How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in Michigan?
A small business website in Michigan starts at $3,500 with me and usually takes 3 to 6 weeks to build. Where it lands from there depends on three things: how many pages you need, what the site has to do, and how ready your words and photos are. Here’s how each one moves the price.
I’m putting a number on the page because most agencies hide it behind a sales call. You should know whether I’m in your range before we ever talk.
What moves the price of a small business website
Pages. A plumber with five core pages is a smaller job than a med spa with twelve treatments, because each treatment needs its own page to rank on its own. Every page is writing, design and a job to do. Page count swings the price more than anything else.
What the site has to do. A tappable phone number and a short form is the simple version. Online booking, quote calculators, payments and member logins are each a separate build with a separate test. Ask yourself which ones you need on day one. Most owners need fewer than they think.
How ready your content is. I can’t write about your kitchen remodels without photos of your kitchen remodels. When an owner shows up with real photos, real reviews and a clear list of services, the build runs closer to 3 weeks. When I’m writing from scratch and chasing photos, it runs closer to 6.
What happens in those 3 to 6 weeks
The first week is the plan: what each page is for, what you want people to do, and what gets tracked. Then I build the pages, wire up the phone and form tracking, and test every form and every button on a real phone. Launch is the last step, and the old pages get redirected so nothing you’ve already earned in Google disappears. When the site goes live, the site, the domain and every login stay in your name.
What a very cheap website usually leaves out
A $500 site isn’t a smaller version of a $3,500 site. It’s a different product, and it usually skips the same four things:
- Tracking. Nobody can tell which page brought a call, so nobody can tell if the site is working.
- Ownership. The domain and logins sit in the builder’s name, so leaving means starting over.
- Speed. A template loaded with plugins that crawls on a phone.
- Local pages. One generic page and nothing that says Troy, Birmingham or Detroit.
The ad math makes the point. $1,500 a month of ads behind a site that can’t convert is $18,000 a year gone before anyone notices. I wrote more about it in the real cost of a cheap website.
Does the city change the price?
The price doesn’t change with the ZIP code. What the pages say does, because every city loses the customer a different way.
Troy: the expensive mistake is the relaunch. When Rêve Medical Spa moved to a new site in June 2026, all 16 of its old URLs were redirected. Between July 23 and September 6 the new site got 750 clicks from Google search. I cover how that works on Troy web design.
Birmingham: your customer has two or three tabs open and will drive ten minutes to the best one, so the site has to win a comparison. That’s the whole point of Birmingham web design. Fine Strokes, our own studio there, went from 2.18 Google clicks a day to 6.91 in the eleven days after we rebuilt it.
Detroit: one services page can’t answer Midtown, Dearborn Heights and Warren at once. A page for each service and each place can. That’s Detroit web design, and the statewide version lives at Michigan web design.
Three questions to ask before you pay anyone
- Who owns the domain, the hosting and every login when it’s done? The answer should be you, in writing.
- What’s tracked on launch day? Calls and form fills, by page. If the answer is “Google Analytics,” ask again.
- What happens to my old pages? Every old address that ranks should redirect to its new home. If it doesn’t, you start at zero.
If you want the longer version of what a site has to do to earn its price, here’s what a conversion-ready website includes.
Want a real number for your site?
Thirty minutes with me, free. I’ll look at your current site, tell you whether you need a rebuild at all (about 1 in 5 reviews ends with “you don’t”), and give you a price range before we hang up. No pitch deck, no closer.
I’ve built websites since 2006 and started AlbaTech in 2016. I’m the person owners call after an agency couldn’t say what changed. You work directly with me, no account manager, nothing outsourced, no closer.