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What a small business website actually needs, what it really costs, and the honest decision about whether to build it yourself or hire someone. Written by someone who takes this work for money.
Most advice about small business websites is written by people selling you the tool. Builder companies tell you builders are enough. Agencies tell you they aren't. I take this work for money, so I have a bias too — you should know that up front, and I'll flag it where it matters.
What follows is the shape of the decision, not a sales pitch.
Almost every small business site has exactly one job: turn someone who already half-decided to contact you into someone who contacts you.
That person usually arrives having heard your name, or from a map listing, or a recommendation. They are not browsing. They want to know three things — is this the right business, are they any good, and how do I reach them — and they want to know in about fifteen seconds, on a phone, one-handed.
That's it. That's the brief. Nearly everything that goes wrong with small business sites comes from forgetting it: the carousel nobody scrolls, the mission statement nobody reads, the contact page buried two clicks deep.
If your site does those three things quickly on a phone, it is a good site. It can be plain. Plain converts.
Short list, in the order it matters:
Notice what isn't on that list. A blog you'll abandon in six weeks. A booking system for a business that takes four bookings a month. An online shop before anyone's asked to buy online. Every feature you add is a thing that can break, and a thing you'll pay to maintain.
Build the smallest site that does the job, then add what the business actually asks for.
Prices for this work vary enormously by market and by who's doing it, so treat any number you read — including mine — as a starting point rather than a quote. What's more useful is knowing what actually drives the price.
The rough tiers, cheapest first:
What actually moves the number: how many pages, whether it needs to do anything (payments, bookings, accounts, integrations), whether the text and photos exist yet, and how many rounds of changes you want.
That third one is the sleeper. On most small projects, waiting for content is the longest delay and the biggest cost driver, because the work stops. If you want a build to be cheap and fast, have your text and photos ready before it starts.
The costs nobody mentions up front are the recurring ones: the domain, hosting, business email, SSL if it isn't included (it usually is now), and the maintenance that keeps the thing from quietly rotting. Ask about all five before you sign anything. A cheap build with an expensive lock-in isn't cheap.
Here's my bias stated plainly: I sell custom builds. Take the next section accordingly — but I'd rather you not hire me for something you could do yourself in a weekend, because that project ends badly for both of us.
Build it yourself when: it's a brochure site, you have the time and some patience for fiddly software, and the business isn't depending on the site to bring in work this quarter. Modern builders are genuinely good at this now. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Hire someone when: the site needs to do something beyond inform; when speed or search visibility actually drives revenue; when you've already tried and it's been "nearly done" for three months; or when your time is simply worth more spent on the business. The last one is the most common honest answer and the one people feel weirdest admitting.
Two things to insist on either way. You own the domain — registered in your name, on your account, not your developer's. And you can leave: find out before you commit what happens to your site if you and whoever built it part ways. Anything you can't take with you is rented, whatever the invoice called it.
Launch day is the middle of the project, not the end.
A site that's never touched degrades. Not dramatically — it just drifts: the prices go stale, the team page shows someone who left, a form silently stops delivering and you don't find out for two months. Test your own contact form quarterly, from a phone, on a network that isn't your office. It fails more often than anyone expects.
Budget a little attention rather than a lot: keep the software updated, keep a backup you have actually restored once, and check every few months that the site still says something true. If you'd rather not think about it at all, that's what maintenance plans are for — and it's a reasonable thing to pay for, as long as you know what's in it.
The one habit worth more than all of that: when a customer asks you a question, answer it on the site. Do it consistently and the site slowly becomes the thing that answers questions before they're asked. That's also, incidentally, how it starts ranking.
If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, here's how I work and what it costs — fixed quote, no lock-in, you own everything at the end. If not, the guides below go deeper on the individual decisions.
