Website costs break into three buckets: initial build, hosting infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance. For a standard business website with 5–15 pages, expect $3,000–8,000 if you're working with a legitimate agency using WordPress or similar platforms. E-commerce sites start around $5,000 and climb to $15,000+ once you need custom checkout flows, inventory management, or multi-currency support. Template-based builders like Squarespace or Wix run $200–500 for the first year if you're comfortable doing it yourself, but you're locked into their ecosystem and SEO limitations become apparent quickly. Custom-coded sites from development shops can hit $20,000–50,000 when you need proprietary functionality or heavy integrations with CRMs and ERPs. Hosting ranges from $15/month for shared hosting to $200+/month for managed WordPress or VPS setups that handle traffic spikes without crashing. Domain registration is $15–40 annually. SSL certificates are usually free now through Let's Encrypt. Maintenance is where businesses get blindsided. Budget $800–2,000 per year minimum for security updates, plugin patches, content tweaks, and performance monitoring. Skipping this is how sites get hacked or tank in Google six months after launch. At Ottawa SEO, we typically scope projects in the $4,500–9,000 range for local businesses because we're building for organic search performance from day one, not just visual appeal. That includes technical SEO infrastructure, proper schema markup, and page speed optimization that template sites rarely handle correctly. We also see clients who paid $15,000 elsewhere for sites that load in six seconds and have no conversion tracking, so price alone tells you nothing about ROI. The real question isn't what a website costs—it's what happens after it launches. A $5,000 site that ranks and converts beats a $25,000 site that looks impressive but generates zero inquiries. Focus on the total cost of ownership over 2–3 years, not just the initial invoice.