Website costs are capitalized when they meet the CRA's criteria for an intangible asset with lasting economic benefit. For a business website, this typically means the initial development costs—design, programming, database setup, custom functionality—go on the balance sheet and amortize over their useful life, usually 3 to 5 years. Routine expenses like monthly hosting, content updates, minor bug fixes, and domain renewals get expensed immediately because they maintain rather than improve the asset. The distinction matters for tax planning and financial reporting. A $15,000 WordPress site with custom templates and e-commerce integration would be capitalized. The $200 monthly retainer for blog posts and plugin updates would not. If you rebuild the site two years later with a new platform and significant new features, that's typically a new capital asset, and you'd write off any remaining value from the old site. Grey areas exist. Major redesigns that substantially extend functionality might be capitalized as improvements. SEO work is almost always expensed because it's ongoing and doesn't create a discrete asset. Adding a membership portal or booking system could go either way depending on scale and integration depth. CRA audits sometimes challenge aggressive capitalization of costs that look like ordinary repairs. At Ottawa SEO, we bill development and ongoing services separately for this reason. A client buying a $12,000 site plus $800 monthly SEO gets clear invoicing that mirrors how their accountant will treat it. We've seen clients try to capitalize everything to reduce current-year tax, then face pushback when the expenses clearly relate to content and marketing rather than asset creation. The safe approach: capitalize the build, expense the operation. When in doubt, your accountant's guidance trumps ours, but understanding the framework helps you structure projects and contracts to align with how the costs will be treated on your books.