How much does a website cost for a small business in Murfreesboro?

Short answer: $1,500 to $3,500 from an independent builder here in town, paid once. That’s what I charge, and those numbers are on my pricing page where you can read them without talking to me first.

The longer answer is worth five minutes, because the number on the invoice is not the whole cost, and “how much is a website” is the wrong question about a third of the time. What you actually want to know is what you’re buying, what it costs to keep, and how to tell whether the person quoting you is being straight with you.

I’ll cover all three. No form to fill out first.

Why nobody will give you a number

Call six web designers in Rutherford County and ask what a website costs. Most will tell you it depends and offer you a consultation.

Some of that is fair — it genuinely does depend, and I’ll show you on what. But most of it is a sales structure. If you don’t know the price, you can’t compare. You have to sit through the call, and by the end of the call you’re not comparing prices anymore, you’re deciding whether you like the person.

One local firm publishes a range of $2,000 to $100,000+. That range is technically true and completely useless. It’s a way of appearing to answer.

I publish flat prices for the opposite reason. If $2,500 is more than you want to spend, I’d rather you know that now than after a forty-minute call. Neither of us gets that time back.

What actually drives the price

Page count is what people ask about. It’s rarely what moves the number.

Copy. Who writes the words. This is the single biggest swing. If you hand me your services, your history, and how you describe your work to a customer, the build moves fast. If someone has to draw all of that out of you and write it from scratch, that’s real hours and it costs real money. Most quotes that come in low assume you’re writing it. Most people discover they aren’t going to.

Revisions. “Unlimited revisions” is either priced in already or it’s a promise nobody keeps. Two rounds is honest and it’s what I include. Round one is the real feedback. Round two is the polish. Round seven is usually a sign we didn’t agree on the goal at the start, which is a different problem than a design problem.

Function. A site that describes your business is straightforward. A site that takes bookings, processes payments, syncs a calendar, or gates member content is a different animal. Every integration is something that can break at 11pm and something someone has to maintain.

Local SEO groundwork. Getting found isn’t a feature you bolt on. It’s page structure, titles, the Google Business Profile connection, and the town pages — done while the site is being built, or done twice.

Photography. Real photos of your work, your building, your crew beat stock every time, and it’s the thing people put off longest. Bring me forty ordinary phone photos and I’ll use them. They’ll outperform stock.

Page count. Yes, it matters. Just less than the five things above it.

The three ways to buy a website

Do it yourself. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy — roughly $240 to $600 a year, plus your weekends. The builders are genuinely good now. The real cost is that you’re the one troubleshooting it, and the local SEO piece is the part nobody’s template does for you.

Hire an independent builder. $1,500 to $3,500 here, one time. You get a person, not a project manager, and they answer their phone. That’s me, and it’s a handful of other people in this county.

Hire an agency. $5,000 to $15,000+, more in Nashville. You get a team, a process, and depth you can’t get from one person. If you’re a multi-location business with real complexity, this is the right answer and I’ll say so.

Most small businesses in Murfreesboro land in the middle. Some genuinely belong in the first bucket — if you’re testing an idea and you’re handy, build it yourself and come see me when it’s making money.

What it costs every year, whoever builds it

This is the part that gets left out of quotes, and it’s the part that surprises people.

That’s not my fee. That’s what the internet costs, and you’d pay it to anybody.

Here’s the part to pay attention to: ask who those accounts are registered to. Mine go in the client’s name, billed at cost, no markup. Every password gets handed over at launch. If I disappear tomorrow, you hand the login to the next person and nothing about your business breaks.

That is not how everyone does it.

I have watched the other way play out. My first client, a counseling practice here in Murfreesboro, came to me after his previous designer told him the site would go dark unless he paid $2,000. The domain was registered in the designer’s account, not his, which is what made the threat work. Getting the domain back into his name took longer than building his new site did. He owns every account now, and that experience is why the questions below are on this page.

What you’re actually buying, in hours

A five-page site is not five pages of typing.

