What A Small Business Website Should Cost In Canada

What you are actually paying for

A website is not one thing. It is a template or a design, a set of pages, some writing, and a decision about who maintains it afterwards. Change any one of those and the price moves by thousands. Most quotes never separate them, which is why comparing two feels impossible.

The bands, honestly

• Under CAD $500. A template with your logo dropped in. Fine for a business that needs an address and a phone number online and nothing more.
• CAD $1,500 to $3,500. A proper small business site. Custom layout on a solid foundation, a page for each service, writing that is actually about your business, and built so search engines can read it. This is where most owner run service businesses should sit.
• CAD $4,000 to $10,000. Adds real design work, photography, booking systems, and more pages. Justified when the website is your main sales channel.
• Above CAD $10,000. Custom builds, ecommerce, or agencies carrying large overheads. Rarely necessary for a single location service business.

The thing that changes the price most

Page count, and specifically service pages. A five page site and a fifteen page site take very different amounts of work, because each service page needs its own writing, its own structure and its own search intent behind it.

This is also the part that decides whether the site earns anything. One page listing eight services will rank for none of them. Eight pages, one per service, each naming your town, is what actually brings people in.

What is usually missing from a cheap quote

• The writing. Many quotes assume you will supply the words, which is the hardest part.
• HTTPS and a proper certificate. Still missing on a surprising number of Canadian small business sites.
• Speed work. A site that takes six seconds on a phone loses most of its visitors before it loads.
• Anything for search. Titles, descriptions, structure and internal links.
• Who fixes it later, and what that costs.

Questions worth asking before you sign

1. Who owns the domain and the hosting account? The answer must be you.
2. How many service pages are included, and who writes them?
3. What happens if I want a change in six months, and what does that cost?
4. Can I see a site you built that is more than two years old? This tells you whether their work ages well.
5. Is search structure included, or sold separately?

A signal worth checking on your current site

Open your homepage, right click and choose View page source. Search for your address. If the address in the code is not the one you trade from, your site has moved on and the code has not. It happens constantly after a relocation and it quietly confuses Google about where you are.