How much does website copywriting cost?

A typical 5 to 10 page small business site runs $500 to $2,000 for an experienced freelance copywriter, more with interviews and positioning work. Per-page rates of $100 to $300 are common. Landing pages with conversion focus run $300 to $1,000 each.

Can I write my own website copy?

Often yes, and a client draft edited by a professional is the best value arrangement. You know your customers' words; the professional adds structure and persuasion. What owners write alone usually fails at is clarity of the first five seconds and killing insider jargon.

Why is copywriting charged separately from web design?

It is a different skill with a different process: research, interviews, drafts, revisions. Bundling it means the designer writes your text between tasks, which shows. Sites that convert usually had copy treated as seriously as design.

What does good copy actually change?

Mostly bounce and conversion. Visitors decide in about 5 seconds whether a site is for them. Copy that names the customer's problem and the outcome in those seconds is the difference between a visitor who reads on and one who is already gone.

What Website Copywriting Costs (and When to Write It Yourself)

Copy is the cheapest thing on your website budget and the thing most responsible for whether the site works. It is also the line item owners most often cut, usually to their own cost. Here are the real numbers and the honest exceptions.

What professional web copy costs

Scope	Typical price
Single landing page	$300 to $1,000
5-page small business site	$500 to $1,500
10+ page site with positioning work	$1,500 to $3,000
Product descriptions (per 50)	$300 to $800
Copy editing of your draft	$200 to $600

Prices scale with research, not word count. The expensive part is not typing, it is the interviews, the customer review mining, and the positioning decisions underneath the words.

What the money buys, specifically

A professional copywriter delivers:

A homepage that passes the 5-second test: what you do, for whom, why you, in one screen
Service pages organized around what customers search, not how you internally name things
Answers to objections in the order customers actually feel them
One voice across every page, instead of three eras of your own editing
The removal of insider jargon, which you cannot hear anymore because you say it every day

That last one is the part owners consistently cannot do alone. You know too much about your business to write like someone meeting it for the first time.

The honest case for writing it yourself first

Here is the arrangement I recommend to most clients: you write the ugly first draft, and a professional edits it. Reasons:

You have the raw material nobody can invent: real customer phrases, real before-and-afters, the actual reason people choose you
Your draft, however clumsy, is specific. Writer-from-nowhere drafts are generic until proven otherwise
The edit costs a third of writing from scratch, and edit-plus-your-material usually beats from-scratch-plus-nothing

What your draft must get right for this to work: who the customer is, what problem you solve, and proof. Leave persuasion and structure to the editor.

When professional copy from scratch is worth it

You are repositioning (new market, new pricing tier, new offer) where the words are the strategy
Your sales depend on a landing page with real ad spend behind it; small conversion gains compound fast there
English is not your strength and your market reads carefully (legal, medical, B2B)
You have stared at the blank homepage for 3 months. The delay is costing more than the writer

How copy affects the rest of the build

One practical note from the developer side: copy delays kill more project timelines than code does. Design lays out around real text; pages built on placeholder text get reworked when the real words arrive, and that rework is billed to someone. Write the copy, even badly, before the design phase starts. It is the single cheapest way to keep your quote where it was.

The test for whether copy is working

Not how it reads. Two questions: do fewer people leave after one page than before, and do more of the right people contact you saying the right things? If your inquiries started matching your best customers, the copy is doing its job.

If you want, send me your current homepage text. I will tell you what is working, what is losing people, and whether you need a professional or just a sharper edit.