Castlegar, BC. Serving the Kootenays and beyond.
12 min read
Key takeaways
- Shopify Basic is $37 CAD a month on annual billing and $49 month to month, plus 2.8% and 30 cents per online sale. Checked September 2026.
- Squarespace Basic is CA$21 a month and adds a 2% store fee on every sale. Core at CA$32 removes it, which is why Basic gets expensive fast.
- Wix Light at CA$21 a month cannot accept payments at all. Selling on Wix starts at Core, CA$33 a month.
- WordPress software is free and hosting is not: C$3.99 a month intro, C$11.99 regular, on a Canadian host, with the maintenance on you.
- A complete Google Business Profile and a booking link cost nothing and are enough for plenty of businesses in their first year.
On this page
Which website builder is best for a small business in Canada?
It depends on what the site has to do, and the honest ranking splits by job rather than by brand. Shopify wins when you sell products online. Squarespace wins for a presence that sells a little. Wix gets you live fastest and has a ceiling. WordPress gives you control and hands you the upkeep. A built site you own wins once the site carries real weight for the business.
This guide is for an owner about to spend money for the first time, comparing tabs and getting a different answer on every one. It is not for someone whose site already runs fine on one of these platforms, because moving costs more than people expect and this would just make you restless.
Every price below came off each vendor’s Canadian pricing page on September 4, 2026, loaded from a computer in Castlegar so the numbers came back in Canadian dollars. Vendors change these whenever they like, so check the current one before you buy.
The five builders, ranked by job
Shopify at $37 CAD a month on annual billing, Squarespace at CA$21, Wix Light at CA$21 with no ability to sell, Square Online free on a Square address or $36 a month billed annually for your own domain, and WordPress at the price of hosting. All checked September 2026.
| Entry price in Canadian dollars | The job it is actually good at | |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Basic $37 CAD a month on annual billing, $49 month to month | A real store: stock, variants, shipping rates, taxes, and a checkout that works at midnight |
| Squarespace | Basic CA$21 a month on annual billing, Core CA$32 | A clean presence with light selling. Basic adds a 2% store fee on every sale, Core drops it to zero |
| Wix | Light CA$21 a month, Core CA$33, on yearly billing paid in full | A fast start. Light cannot take payments at all, so selling anything starts at Core |
| Square Online | Free at $0, Plus $36 a month billed annually | A shop whose till is already Square. The free plan works but keeps a Square web address |
| WordPress | Software free, hosting from C$3.99 a month intro and C$11.99 regular | Total control, and the updates, backups, and broken plugins are yours forever |
| A built site you own | From $2,000 once at Kootenay Made Digital | No platform subscription afterward, the files in your own account, the domain in your name |
Shopify is the one I recommend without hesitation when products are the business. The machinery is real: stock counts that stay true, shipping rates by weight and destination, tax handled, a checkout people already trust. Basic runs $37 CAD a month on annual billing or $49 month to month, plus 2.8% and 30 cents on every online card sale. I go through the whole calculation in is Shopify worth it for a Kootenay store.
Squarespace makes the best looking sites of the builder group with the least fighting. The detail people miss is the store fee. Basic at CA$21 charges 2% on every online sale on top of the card rate, and Core at CA$32 charges nothing. Basic is the cheaper plan right up until you start selling, then it quietly becomes the expensive one.
Wix gets a site live faster than anything else here, and its free plan is a fair demo. The ceiling arrives at the Light plan, which cannot accept payments and cannot run a store, so selling starts at Core, CA$33 a month. I priced the whole ladder, including the renewal jump and the app subscriptions, in the Wix pricing in Canada reference.
Square Online only makes sense when Square is already the till. The integration is the argument: one product list, one inventory count, the floor and the website agreeing without you retyping anything. Free at $0 on a Square web address, $36 a month billed annually for your own domain.
WordPress still runs a large share of the internet and still asks the most of you. The software costs nothing. Hosting on a Canadian host starts at C$3.99 a month on the intro rate and C$11.99 regular, and the intro rate always ends. You are buying control and paying in attention: updates, backups, and the plugin that breaks the contact form in month nine. The full argument sits in the WordPress alternative guide.
Every one of these platforms is a fair deal for the job it was built for. The bad outcomes come from buying one for a job it was never built for.
What does a website builder actually cost per year?
More than the plan, always. The sticker covers hosting and the editor. Card processing, apps, the domain, the mailbox, and your own hours all sit outside it, and for a working business those four usually add up to more than the plan does.
- Card processing on every sale you take, charged as a percentage plus a few cents, separate from the plan.
- Apps and plugins, each with its own subscription and its own renewal date.
- The domain, which is a yearly bill of its own and rarely stays free past year one.
- A business email address at your own domain, priced per mailbox by Google or Microsoft.
