How to Plan a Website Budget for a Small Business

In first meetings with small business owners, the sentence we hear most is: We want a website, how much does it cost? The answer isn't a single figure. A site's cost doesn't end on launch day, and a business that budgets only for setup discovers in month six that there is no money left for promotion.

Split the budget into three parts from the start and you will compare quotes more accurately and see when the site could pay for itself.

The three parts of the budget

• Setup: Design, development, content entry, initial SEO settings. Paid once.
• First-year running costs: Domain, hosting, email, maintenance, any licences. These repeat every year.
• Promotion: The ads, content or Google Maps work that brings the first visitors.

A split that works well in practice is half of the first-year total for setup and the rest for running costs and promotion. Spending everything on setup and nothing on promotion is like opening a beautiful shop nobody walks into.

Setup: where should the money go?

To give you a sense of scale, take Kodyva's current price ranges as an example: a corporate brochure site is 15,000 to 35,000 TL, a single campaign page 6,000 to 15,000 TL, and an online store with payment and shipping integrations 35,000 to 80,000 TL. These figures depend on scope, page count, number of languages and whether the site is ready-made or custom; other agencies' prices may differ.

The question that places you within that range is: does the site need a function unique to your business? For a café, a dental clinic or an accounting office, a site that explains the services, builds trust and drives contact is often enough. In that case adapting a ready-made site to your brand can deliver a similar result for less than a custom design. We compared ready-made and custom builds in detail in a separate article.

Items you shouldn't cut in setup:

• Mobile responsiveness and speed. On most sites a large share of visitors come from phones.
• Basic SEO settings: titles, descriptions, sitemap, Search Console registration.
• Good photos. They can be shot on a phone, but the lighting has to be right.

What you can cut: animations, flashy effects and multilingual support you don't need yet.

First-year running costs

These look small but repeat every year. Roughly:

• Domain: an annual fee that varies by extension and registrar. Check the current price on the registrar's site.
• Hosting: shared hosting is usually the most affordable option; a more powerful server can cost several times as much.
• Business email: per-user monthly services, or free mailboxes bundled with hosting.
• Maintenance and support: monthly packages cover regular backups, updates and small changes. Kodyva's maintenance packages range from 2,500 to 7,500 TL a month depending on scope. Some agencies include first-year support in the setup price; ask about it in the quote.

We broke annual costs down line by line in another article. The point here is the total: for a small corporate site, first-year running costs range from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of lira depending on the maintenance package.

Promotion budget

A new site may not show up on Google for a few months. Something has to bring traffic in the meantime.

For local businesses the cheapest start is a Google Business Profile. It is free but needs regular photos and review management. Next comes a small Google Ads test: a limited test campaign, with a budget you set, can start showing within a few weeks which searches bring you customers. In the long run a blog and SEO can reduce reliance on ads, but results take months.

Don't commission a site without setting aside a promotion budget. If you can't, make the setup smaller.

Payback: how many customers cover the cost?

This calculation clarifies the decision. Take a hypothetical physiotherapy centre in Ankara:

• Setup: 25,000 TL
• First-year running costs: 10,000 TL
• First-year total: 35,000 TL
• Average profit from a new client (on a first package of 10 sessions): 4,000 TL

35,000 divided by 4,000 is about 9 clients. If the site brings 9 new clients in its first year, it has paid for itself. With 12 months in a year, even one client a month is enough.

Run the same numbers for your business. If you don't know your average profit per customer, finding that figure is the first step. Once you know it, the gap between a 15,000 TL site and a 40,000 TL site takes on a different meaning: how many extra customers does it take to close it?

One more note. If your business qualifies, some public support programmes in Türkiye can cover part of website or e-commerce spending; our article on government support explains which programmes to look at. Confirm the current terms with the relevant institution.

If you have built your own budget table and are ready for quotes, whichever agency you ask, request that setup, first-year costs and maintenance appear on separate lines. That makes it easy to see what each part pays for and compare quotes.