Websites

Website design cost in Canada: what small businesses actually pay

What a small business website costs in Canada: ranges by site type, sales tax by province, Canadian vs offshore rates, and the yearly costs quotes leave out.

October 21, 20266 min read

Most Canadian small businesses pay between $3,000 and $15,000 for a professionally designed website of 5 to 10 pages. A template site you build yourself costs a few hundred dollars a year in subscriptions. An online store usually starts around $10,000 and can pass $40,000 once it connects to inventory or shipping systems. On top of the build, add GST or HST (5% to 15% depending on your province) and $500 to $4,000 a year to keep the site running.

Those ranges come from the quotes we see from Canadian businesses, not from an official price list: no government body publishes one for web design. The rest of this article explains what moves a project from the bottom of a range to the top, what really changes from one province to another, and how to compare a Canadian quote with an offshore one.

What small businesses pay, by type of site

Type of site	Typical build cost (CAD)	Who usually builds it
DIY on a website builder	$0 build, $250 to $1,700 a year in plans	The owner
Template site set up by a professional	$1,500 to $5,000	Freelancer
Custom brochure site, 5 to 10 pages	$4,000 to $15,000	Freelancer or small agency
Lead-generation site with landing pages, booking and CRM	$8,000 to $25,000	Agency
Online store	$10,000 to $40,000+	Agency or e-commerce specialist
Multi-location or custom-feature site	$25,000 to $80,000+	Agency

The page count matters less than people think. What drives cost is the number of distinct page layouts, the amount of writing and photography needed, and every connection to another system: a booking tool, a CRM, a payment processor, a listings feed.

Where the money goes

A quote is mostly hours. Here is a realistic breakdown for a custom 8-page site at an agency rate of $110 an hour:

Phase	Hours	Cost
Discovery, site map and planning	6	$660
Design of 4 or 5 page layouts	16	$1,760
Development and content management setup	22	$2,420
Copywriting and content entry	12	$1,320
Basic SEO, analytics and form setup	4	$440
Testing and launch	6	$660
Total	66	$7,260

When a quote comes in at $2,000 for the "same" site, it does not mean someone found a trick. It means some of these phases are missing, usually the planning, the writing or the testing. Ask which ones.

Does your province change the price?

Labour rates are broadly similar across Canadian cities, with Toronto and Vancouver agencies often at the higher end. Four things do change by province.

Sales tax on the invoice

Website design is a taxable service. As of the Canada Revenue Agency's current rate table:

Province or territory	Tax on a website invoice
Alberta, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut	5% GST
British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan	5% GST, plus PST (7%, 7%, 6%) on some items such as software or licences, so check with your accountant
Quebec	5% GST + 9.975% QST
Ontario	13% HST
Nova Scotia	14% HST (since April 1, 2025)
New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island	15% HST

On a $10,000 site, that is $500 in Alberta and $1,500 in New Brunswick. A registered business generally recovers the GST/HST through input tax credits, but you still pay it up front. A freelancer whose taxable revenue stays at or under $30,000 may be a small supplier and not charge tax at all. That is legitimate, but the quote should say whether tax is extra.

Language in Quebec

If you sell to customers in Quebec, the Charter of the French Language requires French commercial content, and the French version can't be a lesser version of the English one. A bilingual site typically adds 25% to 40% to the build because of translation, layout checks in both languages and the technical setup for two language versions. We cover the Quebec market in more detail in our French article on website prices in Quebec.

Accessibility in Ontario

Under Ontario's accessibility law (AODA), a business or non-profit with 50 or more employees must make its public website meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with only live captions and pre-recorded audio descriptions excluded. That requirement has applied to all public websites since January 1, 2021. Accessible design is good practice anywhere, but if you are in that group, it is a requirement to put in the brief, and it adds testing time.

Privacy rules

Quebec's Law 25 requires a privacy policy on your site and tracking that stays off until the visitor opts in. Elsewhere in Canada, privacy law also expects you to say what you collect through your forms and why. Either way, budget a few hundred dollars for a proper privacy policy and a cookie banner that actually blocks tracking until consent, especially if you plan to run ads.

Canadian agency, freelancer or offshore

Clutch, a directory built on verified client reviews, lists the typical rate for web design firms in Canada at $100 to $149 USD an hour, the same band as the United States and Australia. It lists $25 to $49 for Ukraine, Poland and Mexico, and under $25 for India and the Philippines. Clutch also notes that most web design projects reviewed on its site cost under $10,000.

A lower hourly rate does not always mean a cheaper project. What tends to happen with offshore work for a Canadian small business:

Communication takes longer. A five-minute change becomes a two-day email thread across time zones.
Copy often needs rewriting. Generic English or machine French reads as foreign to local customers.
Local rules get missed. Sales tax display, Quebec French requirements, accessibility, privacy consent.
Ownership gets murky. Make sure the domain, hosting and admin access are in your name, whoever builds the site.

Offshore developers can be a good fit for a well-defined technical task when someone on your side manages the project. A local freelancer suits a simple site when your content is ready. An agency makes sense when you also need strategy, writing, SEO and a system for handling the enquiries the site brings in.

What it costs to keep a site running

Budget for these every year:

Domain name: usually a few dozen dollars a year for a .ca or .com.
Hosting: $10 to $50 a month for most brochure sites.
Website builder plans: Squarespace lists plans from about CA$21 to CA$139 a month, depending on the plan and billing period.
E-commerce: Shopify lists Canadian plans from $37 to $389 a month billed yearly, plus card fees starting at 2.4% to 2.8% + 30¢ online depending on the plan.
Maintenance: $50 to $300 a month for updates, backups, security and small edits.
Paid add-ons: premium themes, plugins, booking or chat tools, a cookie consent tool.

Over three years, a $7,000 site often costs $10,000 to $17,000 in total. Compare that three-year number between quotes, not just the launch price.

Red flags in a cheap quote

No discovery or planning phase.
"Unlimited pages" with no mention of who writes them.
No analytics, Search Console or conversion tracking setup.
The agency registers the domain in its own name.
Hosting is bundled at a monthly fee with no way to move the site elsewhere.
No mention of mobile testing.
Payment of 100% up front.

When to spend less

If your business is new, your offer is still changing and most customers come by referral, a well-written site on a builder plan is enough for the first year. Put the savings into a complete Google Business Profile and asking happy customers for reviews. A custom build pays off once you know who you are trying to reach and you are ready to track which pages bring in enquiries. For a sense of why a site that looks fine still brings in nothing, see our checklist on why websites get no leads.

How PNE approaches it

At PNE Solutions we design and build custom sites for Canadian businesses, in English and French when the market calls for it, with analytics and lead capture set up before launch. For DC Maintenance, a commercial cleaning company whose site had not changed since 2014, we rebuilt the site as a modern static build in both languages and cut 227MB of 4K hero video down to a 3.2MB loop that plays on mobile data. You can see the DC Maintenance project or what our website design service includes.