This is usually the first question a small business owner asks, and it's a fair one — there's no shortage of wildly different numbers floating around. A freelancer on a marketplace might quote $300. A big agency might quote $15,000 for what's basically the same five-page site. Neither number tells you much on its own.
Here's a more honest way to think about it: cost mostly tracks with how custom the work is and how much ongoing thought goes into getting the site found. A template with your logo swapped in costs less because there's less real work happening. A site built around your actual business, your actual customers, and how they actually search costs more because that work is real.
What actually drives the price
Page count matters, but it's rarely the biggest factor. The bigger cost drivers are usually: how much custom design work is involved versus a pre-built layout, whether the site needs to integrate with anything (booking systems, payment processing, a CRM), and how much SEO foundation is built in from the start versus added later.
A basic 3-page site for a new business that just needs to exist online looks very different, price-wise, from a 10-page site with a blog, lead capture forms, and local SEO built into the page structure from day one.
A realistic range for the Charlotte / Lake Norman area
For a small, local service business — think contractors, salons, local retailers, professional services — a real, professionally built site typically lands somewhere between $750 and $5,500, depending on scope. Ecommerce or custom web app functionality pushes that higher, often $6,500 and up.
What you shouldn't pay for: a site that looks fine on launch day but was never built with SEO in mind, meaning you'll be paying again in six months to fix what should've been right the first time.
The real question isn't the sticker price
It's whether the site is actually going to bring you customers. A $750 site that ranks and converts is worth more than a $10,000 site that looks great and gets zero organic traffic. Ask any agency quoting you a number what happens after launch — if the answer is "nothing, you're on your own," factor that into the real cost too.