How much should a website cost for a small business in 2026

The monthly price on a website builder's pricing page assumes you've paid a year upfront, and the free domain that comes with it runs out after one year. Add the domain renewals and a business inbox, and a small business site on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress.com costs about $1,180 to $1,340 over three years at November 2026 prices.

That buys a site whose only job is to exist. A custom site starts to pay back when the site has to bring in calls and bookings.

About $1,180 to $1,340 over three years buys a builder site that proves you exist, and a custom site pays off once it must win enquiries.

Pick a builder if the site is a brochure you keep up yourself and few customers find you through search. A custom site makes sense when you need a page for every service and area you cover, and you want each call and form traced back to the page that brought it in.

A custom site also suits an owner who'd sooner hand the maintenance to someone else. A builder keeps the monthly bill small, but its lock-in grows the longer the site runs.

If you sit somewhere in between, add up three years for each route and put the hours you'd spend on the site yourself in as a line. We'd start with that line, since it's the one owners leave out.

Paid annually, an entry business plan costs $144 to $348 a year on the builders' own November 2026 pages, and monthly billing pushes that up.

A website's total cost of ownership is the sum of everything a site costs over the years it stays live, from the plan and the domain to the hours its owner puts in. The plan is the first line, and its price swings with how you pay for it.

All prices below are in US dollars, read on 12 November 2026.

Wix's figures come from Wix's own pricing summary, dated November 2026. The Wix plans page adds that every price it shows assumes a yearly subscription paid in full when you buy.

Squarespace's pricing page offers up to 36% off for paying annually. WordPress.com's pricing page lists Business at $40 billed monthly and $25 a month billed yearly, and a three-year term brings it down to $17.50 a month.

Wherever monthly billing is offered, it costs more. Squarespace Basic comes to $228 a year paid monthly against $144 paid annually, and WordPress.com Business to $480 against $300.

Pay monthly and you lose the free domain too. WordPress.com says so on its pricing page, and Wix leaves monthly plans out of its free-domain voucher.

We'd skip the cheapest tier for a service business. On Wix, scheduling and taking payments start on Core, and Light lists neither.

Squarespace Basic takes 2% of anything sold online, services included. If you take deposits for jobs through the site, price Core from the start.

Check your site for free before you compare plans. Google's phone test on our homepage shows in about twenty seconds how your current site loads on a mobile.

Over 36 months of annual billing, the three builders cost $1,178 to $1,339. That covers domain renewals, one business inbox and each vendor's own booking tool.

Each column uses the tier a service business taking bookings would pick.

Wix's guide to domain costs puts a .com renewal at $21.35 in year two, and the table keeps that price for year three.

Squarespace's domains FAQ puts its renewal at $20 after one year of service. WordPress.com's domain pricing page lists a .com at $13 a year, and it renews at that price on any plan.

The inbox line is Google Workspace Business Starter at $7 per user a month on an annual commitment. New customers get an introductory price in year one, so $252 is the most that line can come to.

Booking swings the totals more than any other line. Wix Core includes scheduling, while Squarespace sells it separately as Acuity Scheduling, whose Starter plan is $16 a month billed annually or $20 billed monthly.

On WordPress.com you add booking with a plugin, and every paid plan can install plugins. What that costs depends on the plugin you pick, so the table leaves it out.

Moving up to Squarespace Core adds $60 a year and lifts the Squarespace total to $1,480. On WordPress.com, a three-year term at $17.50 a month cuts the plan line to $630 and the total to $908.

For a service business, the three builders differ most on booking and control. Wix keeps scheduling inside the plan and Squarespace bills for it on top. WordPress.com leaves the booking plugin to you, which buys you more freedom and more to maintain.

There's a fourth route, self-hosted WordPress. WordPress.org publishes the software as open source under the GPLv2 licence, so the code itself is free. You still pay for hosting and a theme, and somebody spends hours on updates every month.

The line owners forget most is their own time. Say you spend two hours a month on the site and value an hour of your time at $50.

That's $3,600 over three years, more than the full three-year bill on any of the three builders. When did you last count the evenings spent moving a photo or fixing opening times? No pricing page lists your time, yet in this example it's the biggest line on the bill.

A custom small business site from us is priced in a quote after a first call, and most of the hours you'd spend on a builder move to us.

Hosting and maintenance then come as a monthly fee, set in the same quote. Most of that money pays for work a builder plan leaves to you:

• A page for every service and every area you cover, each written around what a customer types into Google.
• Technical SEO from day one, with a sitemap and a title and meta description on every page.
• A phone number and a form on every page, with tracking that records which page each call came from.
• Hosting and updates handled for you.

Pando Cleaning Solutions, a cleaning company in Jacksonville, Florida, is one example. We rebuilt its site as forty-four pages, one for every service, every city and every question a customer types before booking. The Pando Cleaning case study walks through how those pages are organised.

On a builder, the plan price is your maintenance bill. It covers hosting and the platform's own updates, but every content change stays your job.

A custom site's monthly fee pays for hosting and updates done for you. It also covers backups and the small edits you'd otherwise make yourself.

We build business sites and online stores, plus calculators and custom tools for customers who want a price before they call. After launch we host and maintain the site.

Each build is tied to two numbers you can check: how fast the pages load and the conversion rate (the share of visitors who call, book or send a form). We plan the site together with the ads and SEO that send people to it, as part of your whole marketing function, run as one system.

