Search this question and you will get forty articles that never answer it. “It depends on your needs.” “Contact us for a custom quote.” Pages and pages of throat-clearing.
So here is a number, for a small business in Tampa or Wesley Chapel, from somebody who quotes these every month. I charge $175 to $250 per page, with SEO included. A simple five page site for a local service business lands somewhere around a thousand to twelve hundred dollars. I quote a fixed figure before I start, not an hourly meter you cannot see.
Now here is everything behind that number, including when you should not pay it.
What you are actually choosing between
Doing it yourself on Wix or Squarespace. Roughly twenty to forty dollars a month, forever. Genuinely fine for some businesses. You will spend a weekend or three on it, it will look decent, and it will be slower and weaker at search than something purpose built. If money is the binding constraint right now, this is not a stupid choice and I will tell you so.
A cheap freelancer online. A few hundred dollars. Sometimes you get lucky. More often you get a template with your logo dropped in, no search setup, and nobody to call in eight months when the contact form quietly stops sending. The cost is rarely the money.
A local freelancer or small shop. Low thousands, give or take. This is where I sit, and around Tampa there are a lot of us. The quality range is enormous, because there is no barrier to entry. You get somebody who answers the phone, and if you would rather sit down in person over a coffee in Wesley Chapel or Wiregrass, you can.
An agency. Ten thousand and up, often a lot more. For a business doing real volume with a complex site, that can be the right call. For a five page site for a service business in Wesley Chapel, you are buying a lot of account management.
What actually moves the price
Two things, mostly.
How many pages. That is why I price per page. It is the most honest unit I have found, because it maps to actual work.
Whether the content exists. This is the one that surprises people. If you have your service descriptions, your photos and your about page written, the build is straightforward. If I am writing all of it from scratch, that is a different job. Have a think before you get quotes about how much of the words you can supply.
Things that move it less than people expect: the design itself, and the number of “features”. Most small business sites need the same handful of things done properly.
What this looks like around Tampa
Prices are not the same everywhere, and they are not the same across this county either.
A downtown Tampa agency quoting a Hyde Park restaurant is working to different numbers than somebody building a five page site for an HVAC company in Land O’ Lakes. Same work, different overhead, different expectation.
The practical effect for you, if you are in Wesley Chapel, Lutz, New Tampa or Land O’ Lakes: get at least one quote from somebody local and one from somebody downtown, and you will see the spread immediately. Not because downtown is ripping you off, but because you are buying different things. Account managers cost money.
The other local factor is competition. If you are a roofer in Wesley Chapel you are fighting a lot of other roofers in Wesley Chapel, and a site that is merely present will not do it. If you are something more unusual, a plain, fast, well structured five pages may be all you ever need. That changes what is worth spending.
The costs nobody mentions in the quote
The build is one-off. These are not.
Domain, roughly fifteen to twenty dollars a year. Hosting, anywhere from a hundred to a few hundred a year depending on who you go with and how fast you want it. That is genuinely most of it for a small site.
Then optional: maintenance and updates if you do not want to touch it yourself, and ongoing SEO if you want to keep climbing rather than just exist.
Budget a couple of hundred a year minimum to keep a site alive. Anybody who quotes you a build price and does not mention the running costs is either being careless or hoping you will not notice.
The pricing traps
Hourly billing with no cap. One of my clients came to me after exactly this. In their words: “We were getting the runaround from this company for building our site and the cost kept increasing.” That is what an open meter does. Get a fixed number in writing.
Not owning what you paid for. Ask this question directly of anyone you are considering: if I stop working with you, do I keep the site? If the answer involves a proprietary builder you cannot export from, you are renting. My answer is that it is yours completely, on WordPress, and you can take it anywhere.
The endless monthly. Some outfits charge a low build fee and a monthly that never ends, and if you stop paying the site goes dark. That is a lease dressed as a purchase. Sometimes it is a fair deal. Make sure you know which one you are signing.
Contracts. I do not use them. I would rather earn my keep than lock you in.
SEO as a surprise upsell. A site built without search structure is a site you pay to rebuild later. Proper page titles, clean structure, real redirects. That should be in the build, not sold back to you afterwards. Mine is included, and the wider search work is a separate thing you can take or leave.
When you should not pay for a website
I will say this plainly because most people in my position will not.
If you are just starting out and you have no customers yet, your money is better spent on a Google Business Profile, which is free, and getting your first ten reviews. I have written about how to do that. A well filled Google listing with twenty good reviews will out-earn a beautiful website with none.
If you already have a site and it is only slow and badly laid out, a rebuild might be the wrong answer. Fixing the load speed, the forms and the calls to action on what you have is usually cheaper and often does more.
If somebody tells you that you definitely need a full rebuild before looking at what you have got, get a second opinion.
What I would want to know before quoting you
If you ask me for a number, these are the questions I will ask, so you may as well have the answers ready:
- How many pages do you think you need
- Do you have the words and the photos, or am I writing them
- Do you have a domain and hosting already
- What is the site supposed to make happen, calls, forms, bookings
- Is there an existing site, and can I see it
With those five answers I can usually give you a real figure rather than a range.
The short version
A straightforward five page site for a local business, built properly, search ready and yours to keep, is around a thousand to twelve hundred dollars with me. Budget a couple of hundred a year to run it. Get the number fixed in writing before anyone starts.
If you want that number for your situation, send me what you have got and I will tell you what I would do and what it costs. I am in Tampa, so if you would rather sit down and go through it in person, that works too. You can see how I work if you want the detail first.