How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in 2026?
Real 2026 prices for a small business website, from about $12 a year for a DIY template site to $48-$350 a year for a builder, plus email and design.
By Paul Peery
· 8 min read
A small business website costs anywhere from about $12 a year to several thousand dollars up front. Build it
yourself from a free template on free static hosting and the only bill you can't avoid is the domain name, around
$12 a year for a .com. A website builder such as Squarespace, Wix or WordPress.com runs roughly $50 to $350 a
year on its entry plans. An online store adds payment fees to that, and hiring a designer adds their time. The
sections below break down each cost with prices from the providers' own pages, checked at the time of writing.
The short answer, in one table#
Yearly running costs for one website, before your own time. Prices are for yearly billing unless noted, and they change, so follow the links before you buy.
| How you build it | Up front | Per year (approx.) | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free template + free static hosting | $0 | $12 + email | Brochure sites, portfolios, menus, services |
| WordPress.com Personal or Premium | $0 | $48–$96 | Blogs and simple sites edited in the browser |
| Wix Light | $0 | About $213 | Drag-and-drop editing |
| Squarespace Basic or Core | $0 | $228–$348 | Polished all-in-one sites, light selling |
| Shopify Basic | $0 | $348 + card fees | A real online store |
| A designer or developer builds it | Their time (often $1,000s) | One of the above | When your time is worth more than the fee |
Every route also needs somewhere for email (from $12 a person a year) and, for static sites, a form service (free for small volumes). Those are covered below.
The costs every website has#
A domain name: about $12 a year#
Your domain (yourbusiness.com) is the one cost no route avoids, unless you settle for a subdomain like
yourbusiness.wixsite.com, which looks less trustworthy on a van or a business card.
At the time of writing, Porkbun lists a .com at $11.81 for the first
year and the same price to renew. Cloudflare Registrar says it
charges what the registry and ICANN charge it, with no markup. Watch for low first-year prices with much higher
renewals: the renewal price is the one you'll pay for years.
Squarespace, Wix and WordPress.com include a free domain for the first year on their yearly plans. After that year you pay to renew it, so budget for it either way. If you already own a domain, the guide to connecting a custom domain shows how to point it at your new site.
Email at your own domain: $0 to $100 per person a year#
hello@yourbusiness.com looks more professional than a free webmail address, and it's separate from the
website itself. Two common choices at the time of writing:
- Zoho Mail: Mail Lite is $1 per user per month on yearly billing ($12 a year), with 5 GB per user. Its Forever Free plan covers up to five users on one domain, but without IMAP or POP, so you read mail in Zoho's own apps.
- Google Workspace: Business Starter is $84 per user per year on an annual plan, or $8.40 per user per month on the Flexible plan (about $101 a year). You get Gmail, Calendar and Drive with your own domain.
Option 1: Build it yourself from a template ($12 to $100 a year)#
This is the cheapest route by far, and it isn't the hardest. A template is a complete, designed website: you replace the words, photos, prices and contact details, then put the files online. Static sites (plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript) need no database and no server software, so there's nothing to patch and very little to break.
Template: free to paid. Freeframe's HTML templates are free under the MIT license; its Next.js, Astro, Nuxt and WordPress versions are paid. Other template shops work the same way. A template made for your kind of business saves the most time: a tradesperson's site like Handy already has service pages and a quote form, and a restaurant template like Bistro already has a menu and opening hours.
Hosting: $0 for most small sites. Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages all host static sites free, with HTTPS and your own domain. For example, Netlify's Free plan is "$0 forever" with a 300-credit limit and custom domains with SSL, and its Pro plan is $20 a month if you outgrow it. How to host a static website for free compares all four.
Contact form: $0 for small volumes. A static site sends its form to a service. At the time of writing, Formspree's free plan accepts 50 submissions a month, and its Personal plan is $10 a month billed yearly ($120 a year). Netlify Forms and others have free tiers too; see how to add a contact form to a static website.
Total: about $12 a year for the domain, plus email if you want it at your domain ($12 to $100 a person a year). Your real cost is time: a weekend for a five to eight page site, most of it spent writing the words. The step-by-step version is in How to Make a Website for Your Small Business.