Chrome UX Report data for October 2026 shows 80.9% of Wix mobile origins with good Core Web Vitals, against 49.0% on WordPress and 53.0% overall.

An origin is roughly one website's address. The figures come from the HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report, which draws on Chrome UX Report field data from real visitors' page loads.

Core Web Vitals are three speed and stability measures that Google uses to judge how a page feels to a visitor. Google's web.dev guide to Web Vitals sets the "good" thresholds at the 75th percentile of page loads:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time until the biggest element on screen appears, within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP), how fast the page reacts to a tap, at 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), how much the layout jumps while it loads, at 0.1 or less.

Google Search Central's page on Core Web Vitals says good scores line up with what its core ranking systems try to reward, along with other parts of page experience.

A platform average tells you little about any one site. It does set a bar for custom work, though, since Wix and Squarespace sites pass more often than WordPress sites and the web as a whole.

A custom build only clears that bar if speed is planned from the first template. We'd treat a custom site that fails Core Web Vitals on mobile as a failed build, given that four in five Wix sites pass.

The mobile figure is the one to read first. If a customer with a burst pipe searches on their phone at seven in the morning and your page takes five seconds to show the phone number, the call goes to the next result that shows it at once.

Our free site check on the homepage runs the same phone test on your current site.

At $29 a month for Wix Core, the plan is rarely the expensive part once a site must bring in calls, bookings and quote requests.

The money is lost on pages that get visits and no enquiries. A site that brings in work needs four things, and each one takes setup on any platform:

• One page for each service and each area, so a search for end of tenancy cleaning in Leeds lands on a page about exactly that.
• A phone number and a short form on every page.
• Tracking that ties each call and form to the page that produced it.
• Pages that load fast on a phone.

Builders cover part of this out of the box. Wix Core includes scheduling, and Squarespace connects bookings through Acuity.

On any platform, someone still has to plan and build the service and area pages and the tracking behind them. Those pages are also where our SEO work starts, and we'd say they decide more about enquiries than the choice of builder does.

How many of last month's enquiries could you trace back to a page? If it's none, you can't really judge what the site costs you.

A builder is likely enough if most of your work comes from referrals and repeat customers, you offer one or two services in one town, and you enjoy editing the site and have the hours for it. A custom site is likely worth it if you cover several services or areas, run ads, have outgrown the builder's booking or forms, or nobody on the team has time to maintain the site. Answer the questions below to see which side you're on.

Switching makes sense once the current site loses enquiries you can point to, and with us a redesign is priced in a quote after a first call.

Switch if the site is the main way new customers reach you and the builder now limits what you can add. Stay where you are if your work comes from referrals and the site only has to confirm you exist.

For that business we'd spend the money elsewhere. A builder page with a clear phone number and an up-to-date list of services does the job.

Leaving a builder usually means a rebuild. Wix's help centre says a Wix site can't be moved to another host, since its SaaS architecture (software rented as a service) doesn't support external hosting.

Squarespace's export guide says only certain content exports, as an .xml file meant for WordPress. Store pages and product blocks stay behind, and so do style settings and custom CSS.

Three things drive what a redesign costs:

• The number of pages, which on a service site grows with every service and area.
• How much of the text needs rewriting.
• Redirects, the rules that send each old address to its new page so old links and bookmarks still land somewhere.

We map every old address before we write a new page, so each one points to a matching new page.

1. How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost per Month?

On a builder, the plan alone costs $12 to $40 a month at November 2026 prices. Squarespace Basic sits at the low end on annual billing, and WordPress.com Business at the top when you pay monthly. A Google Workspace inbox adds $7 per user a month. On a custom site from us, hosting and maintenance are a monthly fee set in the quote.

2. How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website for a Small Business per Year?

A year of maintenance on Wix Core is the $348 plan plus a $21.35 domain renewal from year two and $84 for one Workspace inbox. Wix runs the platform updates itself. Your time on content is the part that grows, so price it in before you set it against a custom site's monthly fee.

3. Is Wix or Squarespace Cheaper Over Three Years?

They come out close once booking is in, at $1,338.70 for Wix Core and $1,300 for Squarespace Basic with Acuity. Without online booking, Squarespace Basic drops to $724 over three years. If you sell services online through Squarespace, the 2% fee on Basic can make Core the cheaper plan.

4. Is WordPress Free for a Small Business Website?

The WordPress software is free and open source under the GPLv2 licence. Running it costs money. On WordPress.com, the Business plan is $25 a month billed yearly or $17.50 on a three-year term. Self-hosted WordPress needs paid hosting and someone to keep its plugins updated every month.

5. Can I Move My Wix or Squarespace Site Somewhere Else Later?

A Wix site can't be moved to another host, and Squarespace exports only certain content as an .xml file for WordPress. In practice, moving means rebuilding the design and carrying the text across. Plan for that before you build fifty pages on either builder.

6. Do I Need a Custom Website if I Only Get Work From Referrals?

Usually not. A referred customer mostly checks that you exist, and a builder page with your phone number and services handles that. Wix Light at $17 a month on yearly billing is enough for it. A custom site is worth pricing once you want new customers who have never heard of you.

Book a call through the contact form on our homepage and we'll price the build your site needs. Our web design page shows what a build and its maintenance include.