How Much Does a Website Cost? Columbus Pricing Guide

Most small-business websites cost somewhere between a few hundred dollars for a do-it-yourself builder and tens of thousands for a custom site with ecommerce or integrations. Where your project lands depends on three things: how many pages and features it needs, who designs and builds it, and what it costs to run each month after launch.

I’m Rob Carroll, and I run Mobilize Cloud, a web development agency in Dublin, Ohio. We have worked on more than 100 websites since 2012. Below I break website pricing down by project type, explain what you’re paying for with examples from sites we’ve built, and list the ongoing costs a build quote doesn’t cover. If you already know you want a professionally built site, our Columbus web design services page shows how we plan, design and build custom WordPress websites.

The short answer: website cost by project type

Here is how pricing usually breaks down. The figures come from 2026 guides by Forbes Advisor and GoDaddy. GoDaddy sells a website builder, so treat its professional figures as a floor. We don’t sell fixed packages; every custom project gets a written scope and price after a free call.

• DIY website builder (Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy): roughly $0 to $450 to get started, according to Forbes Advisor, plus a monthly plan. Forbes lists Squarespace plans at $25 to $139 a month.
• Small professionally built site: GoDaddy’s guide puts a one-page site at $500 to $5,000 when you hire a professional. A multi-page custom site costs more.
• Custom business site (custom design, forms, SEO setup): GoDaddy lists large bespoke business sites at $15,000 and up.
• Ecommerce site (WooCommerce or Shopify): GoDaddy puts small to medium stores at $5,000 and up, and large stores at $10,000 and up, when you hire a professional.
• Custom web application (accounts, registration, payments): always quoted to scope, because no two are alike.

The ranges are wide because “a website” can mean a one-page landing page or a platform with member logins.

What you are actually paying for

A professional build is hours across five kinds of work. Knowing them makes quotes easier to compare.

1. Discovery and planning. Goals, audience, site map, and what your current site gets right and wrong.
2. Design. Page layouts and visual design for desktop, tablet and phone. At Mobilize Cloud, our design partner, Peebles Creative Group, handles this part.
3. Content. Writing, photography and video. Content is easy to underestimate, and when it arrives late, the launch date moves.
4. Development. Building the site, usually on a staging copy you can click through before launch.
5. Search and launch setup. Page titles, structured data, redirects from your old URLs, analytics, and a final check of forms and speed.

When one quote is much cheaper than the others, check which of these steps it leaves out.

Price ranges by project type

DIY website builders

A builder like Squarespace, Wix or GoDaddy is the cheapest way to get online. You pay a monthly subscription, pick a template, and write your own content. Forbes Advisor puts the initial DIY build at $0 to $450, and GoDaddy estimates $120 to $300 or more a year for a builder plan.

The trade-off is your time and the platform’s limits, and moving off a builder later usually means rebuilding. We wrote more about this in custom website vs. website builder.

Small brochure sites

A brochure site is a handful of pages: home, about, services, contact, and maybe a few service pages. It is the right fit for many local service businesses. Price depends mostly on whether the design is custom or based on a theme, and on who writes the content.

Many “brochure” sites grow once you list what the business actually does. When we built the S&S Midwest Fire Protection site, launched in March 2026 with design by Peebles Creative Group, the service menu alone came to more than 40 installation, inspection and repair pages. We added landing pages aimed at contractors, developers and building owners, a leadership page, and a job board that accepts resume uploads. Each of those is a line in the scope.

Custom WordPress business sites

This is our core service. A custom WordPress site has a design made for your brand, editing screens your team can use without calling a developer, forms connected to your CRM or email, and the search setup needed to rank in Columbus and beyond. Most of our new websites take 6 to 10 weeks from kickoff to launch, depending on the number of pages and how quickly content and feedback come back.

The features are what move the price. Two examples from our own work:

• Miami County Visitors & Convention Bureau: the tourism site we built in 2018 has an events calendar visitors can filter and submit to, a barn quilt trail browsable by city, and a History Pass with 38 historic stops. The bureau’s own team keeps the events and listings current and sends more complex edits our way.
• Easton Town Center: the main site for the Columbus shopping destination includes an interactive center map, an events calendar with list, month and day views, and a dining guide that filters about 80 restaurants by type. Each of those is a custom feature with its own design, build and testing time.

Features like these cost more to build, but they do work that would otherwise land on someone’s desk.

Ecommerce sites

An online store adds product pages, a cart, checkout, payment processing, shipping and tax rules, and order emails. Each of those has to be built and tested. Store size matters too: 20 products with simple options is a very different project from 2,000 products with variations and inventory syncing.

We build stores on WooCommerce, which keeps the store inside your WordPress site with one login and one place to edit. If you are already on Shopify or another platform, we can usually help there too.

