What drives website cost, and how to compare quotes

Website cost comes down to how many hours go into your site: how many different pages it needs, whether the design is custom or a template, whether you sell online, who writes the words, and what’s included after launch. Two quotes can look miles apart and both be fair, because they’re usually quoting for different things.

“How much is a website?” is the question we hear most. The true answer is “it depends”, which nobody enjoys hearing, so this post is about what it depends on.

What drives website cost

A website is mostly people’s time. Planning, designing, building, testing, writing, and fixing the thing that looked perfect on a laptop and fell apart on a phone. Nearly everything that moves the price does it by adding hours or taking them away.

Pages are the obvious place to start, but the number matters less than how different they are. Ten service pages that share one layout are quicker to build than four pages that each need their own design. A site with a booking system, a members’ area or a property search is a different kind of project altogether, even if it only has a handful of pages.

Then there’s the design. A template, or a ready-made theme layout, gets you something decent quickly. Custom web design starts from your brand, your customers and what they search for, and designs around that. For plenty of small businesses a well-adapted template is the right call, and we’ll tell you so. Custom design earns its keep when you’re fighting hard for attention, or when your business simply doesn’t fit the shape of a template.

Selling online and connecting other systems

E-commerce is where quotes jump, and with reason. A shop needs products loaded with photos, variations and stock levels. It needs a payment gateway, shipping rules, order emails and a checkout that has been tested properly from start to finish. Twenty products is quick. Fifteen hundred products in five sizes and four colours is not, because someone has to get all that data in cleanly.

Integrations work the same way. Connecting your site to a CRM, your accounting package or a mailing list sounds like a tick-box. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the other system’s plugin hasn’t been updated in years and the connection has to be built by hand. A good quote tells you which one it’s assuming.

The parts that are easy to leave off a quote

Content is the big one. Somebody has to write the words on every page. If you’re writing them yourself the quote can be lower, but be realistic about whether you’ll find the time. If you want it written for you, that should appear as its own line on the quote.

SEO setup is another. We build for Google first, so keyword research and page structure are planned before design starts, and the technical basics are in place on launch day: page titles, meta descriptions, a sitemap, Search Console, and redirects from your old site. Some quotes include all of that. Some install a plugin and call it SEO. Be wary of anyone who promises rankings, too. Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a number one spot.

And then training. Every client of ours learns how to run their own site, because a website you can’t update goes stale quickly. Plenty of developers hand over a login and move on. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but you should know before you sign.

Hosting and care once it’s live

A website isn’t a once-off cost. It needs hosting, a domain renewed every year, and on WordPress it needs updates, backups and security checks every month. Skip those and the cheap site becomes the expensive one the day a plugin breaks or someone gets in. Our website maintenance plans cover that monthly work so it doesn’t land on your desk.

When you compare quotes, add up the first two or three years. The build price on its own tells you less than you’d think.

Why quotes vary so much

Quotes for what looks like the same website can differ wildly. Usually nobody is being dishonest. They’re quoting for different jobs.

One developer installs a theme, swaps in your logo and pastes in your text. Another plans the site around what your customers search for, designs each page, writes the copy, sets up the SEO and trains your team. Both of those are a website, but they aren’t the same product, and the gap in price is mostly hours and experience.

How to compare quotes like for like

Put the quotes side by side and ask every supplier the same questions. If someone can’t answer them clearly, that’s an answer in itself.

1. How many pages and page designs are included, and what does an extra one cost?
2. Is the design custom, or built on a template?
3. Who writes the content, and who loads it?
4. What SEO work is done before and at launch, including redirects from the old site?
5. Will we own the site, the domain and the hosting account?
6. How many rounds of changes are included?
7. What training do we get once it’s live?
8. What will hosting and maintenance cost each month afterwards?

Our guide on how to choose a web developer goes into this further, including the warning signs we spot most often. For our own website development work we give a fixed quote before anything starts, so you know the number and what sits behind it. If a quote is an hourly estimate, ask what happens when the hours run out.

What cheap quotes usually leave out

A low quote isn’t automatically a bad one. If you’re a sole trader who needs five pages and a contact form, don’t let anyone talk you into a six-month project.

When a price is surprisingly low, though, something is normally missing. The gaps we come across most are no content at all, no SEO beyond a plugin, and no redirects from the old site, so years of Google rankings vanish the week it launches. Hosting tends to be the cheapest shared server going, with no plan for updates. We also regularly meet business owners whose previous developer still holds the domain or the hosting account, which means they can’t change a thing without that person.

Cheap to build and cheap to own are two different things.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a website cost?

It depends on how many different pages you need, whether the design is custom or template-based, whether you sell online, who writes the content and what’s included after launch. The most reliable way to get a real number is a fixed quote based on a short brief.

Why is one website quote so much cheaper than another?

Usually because the quotes cover different work. Cheaper quotes often leave out copywriting, SEO setup, redirects from your old site, training or ongoing maintenance. Ask each supplier exactly what’s included before you compare prices.

Are there ongoing costs after a website is built?

Yes. You’ll pay for your domain and hosting every year, and a WordPress site needs regular updates, backups and security checks. Include these when you compare quotes, not just the build price.