- Your hours. The evenings spent wrestling a theme are the largest line item on most DIY builds and the only one nobody writes down.
Work an example. A Squarespace Basic site at CA$21 a month doing CA$2,000 in online sales pays 2.9% and 30 cents per card sale plus a 2% store fee, so the real bill lands near CA$119 against a CA$21 sticker. Move the same sales to Core at CA$32 and the store fee disappears, bringing it to about CA$90. The cheaper plan costs more.
None of that makes any of these platforms dishonest. Card processing is a real cost every option carries, mine included. The mistake is comparing a plan price against a build quote, which compares two things of different shapes. The website cost guide runs both over five years, which is the comparison that actually decides it.
What changes when the business is Canadian?
Four things: the currency the vendor bills you in, whether GST and PST get calculated at checkout, whether shipping rates come from Canada Post, and whether you can hold a .ca domain. Most global platforms handle the first three now. The fourth is a Canadian rule with real teeth.
- Billing currency
- Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and Square all publish Canadian dollar prices on their Canadian pages. Some other tools price in US dollars and let your bank convert, which adds a few percent nobody quotes you. Check the currency symbol before you sign up.
- Sales tax
- GST plus provincial tax gets calculated at checkout by every store platform here, and each expects you to configure it correctly. That is a twenty minute job worth doing before the first sale.
- Shipping
- Canada Post rates matter more here than anywhere, because parcels out of the Kootenays are heavy on distance. Calculated rates by weight and destination beat a flat rate that loses money on every parcel to Ontario.
- The .ca domain
- Holding one requires meeting CIRA’s Canadian presence requirement, and a .ca signals a Canadian business to a Canadian buyer in a way a .com does not. I cover the requirement and the cost in the Canadian domain guide.
The domain price is worth naming, because it is the one bill that follows you off every platform. A .ca runs C$15.68 a year and a .com C$20.74 at NamesPro, a CIRA certified Canadian registrar, checked September 2026, with GST on top. That is the real market price, and it is a useful yardstick against a builder offering you a free first year.
When is the right answer no builder at all?
More often than any of these companies would like. A complete Google Business Profile, a phone number people can tap, and a booking link cover a surprising number of local businesses for their first year, at no cost. I mean that as a real recommendation, and I have given it to people who arrived ready to hand me money.
The Kootenay List, compiled September 3, 2026, counts 2,527 businesses across the region with no website out of 5,836 listed. In Trail, 178 of 276 businesses have no site. Kimberley runs about the same, 205 of 318. Being the business without a website in those towns is still ordinary rather than remarkable.
So the advice for a business still figuring out what it sells: spend nothing on a website this year. Fill out the Google profile properly, get the first fifteen reviews, put a booking link where people can find it, and write down the questions customers keep asking. Those questions become the pages when you do build. Do you need a website in 2026 works through that call in more detail. The moment a profile runs out of road is specific and you will recognise it: a stranger finds you, wants to compare you against two other options, and cannot.
When does a built website beat all five?
When the site has to earn search rankings rather than receive traffic you already sent it, when it does a job past showing information, and when you want the whole thing in your own accounts. Below that bar, a builder is good value and I will say so.
- Customers arrive from search rather than from a link you sent them, so the pages have to earn rankings on their own.
- The site does a job past showing information: booking, quoting, a members area, a real store, something the business runs on.
- You want the whole thing in your own accounts, so leaving a supplier never means rebuilding.
- Speed matters because half your visitors are on a phone with two bars somewhere up a valley road.
- The look has to be yours, and a template that fifty other businesses in BC are also running will not do it.
The comparison that matters is the five year one. A builder at CA$32 a month with a couple of apps runs near CA$600 a year, so five years lands around CA$3,000 and you own nothing at the end of it. A build at Kootenay Made Digital starts at $2,000 once, with no platform bill of the Squarespace or Wix kind afterward. Hosting is a choice: I host it at no extra cost, or you hold your own account. The domain is in your name from day one either way.
If the money is the obstacle rather than the decision, that same $2,000 build can run as 12 payments of $189, $2,268 all in, and the site is yours outright at payment 12 through Own It Monthly. The Kootenay neighbours discount of 10% applies to builds for businesses in the region.
The argument against renting forever is not a moral one, it is arithmetic and control. Renting versus owning your website lays both columns out, and who owns your website covers the part people only discover when they try to leave.
How do you decide this week?
Write down the job first, in one sentence, before you open a single pricing page. Almost every bad platform choice I see started with the pricing page and worked backwards to the job, which is how a restaurant ends up on a store platform and a store ends up on a brochure builder.
Four questions get you there. Do you sell products that ship? Do you take money at a counter today? Does anything need booking? And do customers find you by searching, or because somebody sent them? Products that ship means Shopify. A counter means Square. Booking without products means Squarespace or Wix. Found by searching means the pages have to be built to be found, which is where a builder starts to strain.
