Website pricing is opaque, and deliberately so in places. This is a straightforward breakdown of what you are paying for.
What drives the price
Number of pages. A five-page brochure site is a different job from a thirty-page site with a service page per town and a blog.
Content. Whether you supply copy and photography, or the developer researches, writes and sources it, is often the single largest variable.
Functionality. Contact forms are trivial. Booking, payments, customer logins, quoting tools and integrations with your existing systems are not.
SEO depth. A site that is merely "built" versus one built around a keyword and content plan, with structured data, an accurate sitemap and per-page metadata.
Ongoing work. Search results reward sites that keep publishing. A site left untouched for three years drifts down.
Where people waste money
- Paying for a redesign when the problem was content, not looks.
- Buying a template site cheaply, then paying again eighteen months later because it cannot be extended.
- Paying monthly for a site you do not own and cannot take with you.
- Buying SEO retainers with no defined deliverables.
What we think is fair
A well-built, fast, properly optimised small business site with a handful of service pages, real content and a sensible foundation for growth sits comfortably in the low thousands. Add booking, portals, payments or a large content programme and it rises from there. Anything materially cheaper is usually a template with your logo on it — which is fine, provided you know that is what you bought.
Questions worth asking any web company
- Do I own the site and the domain outright?
- What is the mobile load time of the last three sites you built?
- How many pages, and will each one target something specific?
- Who writes the content?
- What happens after launch?
If the answers are vague, keep looking.