Short answer: Most Denton small businesses pay $2,500 to $8,000 for a professionally built website in 2026. A simple brochure site runs $2,500–$4,500. A lead-generating service site with multiple pages and conversion-focused design runs $4,500–$8,000. E-commerce and custom functionality push past $10,000. DIY builders like Wix and Squarespace cost $200–$600 per year but carry trade-offs most business owners don’t discover until later.
Below is the honest breakdown — what you actually pay, what drives the number up or down, and how to tell which option fits your business.
Quick Price Reference
| Option | Typical cost | Best for |
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | $200–$600/year | Testing an idea, hobby businesses |
| Freelance designer | $1,500–$5,000 one-time | Simple sites, flexible timelines |
| Local agency — brochure site | $2,500–$4,500 | 4–6 pages, establishing credibility |
| Local agency — service site | $4,500–$8,000 | Lead generation, local SEO |
| Custom / e-commerce | $10,000–$35,000+ | Online sales, booking, integrations |
| Ongoing care & hosting | $50–$500/month | Every site, regardless of builder |
Why the Range Is So Wide
“How much does a website cost” is a lot like asking what a vehicle costs. A used sedan and a work truck are both vehicles. The honest answer depends on what you need it to do.
Three things move the price more than anything else.
Page count and content. A five-page site is a fraction of the work of a twenty-page site with individual service pages, staff bios, and a location page for each area you serve. Content is also where projects stall — if you’re supplying the copy yourself, budget real time for it. If the agency writes it, expect that to be a line item.
Template versus custom design. A well-chosen template, properly customized, is a legitimate choice and saves thousands. Fully custom design costs more because someone is designing every screen from scratch rather than adapting a proven layout. Most small businesses genuinely don’t need full custom.
Functionality. A contact form is simple. Online booking, payment processing, member logins, inventory sync, or a customer portal each add meaningful cost. Every integration is a thing that has to be built, tested, and maintained.
What Denton Businesses Actually Pay
Denton is not Dallas, and pricing reflects that. Agency rates here run below the Uptown and Legacy West firms an hour south, which is a genuine advantage for local businesses — you can get metro-quality work without metro overhead built into the invoice.
A few patterns we see locally:
Restaurants, retail, and service trades most often land in the $2,500–$5,000 range. These sites need to look credible, load fast on a phone, show up in local search, and make it obvious how to call or visit. That’s achievable without an enormous build.
Medical, dental, legal, and insurance practices typically run $5,000–$9,000. Compliance requirements, individual provider pages, and the trust signals these industries depend on all add scope. These are also the businesses where a single new client can pay for the entire site, which changes the math considerably.
Businesses serving multiple cities — Denton plus Flower Mound, Lewisville, Argyle, Corinth — need a page per service area to compete in local search. Each one adds cost, and each one adds reach.
The Real Cost of DIY Builders
Wix and Squarespace advertise $16–$49 per month, and those prices are real. For some businesses they’re the right call. Be honest with yourself about the trade-offs, though.
What you actually spend: the subscription, a premium template, apps for anything the base plan doesn’t do, and your own time. That last one is the cost people underestimate most. A business owner building their own site typically spends 40–80 hours on it. At any reasonable valuation of your time, that’s not a cheap website.
What you may not get: the technical foundation that search engines and AI assistants rely on to understand your business. Clean structured data, proper heading hierarchy, fast load times, and correct schema markup are possible on these platforms but rarely happen by default.
Where it matters most in 2026: people are increasingly skipping search engines entirely and asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend a local business. Those assistants read your site’s underlying structure, not just its appearance. A site that looks fine to a human but is structurally thin often doesn’t get recommended at all.
Use a DIY builder when: you’re validating a new idea, your budget is genuinely zero, or your website is a formality rather than a lead source.
Hire a professional when: your website is how customers find and judge you, you compete against other local businesses for the same customers, or your time is worth more than the hours you’d spend learning page builders.
Costs People Forget to Budget
The build price is the first bill, not the only one.
