Most small business websites were built once, years ago, by someone who has since stopped answering emails.
The usual story is some version of this: the site was built five years ago by a relative or a cheap agency, it has never been updated, it takes six seconds to load, it looks broken on a phone, and nobody can edit it because the person who made it is gone and no one knows where it is hosted. Meanwhile it is the first thing every prospective customer sees, and roughly half of them leave before it finishes loading.
What replaces it is a small, fast, modern site that says clearly what you do, who you do it for, and how to get in touch — built to load in under two seconds on a phone on mobile data, structured so Google can actually read it, and handed over with everything in your own accounts. No page builder subscription, no proprietary platform, no monthly fee to keep your own website online.
You tell me what your business does and who your customers are. No technical questions, no design vocabulary required.
You get a page count, a price and a date. Not an hourly estimate that grows — the number you are told is the number you pay.
A live link from the first day, updated as pages appear. Changes are cheap while it is being built and expensive after launch, so this is where feedback matters.
Deployed to your accounts, domain pointed, Google notified, analytics running. You own the domain, the hosting and the code outright.
Most small business sites land between $800 and $2,000 depending on page count and whether copy and photography need work. You get a fixed price before anything starts, and it does not move unless you add pages.
Usually under two weeks from the first conversation to going live. The part that slows projects down is almost never the building — it is waiting on text and photos from the business, so having those ready makes it faster.
Not to me. Hosting for a site this size is typically free to a few dollars a month on your own account, and your domain renews annually as it always has. There is no retainer and no licence — if you never speak to me again, your website keeps working.
Yes. Text and images are editable without touching code, and you get a short walkthrough at handover. Structural changes — new page types, new sections — are worth asking me about, but changing your opening hours is not.
It removes the technical reasons you are invisible: it loads fast, it is readable by crawlers, it has proper page structure and local business markup, and your Google Business Profile gets connected properly. Ranking beyond that comes from reviews and from other local sites linking to you — which I will point you at, but cannot manufacture.
Then this is a redesign, which is usually easier — the content exists and the domain has history worth keeping. What matters is doing the redirects properly so you do not lose whatever ranking you already have.