A professional website should cost between $2,500 and $15,000 for most small to medium businesses in Canada. That range covers a custom design, mobile responsiveness, basic SEO setup, and a content management system like WordPress. Simple brochure sites with five to eight pages start around $1,500–$3,000. E-commerce sites with product catalogs, payment processing, and inventory management typically run $8,000–$25,000, and custom web applications or enterprise platforms can easily exceed $50,000–$100,000. The biggest cost drivers are custom functionality, design complexity, and content volume. A templated WordPress site with minimal customization might cost $1,500, but you sacrifice brand differentiation and often get poor mobile performance or bloated code. A fully custom design with unique layouts, animations, and user experience optimization costs more upfront but performs better in search and converts visitors more effectively. Development time matters too—integrating third-party APIs, building custom calculators, or developing member portals adds weeks of programming work. Ongoing costs matter as much as the initial build. Budget $100–$500 monthly for hosting, security updates, plugin maintenance, and backups. If you want monthly SEO work, content updates, or performance monitoring, add another $500–$2,000 per month depending on competitiveness and scope. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we've built sites across this entire spectrum since 2014. For most local service businesses, we recommend the $5,000–$8,000 range—enough for a solid custom WordPress build with proper SEO foundation, fast hosting, and room for strategic content planning. That investment pays itself back in months if the site actually converts traffic. Avoid the $500 website trap. Those builds use drag-and-drop builders like Wix or outdated templates, load slowly, rank poorly, and cost more to fix later than building correctly from the start. Also avoid paying $20,000 for what should be a $6,000 site—some agencies inflate prices with unnecessary discovery phases and revisions. Ask for itemized quotes and compare scope, not just total price.