- Domain: $12–$20 per year
- Hosting: $10–$50 per month for a typical small business site
- SSL certificate: usually included free with hosting now
- Maintenance and updates: $50–$500 per month depending on how much you handle yourself
- Content updates: either your time or an hourly rate
- Photography: $300–$1,500 for a professional shoot, and it makes a bigger difference than most owners expect
A realistic all-in first year for a Denton small business: the build cost plus roughly $1,200–$3,000 in domain, hosting, and basic care.
Questions to Ask Before You Sign
These separate a good agreement from a bad one, and they cost nothing to ask.
- Who owns the domain, hosting account, and website files? The answer must be you. If a vendor holds your domain, you don’t control your own business address.
- What happens if we part ways? You should be able to take your site elsewhere.
- Is the site built on a platform I can hire anyone to maintain? WordPress is the safe answer for most small businesses. Proprietary platforms lock you in.
- What’s included after launch? Get specifics on updates, backups, security, and support response times.
- How many rounds of revisions are included? Unlimited revisions is not a real offer; a defined number is.
- Will the site be structured for search engines and AI assistants? In 2026 this is no longer an upsell. Ask specifically about schema markup and structured data.
Is a Cheap Website Worth It?
Sometimes — genuinely. A $1,500 site from a competent freelancer can serve a small operation well for years.
The real risk isn’t a low price. It’s paying for something that doesn’t work. The most expensive website is the one you replace in eighteen months because it never generated a single inquiry. We’ve rebuilt a fair number of those, and the total spend always exceeds what a properly scoped project would have cost initially.
A useful way to frame it: if one new customer is worth $500 to you and a working website brings in two per month, the site pays for itself in a quarter. Run that math for your own business before you decide what’s expensive.
What a Website Costs at Blue Troop
We price websites the same way for everyone, and we’ll tell you the number before you ask twice.
$1,990 for the first five pages. $150 for each additional page. Plus tax. That’s a one-time design project cost — there are no recurring monthly charges for the website itself.
| Site size | Your cost |
| 5 pages | $1,990 |
| 8 pages | $2,440 |
| 12 pages | $3,040 |
| 15 pages | $3,490 |
Every build includes:
- A fully responsive WordPress site — mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop
- All necessary theme and plugin licenses (excluding specialty or subscription-based plugins)
- Copywriting support for your pages
- On-page metatag SEO across the whole site
- Schema markup and llms.txt for AI search visibility
- All royalty-free images needed
- Google Analytics setup
- Photo galleries, animated sliders, embedded video, and existing form scripts
- Email contact form
- Migration and testing on your host server (must support WordPress hosting)
You’ll notice that’s below the typical agency range quoted earlier in this article. That’s deliberate, and it isn’t a reflection of what you get. We’re a small Denton shop without downtown Dallas overhead, we’ve built this process enough times to be efficient at it, and we’d rather price it where local businesses can actually say yes.
One thing worth calling out: the schema markup and llms.txt are included as standard, not sold as an add-on. Those are the pieces that determine whether ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI answers can understand your business well enough to recommend it. Most builds at any price point still skip them.
You own your domain, your hosting, and your files. If you ever move on, everything goes with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a website cost in Denton, TX?
Most Denton small businesses pay $2,500 to $8,000 for a professionally built website in 2026. At Blue Troop, a five-page WordPress site is $1,990 with no monthly fees, and additional pages are $150 each.
How long does it take to build a small business website?
Four to eight weeks for a typical small business site. The build itself is rarely the bottleneck — waiting on content, photos, and feedback is what extends timelines.
Is WordPress cheaper than Wix or Squarespace?
The upfront build usually costs more, but WordPress has no platform subscription and no vendor lock-in. Over three to five years, total cost is often comparable or lower, and you keep the ability to hire any developer.
Do I need to pay monthly for a website?
You’ll pay for hosting ($10–$50/month) and a domain ($12–$20/year) regardless. Maintenance plans are optional but recommended — an unmaintained WordPress site is a security risk.
How much should a small business spend on a website?
A common guideline is 5–10% of annual revenue on marketing overall, with the website as a foundational piece. More practically: if your website is your primary way of getting customers, underfunding it is the expensive choice.
Can I build a website myself and hire someone later?
Yes, and many businesses do. Just make sure you own your domain and content from day one so nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Blue Troop is a web design and AI visibility agency based in Denton, Texas. We build websites for local businesses across Denton County and the DFW metroplex.