Business Websites
How Much Should a Business Spend on a Website?
There is no useful average, but there is a reliable way to work out what your project should cost and to compare proposals fairly.
5 min read
We are not going to publish a price range, because a range that covers every business is not information.
The same brief can legitimately cost very differently depending on how much content exists, whether anything needs to connect to another system, and how much of the thinking is already done. Published ranges tend to be marketing rather than guidance.
What is more useful is knowing what actually drives the cost, so you can tell whether a quote is reasonable for what you are asking, and compare two proposals that look nothing alike.
What actually drives the number
Roughly in order of impact.
Scope, meaning distinct page types rather than page count
Page count is a poor measure. Twenty pages that follow the same layout cost far less than five that each work differently.
What costs money is the number of distinct templates: a home page, a service page, an article, a location page, a contact page. Once a template exists, adding another page using it is cheap.
This is why asking for a price per page usually leads to a misleading answer.
Whether content exists
This is the most underestimated item in almost every website budget. If you supply finished text and usable photographs, the project is meaningfully cheaper and faster. If someone has to interview you, write the pages, and arrange photography, that is real work and it appears in the price.
It is also the most common reason projects run late. The build finishes and everything waits on content.
Design
There is a wide gap between adapting a well-chosen template, designing something custom for your brand, and designing custom while a committee reviews each round.
None of these is wrong. But revision rounds should be agreed upfront, because open-ended feedback is where fixed-price projects turn adversarial.
Functionality beyond pages
A site that presents information costs one thing. A site that does something costs another. Bookings, member logins, calculators, multi-step forms, and anything handling payment all add work, and more importantly they add cases that have to be handled when things go wrong.
E-commerce sits at the far end of this. An online store is an operational system rather than a set of pages, because it has to deal with stock, payments that fail, orders that change, and customers asking where their delivery is.
- E-commerce developmentWhat an online store needs beyond a catalogue and a cart.
Integrations
Connecting the website to something else you run, such as accounting, inventory, or a CRM, is usually the least predictable line in a quote.
The cost depends almost entirely on the other system. A modern service with good documentation is straightforward. Older software, or something customised years ago by someone unavailable, can take longer than the rest of the site combined.
If you need an integration, raise it in the first conversation. Discovering it halfway through is what causes projects to overrun.
Search foundations
Basic search hygiene should be part of any competent build: sensible URLs, real headings, page titles that describe the page, reasonable loading speed, and working redirects if you are replacing an existing site.
Ongoing SEO is separate work and should be quoted separately. Be wary of a proposal that bundles vague SEO into a build price without saying what it covers.
The cost that gets left out
Most businesses budget for building a website and not for having one. The second is smaller but it does not stop.
Recurring items:
- Domain renewal and hosting
- Software, plugin, and dependency updates
- Security checks and working backups, tested rather than assumed
- Content changes as services and prices change
- Someone to call when something breaks
- Any ongoing marketing or SEO you decide to run
Skipping this is how a site that cost a substantial amount becomes unusable in three years. The software falls behind, updates become risky, and eventually a rebuild is cheaper than a repair. That rebuild is not really a new cost. It is the maintenance nobody paid for, arriving at once.
- Website maintenanceWhat ongoing upkeep covers, and when a business genuinely needs a plan.
Why quotes for the same brief differ so much
When three proposals come back at very different numbers, the usual assumption is that someone is overcharging. More often they are quoting for different work.
Common explanations:
- One assumes you supply all content and another includes writing it
- One is adapting a template and another is designing from scratch
- One includes a year of updates and another ends at launch
- One has read the brief and priced the integration you mentioned in passing
- One is priced low expecting to charge for everything outside a narrow scope
A very low quote is not automatically bad, but it is worth understanding. Ask what happens when you request a change that was not specified. The answer tells you what kind of relationship you are entering.
A framework for evaluating proposals
Before comparing prices, make the proposals comparable.
Work through these:
- Write your own brief first. What the site must do, which services need their own page, who your customers are, and what you already have. Sending the same brief to everyone is the only way the numbers mean anything.
- For each proposal, list what is included, what is excluded, and what is unstated. The unstated items are where disputes come from.
- Separate one-time cost from recurring cost, and ask for the recurring figure explicitly if it is missing.
- Ask who owns the result. You should own the domain, the hosting account, the content, and have access to the code. Get this in writing.
- Ask who can update content afterwards and whether that requires a developer.
- Ask what happens to existing URLs if you are replacing a site. A proposal that does not mention redirects has not thought about your search visibility.
- Ask for something they have built that has a similar requirement, and check whether it loads quickly on a phone.
- Judge the questions they asked you. A proposal written without questions was written for a generic business.
We scope against what a site actually needs to do, and we will say when something you have asked for is not worth building.
If you are collecting quotes, it is reasonable to ask us the same eight questions above.
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