What Should a Business Website Cost — and What Actually Drives the Price?
Ask three suppliers to quote the same website and the spread can be tenfold. That is not necessarily anyone being dishonest — it usually means they have quietly assumed three different projects. Here is what actually moves the number, so you can compare proposals on equal terms.
The five things that drive the price
1. How many distinct page types. Not how many pages — how many kinds. A site with a home page, a services page, a contact page and a blog has four templates. Fifty blog posts on the same template add content work, not design work. Every genuinely new layout does add cost.
2. Who writes the words. This is the most commonly under-quoted item on the list. Copy that is researched and written for you is real work; copy you supply is free to the project. Many disappointing quotes assume the second and many disappointing projects stall precisely here, waiting for text.
3. Where the images come from. Stock photography is cheap and looks it. A photographer for a day costs more and does more for credibility than most design decisions.
4. What has to connect to something else. A contact form emailing you is trivial. Payments, booking systems, CRM synchronisation, customer logins or inventory feeds are each a separate piece of engineering with its own edge cases.
5. Who updates it afterwards. A site you can edit yourself needs a content management system, which adds cost up front and removes it later. A site only the developer can change is cheaper to build and more expensive to live with.
The three broad tiers
Roughly, and in ranges rather than promises:
- A credible brochure site — a handful of templates, your own copy, standard contact form. The most common need for a small business, and a bounded piece of work measured in days rather than months.
- A marketing site that does a job — bilingual content, a blog, structured data for search, a CMS so you can publish without a developer, analytics, performance work. Meaningfully more, and usually where the return is.
- A web application — logins, payments, customer accounts, anything with a database behind it. A different category entirely; quote it as software, not as a website.
Anyone giving you a firm number before knowing which tier you are in is guessing.
The costs that recur
The build is one-off; these are not:
- Domain, annually. Trivial, but do not let a supplier register it in their own name — it should be yours.
- Hosting. A static site costs very little to host and scales without drama. A database-driven site costs more and needs more attention. See static sites vs WordPress.
- Maintenance. Traditional platforms need regular security updates. Skipping them is how small business sites get compromised.
- Content. The site earns its keep only if something is published on it.
How to compare quotes fairly
Give every supplier the identical brief, and state explicitly who is providing copy and images. Then ask each of them the same four questions: what happens if we need a page type that is not in the plan; who owns the domain, the code and the content; what does it cost to run per year; and what does a small change cost after launch.
The answers will tell you more than the headline figure.
The cheapest site is rarely the least expensive
A site that loads slowly, cannot be updated without a developer, or has to be rebuilt in eighteen months costs more over its life than one built properly the first time — and it costs you the customers who bounced in the meantime. Judge the price against the business it is supposed to bring in, which is the argument in why your business needs its own website.
Want a straight answer for your specific situation? Get in touch and we will scope it honestly, including telling you if you need less than you think.