Then price the year rather than the month. Plan times twelve, plus card fees on realistic sales, plus apps, plus the domain, plus a mailbox. Put that number beside a build quote and the comparison finally makes sense. Most people find the gap is smaller than they assumed.
Whichever way you go, register the domain yourself, in your own name, at your own registrar. Everything else here is reversible with some effort. That one becomes a hostage.
Sources and further reading
- Shopify pricing plans, Canada
Fetched September 4, 2026, prices labelled CAD. Basic $49 a month billed monthly or $37 billed annually, Grow $132 or $99, Advanced $517 or $389, Plus from $3,400. Online card rates 2.8%, 2.6% and 2.4% plus 30 cents by tier.
- Squarespace pricing
Fetched September 4, 2026 from a Canadian connection, prices returned in CAD on annual billing. Basic CA$21, Core CA$32, Plus CA$46, Advanced CA$109 a month. Basic carries a 2% online store transaction fee that Core and above do not.
- Wix plans
Fetched September 4, 2026, CAD. Free CA$0, Light CA$21, Core CA$33, Business CA$44, Business Elite CA$165 a month. Wix states these are yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, before tax, and the Light card lists no payments and no eCommerce.
- Square Online plans, Canada
Fetched September 4, 2026. Free $0, Plus $36 a month billed annually, Premium $99 billed annually. Square states a custom domain requires an annual paid plan.
- Web Hosting Canada, managed WordPress plans
Fetched September 4, 2026 from a Canadian host publishing in C$. WP Go C$3.99 a month at the intro rate and C$11.99 at the regular rate, WP Pro C$5.99 intro and C$16.99 regular.
- NamesPro.ca domain pricing
Fetched September 4, 2026 from a CIRA certified Canadian registrar. .ca C$15.68 a year, .com C$20.74 a year, registration and renewal at the same price, 5% GST added.
- The Kootenay Business Web Census
The Kootenay List snapshot behind every regional figure in this guide, compiled from public listings and restated here through the site helper rather than typed by hand.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best website builder for a small business in Canada?
There is no single winner, because the builders are not competing for the same job. Shopify is the answer when you sell products online, at $37 CAD a month on annual billing. Squarespace suits a presence with light selling at CA$21 a month. Wix gets you live fastest but caps out. WordPress gives total control and hands you the maintenance. A built site you own makes sense once the site has to carry real weight. Prices checked September 2026.
What is the cheapest website builder in Canada?
Wix has a free plan at CA$0, and Square Online has one at $0. Both keep the platform in your web address and neither is a place to run a real business long term. Among paid plans, Squarespace Basic and Wix Light both sit at CA$21 a month on annual billing, checked September 2026. The cheapest sticker is rarely the cheapest year, because processing fees, apps, the domain, and email are all billed separately.
Is Wix or Squarespace better for a Canadian small business?
Squarespace if you might ever sell something, Wix if you want to be live this week. Wix Light at CA$21 a month cannot take payments at all, so selling starts at Core at CA$33. Squarespace Basic at CA$21 can sell, with a 2% store fee on top of the card rate that Core at CA$32 removes. Both prices checked September 2026 on annual billing.
Do I even need a website, or is a Google Business Profile enough?
For a first year, a complete Google Business Profile plus a booking link is often enough, and it costs nothing. As of September 3, 2026, 2,527 of the 5,836 Kootenay businesses on The Kootenay List run without a website. The moment strangers start comparing you against two competitors before they call, the profile stops being enough.
Is WordPress still a good choice in 2026?
It is, for a business that publishes constantly and wants control over every corner. The trade is maintenance. Core updates, plugin updates, backups, and security are your job or your contractor is billing you for them. Hosting on a Canadian host runs C$3.99 a month at the intro rate and C$11.99 at the regular rate, checked September 2026, and the intro rate ends.
When is a custom built website worth it over a builder?
When the site has to earn search rankings, when it does a job past showing information, and when you want it in your own accounts so leaving a supplier never means rebuilding. Below that bar a builder is honest value. At Kootenay Made Digital a build starts at $2,000 once, and there is no platform subscription waiting on the other side of it.
What does a website builder cost per year once everything is added?
Take the plan price times twelve, then add card processing on everything you sell, every app subscription, the domain, and a mailbox. A Canadian .ca domain runs C$15.68 a year and a .com C$20.74 at NamesPro, checked September 2026. For most small businesses the plan is the smallest of those numbers, so total all of them before you compare anything.
Related pages
- Retail and ecommerce websites
- Trades and contractor websites
- Professional services websites
- Web design for Canadian businesses
- Web design across British Columbia
Kootenay Made Digital
I build websites, local presence, and calm AI setups for Kootenay small businesses. Plain language, published prices, and clear work that makes you easier to find and easier to choose.
