How Much Does a Website Cost and What Drives the Price
What you are really paying for when you commission a website, which decisions push the budget up, and why nobody serious quotes you a price over the phone.
It is almost everybody’s first question and the hardest one to answer cold. Asking how much a website costs is like asking how much a commercial unit costs: it depends on the square metres, the area, and whether you want it already fitted out.
What we can do is show you where the money goes, so you can read a quote and spot when someone is selling you smoke.
What you pay once and what you pay forever
This is the first place people get caught out. A website has two kinds of cost, and it is worth keeping them separate from the start.
One-off: the design, the development, the content structure, the launch and the initial search setup.
Every year: the domain, the hosting, the security certificate and the maintenance. That last one is not optional, however it gets sold to you. A website that never gets updated is a website that one day stops working — or something worse.
If a quote only shows you the first column, ask about the second before you sign.
The five decisions that move the price
1. How many pages and how much content
A five-page website is not the same as a catalogue with two hundred products. And watch out for this one: content is usually the bottleneck, not the code. If you supply the copy and the photos, the project moves faster and costs less. If they have to be written, that is work somebody has to do.
2. Whether you sell or only display
Adding a cart, a payment gateway, stock management and invoicing is a different project. It is not “the same website with a buy button”. It changes the complexity of the whole thing.
3. What it gets built with
This is where the choice between a custom build, WordPress or WooCommerce comes in — and it has more to do with who will run the site afterwards than with price. We explain it in detail in WordPress or a custom build.
4. How much design sits behind it
Starting from a template and changing the colours costs little. Designing something built around your business, that looks nothing like your competitor’s site, costs more. Both are legitimate, but they are not the same thing.
5. Whether it has to integrate with anything
Connecting the site to your invoicing software, your warehouse or a CRM is plumbing work: invisible, but paid for. And it is usually the most underestimated part when asking for a quote.
Why we will not give you a number over the phone
Because it would be a lie. Quoting without knowing how many pages there are, whether you sell online or whether you need to integrate with anything is throwing a dart. And when that dart misses, the project ends in scope changes, arguments and bad blood.
We would rather do it the other way round: a twenty-minute conversation, a fixed written quote stating what is in and what is not, and from there you decide.
Signs that a quote will get expensive
Watch for these four — they usually mean trouble ahead:
- It does not say who owns the domain and hosting. If they are not in your name, it is not your website. The day you want to leave, the problem starts.
- It does not mention maintenance. Either they have not thought about it, or they plan to bill you for it later.
- It includes nothing about search. Handing over a website Google cannot understand is handing it over half-finished. We cover what should be included in what technical SEO is.
- It is suspiciously cheap and very fast. That almost always means a template, and templates age badly as your business grows.
Cheap and expensive
A cheap website you have to rebuild in two years has cost more than a well-built one. And a very expensive website nobody finds on Google is worth nothing either.
The sensible point is to spend according to what the website has to do for you. If it is a calling card, it does not need to be a spaceship. If it is your main sales channel, cutting corners there is the worst investment available.
And in your case
Tell us what you do, how many pages you think you need and whether you are going to sell online. That is enough for us to give you a realistic range — and if we see we are not the right fit, we will say so.
Write to us, or first take a look at how we work and what we include.
