiry and notify the right person
Spam protection	Bot checks verified on the server
Search setup	Titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap, and analytics
Speed	Images sized and compressed for phones
Ownership	Domain, hosting, and code in your name

What moves a website up or down the range?

Scope does, not page count. Ten simple pages cost less than three pages with a custom gallery admin behind them. Here are three common levels, using only our range; the written quote sets the exact number.

Level	Typical scope	Where it lands
Brochure site	A handful of pages, a CMS, a contact form, search basics	Toward $1,500
Portfolio or catalogue	A gallery or product pages with structured fields, a custom admin for one job	Toward $3,000
Site with integrations	A CRM, booking, or payment system connected, or several languages	At or above $3,000, quoted separately

Things that add cost, in our experience: a large product catalogue, a custom admin for a specific task, integrations, multiple languages or markets, content writing, an online store, and migrating an old site without losing rankings.

Two of our sites show the difference. The Sharp Interiors needed a portfolio with a custom gallery admin, which we cover in how to build an interior design portfolio site. Siona Jewels needed a B2B catalogue with lead emails and search work, explained in our jewellery catalogue SEO post. Both cost more than a brochure site because they do more.

What will a website cost in its first year?

Add the build to a year of running costs. Domain and hosting are usually modest for a business site, and form emails often fit inside a provider's free tier. Maintenance is the variable: with no plan, the first year is close to the build price; with our $100 to $300 monthly plan, it adds $1,200 to $3,600.

Do you need a maintenance plan at all? A simple site on a managed host with a CMS your team edits may not. Our software maintenance post explains what a plan covers and when it pays for itself.

Which CMS should a business website use?

One your team will actually use without a developer. For most business sites that's either a headless CMS behind a custom front end or a small custom admin built for one job. Siona runs on Next.js with Payload CMS; The Sharp Interiors uses a custom admin on Firebase with schemas that validate every project.

A headless CMS keeps content apart from the site's code, so the site can be fast and custom while editors work in a familiar admin. A custom admin makes sense when the job is narrow and specific, like ordering a gallery by drag and drop. We explain the trade-offs on the headless CMS page.

Why the framework still matters for search

It matters less than it used to, but it still matters. Google renders JavaScript with an evergreen version of Chromium, so a client-rendered site can be indexed. Google's own guidance still says server-side or pre-rendering "is still a great idea", because it makes sites faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript (Google Search Central).

That's why we build business sites on a framework such as Next.js, which renders pages on the server, generates the sitemap from the CMS, and puts structured data on every page. The same codebase can later hold a customer portal. The Next.js vs React page compares the two.

How fast should the site be on a phone?

Fast enough to pass Google's Core Web Vitals. The targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads on mobile and desktop (web.dev).

What gets you there:

1. Images sized for the screen, compressed, in modern formats.
2. The first screen loads first, with the rest lazy-loaded as people scroll.
3. Few third-party scripts. Every widget and tracker adds weight.
4. Fonts that don't block text from appearing.

Check on real phones and in PageSpeed Insights before launch, not after.

Enquiries matter more than the design

For most business sites, enquiries are the job. A good-looking site that quietly loses leads costs more than it saved. Ask how a quote handles them: is every enquiry saved before the email goes out, does the email reach the right person, and is spam stopped on the server?

Server-side checks matter because, as Cloudflare puts it, Turnstile "tokens can be forged", and each token is valid for 300 seconds and can only be validated once (Cloudflare Docs). A widget without server verification is decoration. Siona's forms pair Turnstile with a honeypot and a fill-time check, and every enquiry is saved before the email is sent. Our post on getting website enquiries into a CRM covers the full pattern.

How do you compare website quotes?

Ask every studio the same questions, in writing, so the answers line up. The cheapest quote often leaves out the CMS, content, or search setup, and those come back as extra invoices later.

1. Can our team edit every page ourselves?
2. Where do enquiries go, and are they saved before email?
3. What search setup is included?
4. Is content writing included, or do we supply it?
5. Who owns the domain, hosting, and code?
6. What happens after launch if something breaks?
7. If you're replacing a site, how will you keep our rankings?

On that last point, Google recommends server-side permanent redirects when URLs change, notes that 301 and other permanent redirects "don't cause a loss in PageRank", and advises keeping them for at least a year (Google Search Central). A studio that can't explain its redirect plan isn't ready to replace your site.

FAQ

Is a website builder cheaper than a custom-built site?

At the start, often yes. A builder's monthly fee is lower than a build, and it's fine for a simple brochure site. The cost shows up later: limited control over speed, structured data, and forms, and a site you rent rather than own. Compare three years of fees, not the first month.

What should we prepare before a website project starts?

Text for the main pages, your best photos, the logo, a list of services or products, and who should receive enquiries. Access to the domain registrar helps too. Projects that start with content ready finish inside one to two weeks; projects waiting on copy slip, whatever the quote says.

Does a website quote include hosting and the domain?

Usually not. The domain renews each year and hosting is billed monthly or yearly, both in your name, so you keep them if you change studios. Ask each quote to list running costs separately from the build, so you can compare first-year totals rather than headline prices.

Planning a new website or replacing an old one? See our website development service and ask for a written plan with scope, timeline, and a number.