What a Business Website Costs, and Why the Gap Is So Wide

Why nobody serious quotes a price on the phone

"How much does a website cost" is a question that is almost always answered with a question, and that is not evasion.

A four page site with content ready, and a four page site that needs an admin panel, two languages and conversion tracking, are the same page count and several times the work. Anyone who does quote a number on the first call is usually pricing something other than what you asked for, and the difference surfaces later.

This post will not give you a price. It will give you what moves the price, so you arrive at the conversation already knowing what you want.

The seven things that set the price

1. How many pages are genuinely different

Ten product pages built from one template are a single piece of work. Three pages that each look different are three pieces of work. When asking for a quote, it is worth counting layouts rather than pages.

2. Whether the content exists

This is the item that surprises people most. Writing the copy is work in its own right, and it is often bigger than the build. "We have materials" usually means an old deck and a few paragraphs from a previous site, which is not the same thing.

3. Custom design or a template

A ready made template adapted with your colours and logo is one route. A design built around your business is an entirely different one. Both are legitimate, and they are not in the same range.

4. Whether you need an admin panel

A site built so you can edit it yourself requires a whole invisible layer: editing screens, permissions, validation. It is worth it if you intend to update, and wasted if the site will sit unchanged for two years.

5. How many languages

A second language is not a few percent on top. It touches every piece of text, the URLs, the text direction, dates, and SEO. It is much better decided at the start. Adding it later costs more than building with it from the beginning.

6. Measurement and privacy consent

A site you run campaigns on needs tracking that genuinely reports, and a consent banner that genuinely blocks until permission is given. It is relatively small work during the build, and it becomes a project when done after the campaign is already running.

7. Accessibility

Same story. Choosing colours that meet the required contrast during design costs nothing. Fixing contrast after the site is finished and approved is a full design round.

What makes it more expensive in hindsight

Two causes explain almost every budget overrun, and both are preventable:

• Design changes after approval. Design approval is the point from which building starts. A structural change after it does not add work, it deletes work already done.
• Content that arrives late. A site built with placeholder text that receives the real text at the end almost always needs layout adjustments, because real text is never the length that was planned for.

What not to cut

Three things are cheap to build and expensive to retrofit, which makes them a bad place to save: loading speed, accessibility, and measurement. Each is priced at a fraction of a percent of the project when included from the start, and each becomes a sub project when added afterwards.

Six questions to ask any supplier

1. What exactly is included in the price, and what will be billed separately?
2. Who writes the content, and if it is me, when do you need it?
3. How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a round?
4. Which parts of the site will I be able to edit myself after handover?
5. What happens after launch? Who is responsible for a problem in six months?
6. Who owns the domain, the hosting and the code?

The last question matters more than it sounds. Anyone who dodges it has answered it.

How to build a budget without numbers

Go through the seven items and mark how many apply to you. A project that ticks two or three and a project that ticks all of them are not in the same world, and that alone explains the gap you see between quotes. Arrive at the conversation with that list in hand and you will get a far more accurate quote, far faster.