Most business owners think of their website as an expense. A cost center. Something you pay for and then forget about until it looks outdated. But when you run the numbers — actually sit down and do the math — a well-built website is one of the highest-ROI investments a small business can make.
Let’s talk about how to think about website value, and what that looks like for a few different kinds of businesses.
How Website ROI Actually Works
The basic formula is straightforward: a website generates value by converting visitors into customers. The equation has three variables:
- Monthly traffic — how many people visit your site
- Conversion rate — what percentage of those visitors take action (make a purchase, book an appointment, submit a contact form)
- Average order or lead value — what that action is worth to your business
Multiply those together and you get monthly revenue attributable to your website. Compare that against what you spent to build and maintain it, and you have your ROI.
The math is simple. What surprises most people is how quickly that number compounds.
Example 1: The Brewery
Say a local brewery invests in a professional website. It has an online merch store, a taproom events calendar, and a beer finder that drives traffic to retail partners.
- Monthly traffic: 10,000 visits
- Conversion rate: 5%
- Average order value: $50
- Monthly revenue: 10,000 × 5% × $50 = $25,000/month
- Annual revenue: $300,000
If the site cost $5,000 to build and maintain over the first year, the annual ROI looks like this:
($300,000 − $5,000) / $5,000 = 5,900%
That means for every dollar put into the website, the brewery is generating $59 in revenue. And that’s year one — before organic search rankings improve, before the email list grows, before repeat customers start coming back on their own.
Projected over five years at consistent performance, the site generates $1,500,000 in total revenue against an initial $5,000 build investment (plus nominal annual maintenance). Over ten years: $3,000,000.
Is the traffic and conversion rate realistic? For an established local brewery with a good reputation and some marketing behind it, yes — especially if the site is properly optimized for local search and built to actually convert visitors rather than just look nice.
Example 2: The Service Business (Law Firm, Contractor, Consultant)
For service businesses, the math works a little differently — they’re not selling products online, they’re generating leads. But the numbers can be even more striking.
Consider a home renovation contractor:
- Monthly traffic: 2,000 visits (more niche, but highly targeted)
- Conversion rate: 3% (60 people submit a contact form or call)
- Close rate: 25% (they book 15 jobs)
- Average project value: $8,000
- Monthly revenue attributed to website: $120,000
Even if the close rate is conservative and some of those leads would have found the business anyway, a website that’s pulling in even 30–40% of that is generating $36,000–$48,000/month from a $6,000 investment.
This is why service businesses — especially trades, legal, medical, and financial — consistently see some of the highest website ROI of any sector. The per-conversion value is high, and a professional web presence is often the deciding factor in whether a prospect calls you or your competitor.
Example 3: The Nonprofit
Nonprofits operate differently, but the value equation still applies — it’s just measured in donations and volunteer engagement rather than revenue.
A regional food bank with a well-built WordPress site:
- Monthly traffic: 5,000 visits
- Donation conversion rate: 2%
- Average donation: $75
- Monthly donations from web: 5,000 × 2% × $75 = $7,500/month
- Annual web-driven donations: $90,000
If the site cost $4,000 to build and $1,200/year to maintain, the return on that investment is substantial — and that’s before counting the volunteer sign-ups, event registrations, and grant credibility a professional digital presence provides. Funders look at websites. A site that looks amateur signals an organization that may not be ready to steward a grant.
What Separates a $500 Site from a $5,000 Site
This is the question we get asked most often, and it’s a fair one.
A template-based DIY site or a cheap freelance build can technically check the “we have a website” box. But there are real performance differences that affect the revenue numbers above:
Speed. Google’s data shows that a one-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%. A poorly optimized WordPress install with bloated plugins and uncompressed images might load in 6–8 seconds. A well-built site loads in 1–2. That difference compounds across thousands of visitors.
Search visibility. A site with proper technical SEO — clean code, structured data, optimized metadata, fast load times, mobile responsiveness — ranks higher and attracts more organic traffic. More traffic at the same conversion rate means proportionally more revenue.
Conversion design. There’s a craft to building pages that actually move people toward action. Clear calls to action, intuitive navigation, trust signals, mobile-first layouts — these aren’t decorative choices. They directly affect your conversion rate, which directly affects your bottom line.
A site that converts at 5% versus 2% — with all other factors equal — generates 2.5× the revenue. In the brewery example above, that’s the difference between $120,000/year and $300,000/year.
The Honest Caveats
These projections are based on assumptions, and it’s worth being clear about what they require to hold:
- Consistent traffic. Traffic doesn’t maintain itself. It takes ongoing investment in SEO, content, and potentially paid advertising to sustain and grow it.
- Maintained conversion rates. Markets shift. Competitors improve. Consumer expectations rise. What converts well today may underperform in three years without updates.
- Realistic numbers. A brand-new business with no audience and no marketing budget won’t see 10,000 monthly visits out of the gate. The projections above represent businesses with some existing presence and marketing activity behind them.
The ROI framework is real. The specific numbers depend on your industry, your market, and how much you invest in driving traffic to the site.
So What’s a WordPress Website Worth?
The short answer: far more than most people budget for it.
A professionally built WordPress site isn’t a brochure — it’s a revenue-generating asset with a measurable return. The businesses that treat it that way, that invest in building it right and then feed it with traffic and content, consistently outperform competitors who treat it as a checkbox.
If you’re curious what the numbers look like for your specific business, we’re happy to run through it with you. It’s usually a pretty clarifying conversation.
