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Website quotes vary more than any other design purchase, because "a website" describes anything from a one-page template to a bespoke platform. The specification, not the supplier, explains most of the variance.
Typical ranges
| Landing page | $350 – $1,500. One page, one goal, usually for a campaign. |
|---|---|
| Small business site (5–10 pages) | $700 – $4,000. Custom design, CMS, forms, basic SEO setup. |
| Content site with blog and locations | $3,000 – $12,000. Multiple templates, editorial workflow, structured data. |
| E-commerce | $1,000 – $25,000+. Driven by catalogue size, variant complexity, integrations and custom checkout logic. |
| Web application or portal | $10,000 – $100,000+. Genuinely software, priced as software. |
What drives the price up
- Number of distinct page templates, not number of pages. Fifty pages using three templates is cheap; six pages each needing its own design is not.
- Integrations. CRM, ERP, booking, payment, shipping, accounting. Each one is a project with its own edge cases.
- Custom functionality. Calculators, configurators, member areas, multi-step forms with conditional logic.
- Content. If you need copywriting, photography or migration of hundreds of existing pages, that is often the largest line item.
- Multi-language. Not double the cost, but substantially more — layouts have to accommodate text expansion, and right-to-left languages mirror the whole design.
- Accessibility conformance. Achievable and worth doing, but designing and testing to WCAG AA properly takes real time.
The ongoing costs nobody quotes
- Hosting: $10–$200 a month depending on traffic and platform.
- Domain: $10–$50 a year.
- SSL: usually free now, occasionally bundled and charged.
- CMS or platform fees: Shopify, Webflow and similar charge monthly, and it rises with sales volume.
- Plugins and apps: individually small, collectively significant, and the most common cause of a bloated store.
- Maintenance: updates, backups, security patching. Budget something even if you do it yourself.
- Content: someone has to write the blog posts, and that is the cost that most often goes unpaid and undone.
Questions that change the quote most
- 1Who writes the content? This single question moves quotes more than any other.
- 2How many templates, not pages?
- 3What has to talk to what? List every existing system.
- 4Who edits it afterwards, and how technical are they?
- 5Is there an existing site with URLs and rankings that must be preserved?
- 6What does success look like — enquiries, sales, bookings? A site with a defined goal is designed differently from one with a vague brief.
Where to spend and where not to
Spend on: speed, mobile experience, the conversion path, and content. These are the things that measurably change outcomes.
Do not spend on: elaborate animation, a full-screen video header, a bespoke CMS when a standard one would do, or a custom design for a page that gets forty visits a year. The video header in particular is one of the most reliable ways to make a site slow and it almost never improves conversion.
Want this done for you?
We will tell you honestly whether you need us for it. Send a two-line description of the business and we come back with a plan, a timeline and one fixed price.