What a Martial Arts School Website Costs in 2026

Every website has two prices

The first price is what you pay to get the site built. The second is what you pay every month to keep it online, updated, and fast. Vendors quote whichever one makes them look cheap. A builder shows you "$25 a month" and hides the hundred hours you will spend. An agency shows you a setup fee and hides the hourly rate for changing a class time.

There is also a third price that never appears on an invoice: the enquiries you never hear about while the site is slow, outdated, or down. Nobody can put a figure on that for your school, and we are not going to invent one. What you can do is check whether the site answers the questions in the 24-point checklist at all, and read the prices below knowing the cheapest route is not automatically the cheapest outcome.

Route 1: do-it-yourself builders

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and similar tools let you drag boxes onto a page and publish. The subscription is the visible price. As one reference point, Squarespace's published plans on 2026-09-26 ran from $25/month (Basic) to $139/month (Advanced) billed monthly, or $19 to $99/month billed annually (squarespace.com/pricing). Wix's plan page is loaded by script and did not expose prices to a plain page read, so we do not quote it; check wix.com/plans yourself.

The subscription is not the cost. The cost is:

• Your hours. A five-page academy site with a schedule, program pages, and a trial form is a weekend at best, and usually several. Value your time at what an hour of private lessons brings in and the math changes.
• The copy. Builders give you a template full of placeholder text. Somebody has to write the program descriptions, the bios, the trial offer, and the safety section. That somebody is you.
• Speed. A template you have filled with full-size photos and a few widgets is a large download on a phone. Compressing images and removing scripts is a separate skill from dragging boxes, and nothing in the editor makes you do it.
• The plateau. The site ends up being whatever you had time to make. There is no one else scheduled to improve it next month.

DIY makes sense if you genuinely enjoy this work, have the hours, and will keep at it. It is the wrong route if you are on the mat six days a week.

Route 2: a freelancer

A freelancer builds the site for a one-time fee, usually on WordPress or a builder. There is no published price for this route; every freelancer quotes their own. What moves the quote:

• Scope: number of pages, whether they write the copy, whether they build program pages or one long homepage.
• Platform: a WordPress build usually adds a theme license, plugins, and a hosting plan you pay separately.
• Where they are: rates vary widely by country and city.
• Aftercare: ask in writing what happens after launch. Hosting, updates, security patches, and "can you change the Tuesday class to 5:30" are either in the quote, billed hourly, or nobody's job. Find out which before you sign.

Route 3: an agency

Agencies sell a team: designer, developer, copywriter, project manager, and often a monthly marketing retainer bundled in. Again, no published price to cite; agency pricing is quote-based. Part of what you are paying for is coordination between those people, so when you get a quote, ask what it assumes about meetings, revision rounds, and project management.

• Discovery and strategy phases, often billed before any design.
• Revision rounds and approvals across several people.
• A retainer for hosting and "maintenance", which may or may not include the edits you actually need.
• Marketing add-ons (ads, social, SEO) that are sold on top and are hard to evaluate.

An agency is a sensible call for a multi-location chain with a brand to manage across sites. For a single academy that needs five pages and a trial form, ask what share of the quote is coordination you do not need.

Route 4: the gym-software website add-on

Member-management platforms sell a website as a line item next to billing and attendance. The convenience is real: the schedule and the sign-up form talk to the software. The price is recurring. Published example, read on 2026-09-26: NextKick lists its Website product at $169/month, separate from its Core ($79) and Pro ($179) software tiers, with an Ultimate Bundle at $319/month (nextkick.ai/pricing).

The arithmetic on that published price: $169 × 12 = $2,028 a year, $6,084 over three years, for as long as you keep the subscription. Before you buy any hosted website product, ask the vendor two questions in writing and keep the answers: what exactly can I export if I cancel, and does the live site stay up if I stop paying? Those answers decide whether three years of payments leaves you with an asset or a stopping point.

Read the software fees guide before choosing this route. The website add-on is usually the smaller of the two recurring costs; the card processing rate is the bigger one.

Route 5: a fixed-price rebuild (what we do)

CyberKnockouts builds academy websites at one published price: $999 one-time plus $50 a month. The $999 covers a custom five-page site, copy written for you, mobile-first, built to load in under a second, with local SEO in place. The $50 covers hosting, updates, maintenance, and changing the Tuesday class to 5:30 when you ask. No contracts, cancel anytime.

The part that matters most given the risk above: you see the site before you pay. We build a free preview of your new site and send you the link within 24 hours. You compare it against your current site and against the checklist. If it is not a knockout, you owe nothing. Claim the free preview here.

Three-year cost of the rebuild: $999 + 36 × $50 = $2,799. The same three years on a $169/month software website add-on: 36 × $169 = $6,084. The three-year gap is $3,285. Both are subscriptions you can cancel; the difference is the monthly number and what the up-front fee buys you.

Side by side

The costs that are not on any invoice

1. 1Downtime nobody notices. A site can return a server error for days while everyone at the school assumes it is fine, because staff reach it from a cached browser and parents who hit the error simply leave. Ask every vendor whether anyone is monitoring uptime and who gets alerted.
2. 2The edit tax. If changing a class time means emailing someone and waiting, the schedule on the site drifts from the schedule in the room. A parent following the published time arrives to a closed door, and that is your reputation, not the vendor's.
3. 3The speed tax. A parent checking three schools from a car park is doing it on mobile data on a phone. Whatever your page makes them wait for, they are waiting for it in that situation, not at a desk.
4. 4Exit cost. If leaving a vendor means the live site stops working, the real price of switching later includes building a new site. Get the export and cancellation answers in writing up front.
5. 5The vendor who never delivers. Any route where money moves before you see work carries this risk. Insist on seeing something real first.

Whatever route you choose, score the result with the 24-point checklist and run it through the free website grader. A cheap site that fails both is the most expensive site you can buy.

Questions