How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business in Denver?

If you’re a small business owner in Denver or the Front Range, you’ve probably Googled “how much does a website cost” and gotten answers ranging from $0 to $100,000. Useless.

So here’s the actual range, based on what local independent developers and small agencies charge, and what I charge.

The Short Answer

Most small business websites in Denver cost between $2,000 and $8,000 when built by an independent developer or small agency. Landing pages start around $1,500. Larger sites with custom features, e-commerce, or complex integrations can run $10,000 or more.

Template-based builders like Wix or Squarespace cost $17-40/month but come with significant trade-offs in speed, SEO, and flexibility.

What Affects the Price

Scope and Page Count

A 5-page business site (home, about, services, contact, plus one more) is the sweet spot for most local businesses. Each additional page adds to the cost, but not linearly. Once the design system is built, new pages go fast.

A restaurant on South Broadway might need home, menu, about, catering, and contact. That’s a clean scope. A home services company in Arvada might want a separate page for each service (plumbing, HVAC, electrical), which adds pages but reuses the same layout. More pages doesn’t always mean proportionally more cost.

Custom Design vs. Templates

A custom site costs more upfront but pays off later. Template sites tend to look like every other business in the same industry. Walk down any commercial street in Denver and you’ll spot the same three Squarespace layouts repeating. Customers notice, even if they can’t quite say why one business feels more put-together than the next.

A custom build matches your brand, loads faster, and gives you control over the layout.

Content and Photography

If you have your photos and know what you want to say, the project moves faster and costs less. If you need help with copy or images, that adds time. I work on content with clients as part of the process. It’s not a separate line item, but it does affect the timeline.

A real recommendation: get actual photos of your shop, your team, your work. Stock photos look like stock photos, and they undermine trust. A phone photo of your real storefront beats a polished stock image of a generic one. If you’re a salon, shoot the haircuts you’re proud of. If you’re a restaurant, shoot the food. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It needs to be real.

Functionality

A brochure site with a contact form is straightforward. Add booking, e-commerce, membership areas, or integrations with a CRM or scheduling app, and the complexity goes up fast.

Local SEO Setup

For Denver businesses, local SEO is the difference between getting found and not. That means Google Business Profile setup, structured data for your service area, and location-specific content. Some developers sell this as an add-on. I include it in every project, because a site nobody can find isn’t doing its job.

What You Get at Each Price Point

$1,500 - $3,000: Landing Pages

One page, one goal: get the visitor to book, call, or sign up. Useful for:

• New businesses testing the market
• Specific promotions or services
• Event pages
• Lead generation

You get a fast, mobile-friendly page with a clear CTA, contact form, and basic SEO setup.

$3,000 - $6,000: Business Websites

This is the typical project. A multi-page site with:

• Custom design that matches your brand
• Mobile-first, responsive layout
• SEO fundamentals (meta tags, structured data, fast load times)
• Contact form with email notifications
• Google Business Profile integration
• Basic analytics setup

This tier is what I built for Critter Care, a pet sitting business that had been paying $53/month for a dated template plus an SEO package that wasn’t actually doing anything. The rebuild dropped their hosting to $0/month and brought load times from 4+ seconds to under 1. The full case study is here. This range covers restaurants, salons, professional services, home services, and most other local businesses around the Front Range.

$6,000 - $10,000+: Complex Sites

For businesses that need more than a brochure site:

• E-commerce with product management
• Booking or scheduling systems
• Content management (CMS) for regular updates
• Multi-location pages
• Custom web applications
• API integrations

Typical Timeline

Most small business sites take 3 to 6 weeks from kickoff to launch. Roughly:

• Week 1: Discovery call, content planning, sitemap
• Weeks 2-3: Design and build
• Week 4: Content integration, revisions, testing
• Week 5-6: Final review, SEO setup, launch

The biggest variable is content. If you have your copy and photos ready, we can move faster. If we’re starting from a blank page, add a week or two. Start on content early. It’s almost always the thing that holds up a launch. A build can be done in ten days and still sit for six weeks waiting on photos. If you want to move fast, get your content together before the build starts.

Why an Independent Developer Often Beats an Agency

Agencies in Denver typically charge $8,000 to $25,000+ for a small business site. A lot of that price is the office on 16th Street, the project managers, the account executives, the overhead. The person actually building your site might be an entry-level employee or a contractor they found on Upwork. You’re not paying for better work. You’re paying for the layers between you and the person doing the work.

With an independent developer like me, you get:

• Direct communication. No telephone game through project managers.
• Lower overhead. No office rent or admin staff baked into the quote.
• Senior-level work. I have 14+ years of engineering experience, not 2.
• Accountability. One person is responsible for the whole project.

I build production software at my day job. Same standards, same tools, same attention to detail go into the business sites I take on. You’re not getting a WordPress theme with your logo swapped in. The performance scores are public if you want to see them.

What to Watch Out For

”Free” Website Builders

The monthly fee adds up. A Wix Core plan at $29/month is $1,044 over three years, and at the end of it you still have slow load times, limited SEO, and a site that looks like the template it is. A custom site is a one-time investment that you own.

Hidden Hosting Fees

Some developers build your site and then charge $50 to $200/month to host it. Modern static sites don’t need expensive servers. Hosting for a typical small business site sits in the $0 to $20/month range, depending on what’s bundled with it. If someone wants $200/month to keep the lights on, ask exactly what that covers.

Ongoing Maintenance Costs

Websites need attention after launch. Ask what happens once the site goes live. A lot of developers vanish. I offer a support plan that bundles hosting with monthly hours for content tweaks, plus active monitoring of Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Cloudflare. I wrote up exactly what’s in it, what isn’t, and what to ask anyone else pitching you a maintenance plan. Even without the plan, I’m local and reachable when something breaks.

Locked-in Contracts

Some agencies put you on a 12-month contract with mandatory hosting and maintenance baked in. Before you sign, ask what happens if you want to leave. Can you take your site with you? Do you own the code? If the answer is no, keep looking.

”SEO Packages” That Don’t Do Anything

This one comes up constantly. A developer or agency builds your site, then sells you a $200 to $500/month “SEO package” on top. What’s actually in it? Usually: submitting your site to Google (free, takes 30 seconds), tweaking a meta description here and there, and a monthly report full of vanity metrics. Real SEO is built into the site on day one. Technical foundations, structured data, page speed, content structure. If those aren’t there at launch, no monthly retainer is going to fix it after the fact.

How to Get Started

If you’re a small business in Denver, Lakewood, or anywhere along the Front Range, I’d love to talk about your project. The free consultation is exactly that: I look at your current site if you have one, ask about your goals, and give you an honest number.

No sales pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation. And if you’re not sure whether you need a new site or just a refresh, I wrote about the signs it’s time for a redesign.

Get in touch →

I serve small businesses across the Denver Front Range: Denver, Lakewood, Golden, Littleton, Boulder, Arvada, Aurora, Westminster, and Highlands Ranch.