What actually drives the cost of a website
Two quotes for "a website" can differ by a factor of ten and both be honest, because the word covers everything from five pages to a booking platform. The price follows four decisions: how many pages need their own design, whether the site has to do work rather than describe it, who writes the words and takes the photographs, and how much old content has to come across. Settle those four and quotes become comparable.
Why two quotes can differ tenfold
"A website" is not a specification. It is a category, and it stretches from a five page brochure to a system that takes bookings, handles payments and logs people in. Ask three agencies for a website and you will get three different products priced accordingly, which is why the numbers look so far apart.
The way out is not to collect more quotes. It is to describe the thing more precisely before you ask. Everything below is aimed at that.
The four decisions that move the price most
One: how many pages need their own design. A site can have forty pages and six designs, or eight pages and eight designs. Design and build time follows the number of unique layouts, not the number of pages. This is the single biggest lever you control, and it is the one clients are most often surprised by.
Two: whether the site has to do work. A page that describes your service is one job. A page that checks availability, takes a deposit, emails a confirmation and shows an admin who booked what is a different job entirely. Logins, bookings, payments and dashboards are where a website stops being a website and becomes software.
Three: who writes the words and takes the photographs. Content is the most common reason projects stall, and the most common thing left out of a quote. If you are writing it, the build waits on you. If the agency is writing it, that is real work and it should appear as a line on the quote.
Four: how much has to come across from the old site. Moving twelve pages is an afternoon. Moving four hundred, with their images and their web addresses intact so that you keep your Google ranking, is a piece of work in its own right. It is worth doing properly, and it is worth pricing separately.
What people mean by "a website"
Naming the type you actually need takes most of the ambiguity out of a quote.
| Type | What it is for | What drives the price |
|---|---|---|
| Brochure site | Explaining what you do and getting enquiries | Number of unique page designs, and who writes the copy |
| Content site | Publishing regularly and ranking for it | Editing tools, templates, and migrating what exists |
| Online shop | Selling products | Product count, variants, payment and delivery rules |
| Booking site | Taking appointments or jobs | How complicated your availability and pricing rules are |
| Web application | Logins, dashboards, work that used to be manual | Everything above, plus how many user roles there are |
| Redesign or migration | Replacing a site without losing ground | How much content moves, and keeping the old web addresses working |
What is usually included, and what usually is not
Quotes vary less than they appear once you line up what each one covers. Things that should be included as standard, and which we treat as standard rather than as extras: responsive layouts that work on a phone, reasonable loading speed, basic accessibility, page titles and descriptions, and an analytics setup so you can see what happens after launch.
Things that are legitimately separate, and are worth asking about explicitly: copywriting, photography, logo and brand work, paid stock imagery, ongoing hosting, support after launch, and any third party licence the site depends on. None of these being on a quote is a problem. Not knowing which of them are missing is.
The costs that arrive after launch
A website is not a one-off purchase. Domains and hosting renew. Certificates renew. Plugins and frameworks need updating, and an unmaintained site becomes a security problem rather than slowly fading away.
Ask any agency what year two looks like before you sign for year one. Ask what happens if you want to change something yourself, and whether you will be able to. Ask who holds the domain and the hosting account, and make sure the answer is you. We have inherited plenty of sites where it was not, and untangling that is the least enjoyable work there is.
How to write a brief that gets an accurate quote
Half a page is enough. It does not need to be formal.
- Say what the site is for in one sentence. "We want more enquiries from commercial customers" leads somewhere. "We need to refresh our online presence" does not.
- List the pages you know you need. Rough is fine. It tells an agency how many unique designs are likely.
- Say what the site has to do. Bookings, payments, logins, quote calculators, anything a visitor interacts with rather than reads.
- Say who is writing the words. Be honest. If nobody has time, say that, and have it quoted.
- Say what exists now. Current site, roughly how many pages, and whether it needs to move across.
- Give a budget range. Not to be spent, but so nobody wastes a fortnight designing something you were never going to buy.
A brief like that gets you comparable quotes. Without it, you are comparing guesses, and the cheapest guess usually turns out to be the least complete one.
Questions worth asking any agency
Five that tend to be revealing:
- Who actually does the work, and will I speak to them?
- Is this a fixed price, and what specifically would change it?
- Can I edit the content myself afterwards, and can you show me how?
- What happens in year two, and what does it cost?
- Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting when we are finished?
We put our scope and price in writing before starting, work is done in-house by the people you meet, and you own everything at the end. Any agency that answers those five clearly is worth taking seriously, whether or not it is us.
Common questions
There is no single figure, because the word covers a five page brochure site and a booking platform equally. The price follows four things: how many pages need their own design, whether the site has to do work such as bookings or payments, who writes the words and takes the photographs, and how much existing content has to be migrated. Once those are settled, a fixed price can be agreed in writing before anything starts, which is how we quote.
A focused marketing website is usually four to eight weeks. A larger platform with logins, bookings or payments is typically three to six months. The most common cause of delay is not development, it is waiting on content, so agreeing who writes the words at the start makes more difference to the timeline than almost anything else.
Usually because it is for a smaller product. Check whether the cheaper quote includes copywriting, migrating your existing content, keeping your old web addresses working, and support after launch. Sometimes the difference is real value. Often it is scope that has quietly been left out and will come back as extras.
It can, if the old web addresses are not redirected to the new ones. Done properly, every old address points at its replacement and the ranking carries across. Ask specifically how redirects will be handled before you commit. It is a small piece of work that protects years of accumulated ground.
You should be able to, and you should ask to see it demonstrated rather than promised. We build sites that clients edit themselves, including WordPress builds where that is the right fit, and we train your team on the parts they will actually touch.
Where to go next
If you want a straight answer about your own situation, tell us what you are trying to do and we will say what we would do, including when the answer is that you do not need us. Start a conversation.