What "cheap" means for a small business website
Prices for a small website with a few pages vary wildly. In the US, a DIY builder runs roughly $15 to $40 a month, a freelancer charges anywhere from $500 to $5,000 and an agency usually starts around $3,000. In the UK the ranges are similar in pounds. These are rough figures, and comparing the number alone is misleading.
What matters is what's inside: how many pages, whether the domain is yours, whether fees follow, who writes the copy and what happens when you want to change something.
Whose name is the domain in?
This is the most expensive trap and the least visible one. If whoever builds your site registers the domain in their own name, your address on the internet isn't yours: if you part ways, changing it means starting over with Google.
Always ask for the domain to be registered in your name from day one, with the login in your hands.
Are there fees afterwards?
Many cheap websites are only cheap in the first month. The entry price is low, then come hosting, a mandatory maintenance plan or theme and plugin licences that renew every year.
Ask what you'll pay in year two and year three if you don't request a single change. If the answer isn't clear, neither is the price.
Is it a cloned template?
A ready-made template lowers the cost, and that isn't always a bad idea. The problem comes when hundreds of businesses in your field use the same one and your site can't be told apart from your competitors', by customers or by Google.
Ask to see real sites built by that person or agency and check whether they all look alike. If they do, what's being sold is a template.
What's included in writing, and by when?
A serious quote states how many pages and languages, whether there's a contact form, whether the privacy policy is included, how many rounds of changes and the delivery date. What isn't in writing isn't included, whatever was said on the phone.
Speed matters too: a site that's slow on a phone loses visitors before it finishes loading. Ask for a guaranteed minimum score in Google's performance audit, Lighthouse.
An affordable website done right
You can have a website at a sensible price without falling into any of these traps: a few well-planned pages, the domain in your name, no hosting fees and everything agreed in writing. That's how our website packs work, with the price published.