Guide
What a small business website really costs to run
Not the build. The build is one number you pay once. This is the number that comes out of your account every year after that, including the part nobody counts: your own time.
The four running costs
There are only four things a website costs to keep alive. Everything else someone has ever sold you is one of these wearing a different hat.
1. The domain name
Around $18 a year for a normal .com, or more for a .plumbing or a regional suffix. This is the one cost that never goes away and is never worth optimising. Register it yourself so nobody else holds it.
2. Hosting and TLS
Around $120 a year for a plain site, because a plain site is a handful of files and some CSS. WordPress hosting runs closer to $180. Hosted site builders run $350 and up, and that figure is the floor, not the ceiling.
The certificate is free now and always has been on decent hosts. If anyone quotes you for SSL separately, that is a red flag.
3. Business email
Roughly $96 a year for a mailbox on your domain. This is not strictly the website, but it belongs to the same budget and it is where a surprising amount of money goes. If you use a free Gmail address rather than one on your own domain, you can put a zero here, and you should know what that costs you: you cannot be found by a typed brand search as reliably, and your mail looks like everyone else's.
4. The time you spend on it
This is the line that gets left out of every quote. A small update is about half an hour if the site is simple. Four updates a year is two hours. Value an hour of your own time at $45 and that is $90 a year, which is more than the hosting.
If updating your site takes three hours a time, that is not a maintenance problem, it is a design problem. The fix is a site you can edit yourself, which is the whole argument for how these are built.
So what is the total?
A plain, well-built static site: $230 to $400 a year all in, once you count a little of your own time. WordPress or a hosted builder: $600 to $1,500 for the same job, before anyone is paid to update it.
The gap between those two numbers is not quality. It is a database, a plugin licence, and an update process that exists because the platform is capable of being exploited. Neither of those buys a visitor anything.
What you can usually cut
- A second or third plugin you installed once. Most sites run five or six, and two of them do nothing.
- A monthly maintenance retainer for a site that needs it twice a year. You can do two edits a year yourself in an hour.
- Stock photography. It reads as a template and it is why the site looks generic. A real photo of your van on your own street beats a licensed stock image of someone else's.
- A logo made in a generator. If your business name needs a symbol to be legible, the problem is the name.
What you cannot cut
- Being findable on your own domain. Everything else is optional.
- A page that works on a phone. Most people looking for a plumber are holding a phone in a bathroom.
- The words in the HTML. If your text only appears after scripts run, some search engines and most AI assistants will not see it.
- A real 404 page. Without one, your hosting serves your home page for every mistyped address, and search engines index the lot.
Calculator
Work out your own number
Enter what you are actually paying and the calculator totals it up. Nothing is sent anywhere; it all happens in your browser.
Static, hand-built
Plain files, no database. Cheapest to run and cheapest to update.
$230–$400 / year
WordPress
Flexible and enormous. Costs more in hosting, licences and admin time.
$600–$1,500 / year
Hosted builder
Convenient to start, rents your site by the month, and takes your content with you.
$350+ / year
Reference figures are typical Central Florida market rates checked in October 2026. They move, and they are not TruSpokeWare prices, which are not published. Your own time is valued at $45 an hour, which is a floor rather than a rate.
Questions
Three people always ask
Roughly $230 to $400 a year for a plain, well-built site once you count the domain, hosting and business email. Add your own time updating it, valued at about $45 an hour, and that is usually the largest single line. WordPress and hosted builders add $150 to $400 a year on top.
A Google Business Profile matters more than a website for the map results, and it is free, so set that up first if you have not. But the profile links to a site, and Google reads the site to check the business is real and genuinely local. Businesses with no site at all get filtered out of some results entirely. So: the profile is where you start, the site is what it points at.
Because some search engines and most AI assistants do not run scripts. A site that assembles its text in the browser can look empty to them. That is the most common reason a good-looking, expensive site ranks badly, and it is invisible when you look at it in a browser, because on your machine the scripts do run.
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