What a Small Business Website Costs in South Florida (Real Numbers)

Nobody in this industry likes publishing prices, which tells you something. Here is the honest math for a South Florida small business trying to figure out what a website should cost in 2026, including what I charge.

The four ways to buy a website

1. Do it yourself on a site builder

Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy builders run roughly $20 to $50 a month forever, so around $240 to $600 a year, plus your weekends. The real cost is the result: a template your customers have seen a hundred times, slower loads than hand-built sites, and a design ceiling you hit the first time you want something the template does not do. For a hobby, fine. For a business whose customers compare you against competitors, it usually reads exactly like what it is.

2. The cheap freelancer

Somewhere between $300 and $800, often through a marketplace. Sometimes you get lucky. More often you get a template with your logo swapped in, no SEO structure, no mobile testing, and nobody picking up when it breaks in six months. I rebuild a lot of these.

3. The agency

South Florida agencies commonly quote $5,000 to $15,000 and up for a small business site, and the good ones do beautiful work. You are also paying for their office, their account manager, and their project management layer. For a five to ten page local business site, most of that overhead buys you meetings, not a better website.

4. The one-person studio

This is the lane I am in, so judge accordingly. A single experienced person who designs, builds, and ranks the site personally, without agency overhead or marketplace roulette.

What I actually charge

That price includes the things that are usually upsells: custom design instead of a template, mobile-first build, SEO-ready structure with schema markup, Google Search Console setup, and launch verification on real phones. You own everything when it is done: code, domain, content.

Ongoing SEO, if you want it, runs $200 to $500 a month depending on the size of the site, and the plan includes maintenance and any site changes, so there is no separate hosting-guy invoice every time you need a photo swapped. Ads management is quoted flat around your budget. Neither is required to get a site built.

The cost that actually matters

A website is not an expense line, it is math. If your average job or customer is worth $300 and a real website brings you two extra calls a month that you close, the site pays for itself in under three months and then keeps producing. The expensive website is the one that does not produce calls, at any price, including free.

Questions to ask whoever you hire

• Is the quote flat, or does it grow? Get the number in writing before work starts.
• Do I own the site, the domain, and the content when it is done? The answer must be yes, without hedging.
• Will it be custom or a template? Ask to see past work and check whether the sites look like each other.
• Is SEO structure included, or an upsell? Titles, schema, and Search Console setup should be part of the build.
• Who does the actual work? At agencies, the person selling you is rarely the person building.

Want the number for your specific project? A quick call gets you a flat quote, no pitch.