Custom web applications

Some projects are a process rather than pages: member accounts, event registration, certificates, or tools that replace spreadsheets. When plugins would need so many changes that custom code is simpler, we build a custom web application in PHP or ASP.NET. These are always quoted to scope.

Two examples: Mango’s Place, a child care provider in Dublin, Powell and New Albany, has WordPress websites we build and host, plus Mango’s Hub, a custom web app we built for it. And Ohio State’s Center for Continuing Medical Education, a client since 2012, runs its program on Mobilize CME, the platform we built and run, which Stony Brook Medicine CME now uses too. Our web development services page explains when a custom app makes more sense than WordPress.

The ongoing costs a build quote doesn’t cover

The build is a one-time cost. Running the site is not. Budget for these every year:

• Domain name: about $10 to $35 a year, according to Forbes Advisor.
• Hosting: from a few dollars a month for basic shared hosting to a few hundred for managed hosting on a higher-traffic site.
• SSL certificate: included free with many hosts, including WP Engine.
• Maintenance: WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, security scans, backups and fixes when something breaks.
• Content and marketing: new pages, blog posts, SEO and ads, if the site is meant to bring in leads.

Maintenance is the easiest line to skip, and skipping it causes trouble later. A site that never gets updated becomes slower and easier to hack. Our WordPress plans are published on our pricing page:

• Essentials, $125 a month: managed WP Engine hosting, SSL, nightly backups, CDN, uptime monitoring and free migration.
• Managed, $325 a month: everything in Essentials, plus monthly updates tested on a staging copy, security scans, form and link checks, a Search Console review, a monthly report and 1 hour of development time.
• Priority, $525 a month: everything in Managed, plus 3 hours of development or content time, quarterly speed and SEO tune-ups, and same-business-day response.

If you would rather not be on a plan, on-demand WordPress help is $200 an hour.

What drives the price up or down

If you want to bring a quote down, these are the levers that make the biggest difference.

• Number of unique page templates. Ten service pages built from one template cost far less than ten pages that each need their own layout.
• Custom design vs. a theme. A custom design takes more hours but fits your brand and avoids the bloat of a multipurpose theme.
• Who writes the content. Having your copy ready before design starts saves time and money.
• Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, booking system, payment processor or inventory system adds development and testing time.
• Logged-in features. Accounts change a project. Marzetti’s What’s for Dinner recipe site, which we built, has a meal finder plus free accounts with a meal planner and shopping list, and each of those needed its own build and testing.
• Ecommerce complexity. Product count, variations, subscriptions and shipping rules all add work.
• Migration and redirects. Moving an older site means mapping old URLs to new ones so you keep your search rankings.
• More than one site. Organizations with a site per brand or property can share design patterns and one hosting setup. We run 14 development sites for Nationwide Realty Investors, including Jerome Village and Grandview Yard, each with its own brand and the same standard behind it.

How to get an accurate quote

Before you ask for quotes, write down:

1. What the site has to do: generate calls, sell products, take registrations, or something else.
2. A rough list of pages, or a link to your current site map.
3. Features you know you need, such as forms, booking, a store or member logins.
4. Who will write the content and supply photos.
5. Your launch date and your budget range.

When you compare quotes, check that each one covers the same work: design, content, development, SEO setup, redirects, hosting and post-launch support. We don’t sell a Plan A, Plan B or Plan C for new websites. We talk through what you need, and you get a written scope and one price, and the quote itself costs nothing.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a small business website cost in Columbus?

It depends on the number of pages, design and features. A DIY builder can cost a few hundred dollars a year. A professionally built custom WordPress site costs more and depends on page count, features and who writes the content. We quote every project to scope after a short call, and the quote is free. Plan for hosting and maintenance after launch too.

How much does a website cost per month?

Expect to pay for a domain, hosting and maintenance. Basic shared hosting can be a few dollars a month. Mobilize Cloud’s managed WP Engine hosting starts at $125 a month, and full maintenance with tested monthly updates starts at $325 a month.

Is $1,500 a good price for a website?

It can be for a very small site built from a template, with content you supply. At that price, check whether the quote includes custom design, SEO setup, redirects from your old site, and any support after launch, since those vary from quote to quote.

Do I have to pay for maintenance after the site launches?

You don’t have to, but WordPress sites need regular core, plugin and theme updates, backups and security checks. You can do that yourself, pay hourly when something breaks, or put the site on a monthly maintenance plan.

Get a written scope and price

If you are planning a new website or a redesign, tell us what the site needs to do and we will send a written scope and price after a short call. Start a website project with Mobilize Cloud, or if you already have a WordPress site that needs a better home, compare our WordPress hosting and maintenance plans.