Option 2: A website builder ($48 to $350 a year)#
Builders bundle hosting, an editor and templates into one monthly fee. You edit in the browser and never handle files. The trade-off is that you pay every year for as long as the site is online, and moving away later means rebuilding.
Entry plan prices at the time of writing:
| Builder | Plan | Billed yearly | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress.com | Personal | $4/mo ($48/yr) | $9/mo |
| WordPress.com | Premium | $8/mo ($96/yr) | $18/mo |
| WordPress.com | Business | $25/mo ($300/yr) | $40/mo |
| Wix | Light | $17.77/mo (about $213) | Not listed |
| Squarespace | Basic | $19/mo ($228/yr) | $25/mo |
| Squarespace | Core | $29/mo ($348/yr) | $39/mo |
Three things to check before you pick one:
- Monthly billing costs more. Squarespace Basic is $228 a year billed yearly but $300 a year billed monthly, and monthly plans don't include the free first-year domain.
- Free plans are for trying the editor. Wix and WordPress.com have $0 plans, but neither includes a domain (WordPress.com's free plan uses a WordPress.com subdomain), so they don't suit a business.
- Selling can add a fee on top of card processing. Squarespace's Basic plan, for example, takes a 2% fee on online store sales on top of 2.9% + $0.30 card processing; Core and above take 0% on product sales.
If you want WordPress but not a builder, a WordPress block theme on your own hosting is another route; the cost is then the host's plan plus the theme. See how to install a WordPress block theme.
Option 3: An online store ($348 a year and up, plus fees)#
If selling products online is the main job, the platform's fees matter more than its monthly price. At the time of writing, Shopify's Basic plan is $29 a month billed yearly ($348 a year) or $39 billed monthly, with online card payments at 2.9% + 30¢. Squarespace's Core plan costs the same $29 a month billed yearly, with no store fee on products and the same 2.9% + $0.30 card rate.
Card fees grow with your sales. On $2,000 of online orders a month in $40 orders, 2.9% + 30¢ is $58 + $15 = $73 a month, which is more than the plan itself. If you only sell a few things, such as gift cards or deposits, a payment link on a template site can be enough; see how to sell gift cards on your website.
Option 4: Hire someone (hundreds to thousands up front)#
Paying a designer or developer to build the site buys you time and expertise, not a cheaper running cost: you still pay for the domain, hosting or builder plan and email afterward.
There's no official price list for freelance web design. For a reference point, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for web developers and digital designers at $47.85 an hour ($99,520 a year) in May 2025. That's a wage for employees, not what a freelancer or agency charges, so treat it as a rough yardstick: 20 hours of work at that rate would be about $957. Get two or three written quotes that say:
- how many pages and which features (booking, forms, a store) are included;
- who owns the domain, the hosting account and the files when the job is done (it should be you);
- what changes cost after launch, and whether there's a monthly fee.
A common middle path: start from a template yourself, and pay someone for a few hours to customize the parts you can't, such as your logo, photos or colors.
Costs people forget#
- Your time. Writing the words and gathering good photos takes longer than building the site, whichever route you take.
- Renewals. Domains, builder plans and email renew every year, often at a higher price than the first-year deal.
- Paid add-ons. Booking tools, premium form plans, extra storage and apps from a builder's marketplace each add a monthly fee.
- Keeping it current. A WordPress site needs core, plugin and theme updates (how to update WordPress safely); a static site needs almost none, but its hours, prices and copyright year still need someone to change them.
Which should you choose?#
- You want the lowest running cost and can edit text files: a free template on free static hosting, about $12 a year plus email.
- You want to edit everything in the browser and never touch files: a website builder's entry plan, $48 to $350 a year.
- Your website is mainly a shop: a store platform, $348 a year plus card fees.
- You'd rather spend money than a weekend: hire someone, but make sure you own the domain and the accounts.
Whatever you pick, budget for the domain and email every year, and check the renewal prices, not just the first year's. When you're ready to build, the website launch checklist covers what to check before you go live.
About the author
Paul Peery
Founder of Freeframe
Paul Peery runs Freeframe, which publishes complete multi-page website templates in HTML, Next.js, Astro and WordPress, and writes about getting small websites built, launched and kept up to date.
