“How much does a website cost?” is a perfectly reasonable question and an unusually difficult one to answer. It is rather like asking how much a building costs. A garden shed and an airport terminal are both buildings, but knowing this does not make their budgets particularly comparable.
Websites have the same problem. Before setting a budget, it helps to understand what you are actually buying.
Start with what the site has to do
The most useful specification does not begin with a page count. It begins with the purpose of the site. Is it there primarily to reassure people who already know the company, generate qualified enquiries, sell products, support a sales team, recruit staff, explain a complicated service or provide a customer tool?
Those objectives affect almost every other decision. A visually elaborate brochure site may be simpler to build than an apparently modest site connected to stock, payment, booking or internal business systems.
Design is only one part of the cost
A professional website typically involves several overlapping areas of work:
- strategy and structure
- UX and information architecture
- visual design
- copywriting and content preparation
- photography, illustration or video
- front-end development
- content management
- forms and integrations
- ecommerce or transactional functionality
- accessibility
- analytics and measurement
- search-engine foundations
- testing, launch and ongoing maintenance
A small project may need only some of these. A complex one may need all of them. This is why two proposals for something vaguely described as “a new company website” can differ considerably without either supplier necessarily being dishonest or incompetent.
Content is usually underestimated
At the beginning of a project, it is easy to say that the existing copy will be reused or that somebody internally will write the new pages. This can work perfectly well, but only if the material already exists, is strategically appropriate and somebody genuinely has the time to prepare it.
A cheap website populated with weak content is still a weak website.
Functionality changes the project quickly
- ecommerce and payment
- customer accounts
- booking or availability systems
- CRM integration
- multilingual content management
- searchable databases
- gated content
- complex lead-routing
- product configuration
- custom calculations
- third-party APIs
- bespoke business workflows
Some of these are relatively easy to implement using established services. Others require significant development and testing. The visible interface may be only a small part of the work.
Templates, no-code and AI have changed the economics
Templates, mature content-management systems, no-code platforms and AI-assisted coding can reduce the time required for certain tasks dramatically. A business that once needed substantial bespoke development may now be able to achieve most of what it needs with existing components.
Production has become easier. Deciding what is worth producing has not.
The fact that a website can be assembled quickly does not automatically answer what it should say, how the offer should be structured, what should be prioritised, what the brand should look and sound like or what should happen when somebody arrives.
Write a useful brief before asking for a price
- what the business does
- who the important audiences are
- what the current website gets wrong
- what the new site must achieve
- the main types of content required
- essential functionality
- relevant technical constraints
- who will maintain the site
- any realistic timing or budget constraints
A good supplier may challenge parts of that brief. This is normally a positive sign. First understand the job; then determine what level of investment makes commercial sense.
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