It’s a conversation about what your customers need to see, a layout that works on a phone before it works on a desktop, copy that sounds like you instead of like a brochure, photos placed and compressed so the page loads fast, a contact form that reaches you reliably, a click-to-call button that matters more than most of the design, the Google Business Profile wired to the site, page titles written for how people actually search, and a launch that doesn’t break your email.

At $1,500 that’s a real week of work. When someone quotes you $500, they’re either using a template with your logo dropped in, or they’re planning to make it back on hosting you can’t leave.

Do you need monthly, or is the site enough?

You can pay once and be done. The site will keep working. Plenty of businesses need exactly that.

Monthly makes sense when one of these is true:

• You don’t want to be the one doing updates. WordPress and its plugins need updating, and unpatched sites get compromised. Care plans start at $150 a month and cover hosting, updates, backups, and small text and photo changes.
• You need to be found, not just findable. Getting into the map pack is ongoing work — Google Business Profile management, weekly posts, review handling. That’s the $275 Grow plan.
• You’re actively competing for search traffic. Real SEO work is monthly by nature: pages optimized, keywords tracked, competitors watched. That runs $350 to $1,100 a month depending on how hard you’re pushing.

And if none of that applies, don’t buy it. I’d rather have a client for eight years than a cancelled plan in month three.

Run this before you pay anyone

Ask any web designer in Rutherford County these six questions. Including me.

1. What’s the total, in dollars, before we start? A number, not a range.
2. Whose name is the domain in? Whose name is the hosting in? If the answer isn’t yours, ask what happens when you leave.
3. Who writes the copy? Most disputes trace back to this one.
4. How many rounds of revisions, and what happens after?
5. Will you show me the site on a phone before it launches? Most of your customers will never see it on a desktop.
6. Is there a contract, and how do I cancel?

Any designer worth hiring answers all six in under two minutes. If a question gets deflected, that’s your answer.

What I charge

Every number is on the pricing page. Here it is anyway.

Websites — one time, flat

Monthly care — cancel any time

Ongoing search work

Tune $350/mo · Climb $650/mo · Push $1,100/mo — keyword map, pages optimized every month, directory consistency, Search Console monitoring, with tracking and content scaling up by tier. There’s a one-time Site and Search Audit at $500 if you’d rather just find out where you stand first.

Domain and hosting are separate, in your name, at cost — about $150 to $300 a year.

No contracts on anything monthly. Cancel any time. Every engagement still gets a simple written agreement, because handshakes are how people end up in the situation described above.

How long it takes

Starter: about two to three weeks from the day I have your content. Business and Growth: three to five weeks.

That clock starts when I have your photos and your information, not when you pay the deposit. The single biggest cause of a slow build is waiting on content — which is exactly why copywriting help is included at the Business tier and up.

Frequently asked

Is $1,500 really the whole price? For a Starter build, yes. Domain and hosting are separate and go in your name at cost. There’s no setup fee, no launch fee, and no charge to hand over your passwords.

What if I already have a website? Then the question is whether it can be fixed or needs rebuilding. Some sites are on platforms so locked down that tuning them is throwing money away. I’ll tell you which one you have before you pay me anything.

Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page? Short version: a Facebook page is rented and you don’t control what shows up next to it. But if you’re choosing one or the other on a tight budget, a well-run Google Business Profile beats both.

Can you make me show up on Google? I can do the work that makes it likely, and I’ll report honestly on what happens. Nobody can promise you a position, and anyone who does is guessing or lying. That applies to me too.

Do you work outside Murfreesboro? Rutherford County and the counties around it — Cannon, Coffee, Warren, Williamson, Marshall, and out toward McMinnville and Smithville. Same prices everywhere. Warren County has its own page.

Still have a number in your head? Check it against mine.

You came here for a price and now you have several. If your budget is $800, tell me — I’ll tell you honestly whether that buys anything worth having or whether you’re better off on Squarespace for a year.

Ten minutes on the phone and you’ll know which build fits and what it costs. Nothing on this page changes on that call.

Call or text 615-580-0699 · trey.surles@borodigital.com

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