What does a website for a small business cost? What you are really paying for

Ask what a website costs and you get answers between zero and five figures. Both can be right. The difference lies in who does the work and what you get at the end.

This article shows what the price is made of, what a good quote should contain, and what you should clarify before you sign.

Three ways to a website of your own

• Site builder (do it yourself). Cheap per month, but your time is not free. Texts, images, structure and technology are all on you. Often enough to start with, rarely enough for a professional presence.
• Template with adjustments. Someone adapts a ready-made theme. Quick and cheap, but it often looks exactly like that: like a template.
• Designed and built for you. The website is designed for your business, optimised for speed and structured so that Google understands it. More expensive to build, but a presence that sells.

What drives the price

The cost depends less on the design than on five questions:

1. How many pages? A home page with a contact form is something else than twenty subpages with services and references.
2. Who provides texts and images? Good copy is often the biggest effort. If it is ready, the price goes down.
3. How many languages? Every language is a website of its own, for search engines too.
4. What does the site need to do? A contact form is standard; appointment booking, a customer area or a connection to your software are not.
5. Who looks after it afterwards? Updates, security, small changes and hosting come up every month.

What a good quote should include

Make sure these points are named explicitly:

• design for phone and desktop
• the technical basics for search engines: page titles, descriptions, sitemap, clean structure
• loading time: a page that takes long to load loses visitors before they have seen anything
• a contact route on which no enquiry gets lost
• room for the legal pages your country requires (you are responsible for the content, the technology has to fit)
• who owns the website and the domain at the end

Mistakes that get expensive later

• The domain is registered to the provider. Always register your domain in your own name. Otherwise your address depends on someone else's company.
• Fonts and services are loaded from third-party servers. In 2022 the Munich Regional Court ruled that embedding Google Fonts from Google's servers without consent breaches the GDPR (LG München I, 3 O 17493/20). Fonts can easily be served from your own site.
• Nobody is responsible for updates. A website without upkeep ages technically, and outdated systems are a security risk.
• Beautiful, but without a goal. A website should achieve something, usually enquiries. Every page needs a clear next step.

What it costs at Mikavo

A custom-designed website costs from €1,490 at a fixed price at Mikavo. If you like, I take care of hosting, updates and small changes from €49 a month. The exact price depends on the five questions above, and you get it after the first call, before I start.

You can see what that looks like on this website itself: self-hosted fonts, pre-rendered pages for fast loading, three languages and a contact form whose enquiries land on my phone straight away.

A good website costs money once. A bad one costs you enquiries every month that you never get to see.