How to Get a Small Business Website Built Without Overpaying

Small business web design is the job of turning a few pages into something that makes the phone ring. Not a brand exercise, not a portfolio piece: five or six pages that say what you do, prove you can do it, and make it easy to contact you from a phone on a building site or a bus.

This guide answers the question people actually type before they hire anyone, which is what it costs. Search results for this topic are full of agency pages promising a price after a call, so the numbers here come with the ranges attached and with the three things that move them.

It also covers the pages a small company genuinely needs, how to be found locally without an SEO budget, what European law requires even on a five-page site, and the six questions that make two quotes comparable.

A small business website has one job with three parts: be found by someone searching for what you sell, convince them in under a minute that you are competent and real, and hand them a way to get in touch that works on a phone. Everything else is optional, and most of what agencies upsell sits in the optional pile.

That framing decides the budget. You are not buying a digital transformation, you are buying the online version of a good shopfront and a business card that a stranger can verify. A site that does those three things on five pages beats a site that does them badly on twenty.

It also decides what you skip. Animation, custom illustration, a blog nobody has time to write, a chatbot: all of it can wait until the basic version brings enquiries. The one thing that cannot wait is speed on a mobile connection, because that is where most local searches happen.

Five pages cover almost every trade, practice and small firm. Each one answers a question a customer asks before calling, and adding pages beyond this list is worth it only when you can name the visitor who needs them.

Home. What you do, for whom, in which area, and a phone number visible without scrolling. If a stranger cannot repeat your offer after five seconds, nothing else on the site matters.

Services. One page per service when they attract different customers. Two services on one page compete for the same search result and neither wins, which is the most common reason a small site ranks for nothing.

About. Who is behind the business, since when, with what qualifications, insurance and memberships. In trades and professional services this page gets read more than owners expect.

Work or reviews. Photos of real jobs, before and after, named reviews where the customer agrees. Proof beats adjectives every time.

Contact. Form, tappable phone number, address, opening hours, and a map if customers visit you.

Legal pages. Legal notice, privacy notice and cookie consent, which are obligations rather than options. Our guide to what a company website needs covers them in detail.

This is the question typed before any other, and most results answer it with a contact form. Three things decide the number, and none of them is the page count: how many design templates get made, who writes the words, and whether usable photos of your work already exist.

Our published pricing starts at €1,500 for a single landing page delivered in two to three days and €4,500 for a site of 10 to 30 pages delivered in one to three weeks. A five-page small business site sits between those two points, closer to the lower end when the copy and photos are ready and closer to the upper end when they are not. Figures are current as of August 2026.

Below that range sit template packages and builder subscriptions, which are a real option for a one-person business with one service. Above it sit projects with bookings, payments or several languages, which stop being small business web design and become something else.

Two costs are annual rather than one-off, and quotes routinely leave them out: hosting with maintenance, and the domain. Ask for both as yearly figures before you compare anything.

The route decides the budget before anyone talks about design, and choosing badly is more expensive than choosing slowly. The honest version is that all three work, for different situations, and the cheapest is genuinely right for some businesses.

A builder subscription suits one person with one service and no plans to add more. You do the work, you own the maintenance, and the monthly fee runs forever. A freelancer suits a clear brief and an owner willing to chase progress; the risk is that holidays and illness become your delays. An agency costs more because coordination is included, which starts paying off around five pages with real copy and photography.

What none of the three fixes is missing content. Whoever builds it, someone has to describe your services and supply photos of your work, and that person is usually you.

For a local business, the free listing matters as much as the website. A Google Business Profile with correct opening hours, a service area, photos and reviews often brings more calls in the first months than the site does, and it costs nothing but attention.

The website's job is to back that listing up. Three things do most of the work. Name your town and service area in plain text on the home page and the contact page rather than only in an image. Keep the business name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear, including the listing. And give each service its own page, because that is what search engines can rank against a specific query.

Speed matters more here than in any other segment, because local searches happen on phones on mobile data. According to Google's documentation, Core Web Vitals are assessed at the 75th percentile of real page loads, with published thresholds of 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint, 200 milliseconds for Interaction to Next Paint and 0.1 for Cumulative Layout Shift on web.dev. A five-page site has no excuse for missing them.

Three obligations apply to a five-page site exactly as they apply to a corporate one, and none of them depends on turnover. They are the cheapest part of the project and the most visible when missing, because anyone can check them from the outside in a minute.

A legal notice identifying the business, its address and its registration comes from the E-Commerce Directive and its national transpositions. A privacy notice explaining what you collect and why comes from the GDPR, Articles 12 to 14, and a contact form alone is enough to trigger it. Consent before non-essential cookies comes from the ePrivacy rules, which is why an analytics tag may not fire before the visitor agrees.

Accessibility is the newer question. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to the services it covers, mainly consumer e-commerce and a set of regulated sectors. A plain brochure site for a local trade usually falls outside that scope, but the moment you sell or book online, the answer changes and WCAG 2.1 Level AA becomes the benchmark to build against.

The same four faults turn up in almost every audit of a small site, and none of them is a design problem. Each is visible from the outside, which means customers and competitors see it too, and each costs less to prevent during the project than to repair a year later.

The phone number is not tappable. Most visits arrive on a phone and the expected action is a call. A number set inside an image is a lost job.

One page for every service. The site ranks for nothing because no page is about anything specific, and there is no link to send when someone asks what you do.

Nothing has changed in three years. A frozen year in the footer, news from two summers ago, a team photo with people who left. Visitors conclude the business is in the same state.

No owner after launch. The site goes live, the supplier leaves, and nobody has the job of updating it. A small maintenance arrangement with a named response time solves it, and it belongs in the first budget rather than the second.

Six questions, asked in writing to every supplier, turn a pile of prices into a comparison. Ask all six even when you already like someone, because the answers describe how they work rather than how they sell.

1. How many pages and how many design templates are in this price?
2. Who writes the copy, and how many revision rounds are included?
3. Are the legal pages included, and who sets up the cookie consent?
4. What does hosting and maintenance cost per year, and what does it cover?
5. Will I be able to edit text and photos myself, and will you show me how?
6. Who owns the domain and the files if we stop working together?

Question six is the one small business owners forget and later regret. The domain should be registered in your name, not the supplier's, and you should have the login. If you are earlier in the process, our guide to commissioning a website covers the full quote comparison.

Run this before the site goes live and once a year afterwards. Every line is a yes or a no, and the whole thing takes about half an hour with a phone and a laptop.

Content

• One page per service that attracts a different customer.
• Photos of your own work, not only stock images.
• Reviews or references with permission to use the name.
• Town and service area written in plain text, not only in a picture.

Contact

• Phone number tappable on a mobile.
• Address and opening hours matching your Google Business Profile.
• Form tested through to the inbox, including the automatic reply.

Legal

• Legal notice with the business name, address and registration.
• Privacy notice covering the contact form and any analytics.
• Cookie banner that blocks non-essential cookies until consent.

Technical and ownership

• Loads in under 2.5 seconds on a phone on mobile data.
• HTTPS on every page.
• Domain registered in your name, with the login in your hands.
• A named person for updates and a maintenance arrangement in the budget.