How Much Does a Website Cost For a Small Business?

At Riverworks, we specialize in helping small and middle-sized companies produce a large online presence so they can compete with the Big Dogs. Whether you’re looking to build a completely new small business website, or if you just want to touch up your website’s existing design– we can help! Different factors come into play when determining how much a website will cost; no website is the same, so there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” price.

Before we can give you a price, we need to understand your specific needs. We usually begin by scheduling a discovery meeting virtually or in-person to learn more about your business and help inform any considerations when building a new site. Your small business website’s cost depends on the size of the website, the complexity of the design and any specialty features or advanced functionality or 3rd party integrations.

Getting the perfect domain for your business.

Getting the domain name you’d like for your small business can be competitive nowadays. Sometimes a business has already bought the domain, or an opportunist has claimed it in hopes that you’ll spend a pretty penny to buy it from them. There are a couple of ways to get a small business domain name that works for you.

You could always just use a different top-level domain. The most common ones you see are .com, .net, or .org, but there are all sorts of TLDs! The pro is that you’ll be able to use your business name in the domain, but the con is that people are less likely to remember your domain.

You could tweak how you write your business name. Add a hyphen, put “the” in front of your business name, add your location after your name—there are some small changes you can make that could give you the ability to get that coveted .com even if your first choice is taken.

Worst case scenario, you pay the ransom for the domain name. The unfortunate truth is that most people will type in yourbusinessname.com when looking for your website, they won’t think to add “the” at the start or “.store” at the end. Explaining that there’s a hyphen gets old fast, and you might just wish you paid the price for the domain you wanted.

A small business website design to be proud of.

A well-designed website can help elevate your business from the competition, get Google to rank you at the top of the SERPs and convert your visitors into new customers.

You’ll need a design for a homepage, templates for your pages, and a contact page. As you add pages, services, and options, the cost will go up. It’s important to decide what your small business website’s needs and wants are when considering, “How much does a website cost?” You can always add more later — take care of the basics first.

Website hosting that you can trust.

Ongoing costs are a part of maintaining a website. To keep the small business website running and address performance and security updates, as well as miscellaneous fixes and troubleshooting go into these costs. One ongoing cost, hosting, has options available to you:

• Shared hosting is the least expensive option because you’ll be sharing a server with other websites. This is the best choice for a website that doesn’t require many resources.
• A virtual private server (VPS) is an upgrade from shared hosting. You’ll still be sharing a server, but you’ll have dedicated space on it.
• Dedicated hosting is your very own server. This would only be necessary for a very high-traffic website.
• Managed hosting has the host take care of your hardware, software, updates, and maintenance. We recommend this for small businesses that want to be more hands-off with the backend of their websites and would rather have their host resolve any unexpected problems that come up.

Riverworks Marketing can help make the complex simple.

Unfortunately, when you’re coming to the table without a lot of background knowledge on web design, it can leave you vulnerable to price gouging. The services and features you spend money on should be things your business needs today, not tomorrow.

At Riverworks, we won’t trick you into paying extra for features that should be free. For example, most WordPress themes these days are responsive out-of-the-box. You will be able to communicate directly with your design team and we will do our diligence to understand your audience before building your website. If you’d like to learn more about our website design services at Riverworks Marketing, contact us today.