How much does a professional website cost (and why it is hard to answer)

It is the first question I get, almost always before I know what the site is even supposed to do. And it is a fair question: nobody buys something without knowing what it costs. The problem is that a website is not an off-the-shelf product, it is a bespoke project: asking how much a website costs is like asking how much a house costs.

What I can do is explain precisely what the quote depends on. If you understand the items that make it up, you will be able to read any offer you receive — including other people’s.

The five items that determine the price

1. How many pages, and what kind

A five-page brochure site and a site with fifty product pages do not take the same amount of work. But it is not only the number that counts: what counts is how many pages have a structure different from the others. Ten pages built on the same template cost far less than three pages designed from scratch, each with its own logic.

2. Bespoke design or off-the-shelf template

Starting from a ready-made theme cuts costs and is a perfectly reasonable choice in some situations. But a theme is designed to suit anyone, and therefore represents no one in particular. If your positioning is a competitive asset, bespoke design is not an aesthetic luxury: it is what makes you recognisable.

3. The features

An e-commerce site with payments, stock management and shipping is a different order of magnitude from an informational site. The same goes for members’ areas, bookings, multilingual systems and integrations with management software or a CRM. Every feature adds development, but above all it adds testing: that is the part usually underestimated.

4. The content

This is the item almost nobody considers, and the one that most often delays projects. Copy, photographs, video and graphic material may already exist, or they may have to be produced. If I produce them — copywriting, photo shoots, filming, editing — they go into the quote. If you supply them, the cost goes down but the timing depends on you.

5. What happens after launch

A website is not a finished object: it has to be updated, protected, measured and improved. Support, maintenance, backups and content production over time are recurring items. Ignoring them in the initial quote only means discovering them later.

Why to be wary of a round number

When someone answers with a flat figure before asking any questions, they are doing one of two things: applying the same template to everyone, or guessing, and making it back later through variations. Either way you are not buying a project, you are buying a package.

A serious quote comes after the questions, not before.

The questions they should be asking you are always the same: what is the business goal, who is the audience, what are competitors doing, what content already exists, which tools you use and what it has to integrate with. That is the analysis stage, and without it any number is arbitrary.

How to read a quote

When you receive one, the useful questions are few and always the same.

What is included and what is not. Content in particular: are copy, photographs and video down to you or to the supplier? It is the item that delays the most projects, because both sides take it for granted.

What happens after launch. Whether support, updates and backups are included, for how long, and what they cost once the included period ends.

How changes are handled. Anything beyond what was agreed should always be quantified before it is done, never counted up at the end.

Who owns the domain, the hosting and the content. They must be registered in your name. I have written about this in detail in how to choose who builds your website.

The right question is not how much it costs

The right question is: how much does it have to bring in. A site costing a few hundred euros that brings in not one enquiry is expensive. A more demanding project that generates qualified enquiries every month pays for itself, and keeps doing so.

That is why a serious assessment never starts from the price, but from the goals: what the site has to do, for whom, and how you will know whether it is working. That is the analysis stage, and without it any figure is arbitrary.