How much does a website cost?
Real ranges for a small business site, a content site, and a store, plus the running costs most quotes quietly leave out.
Where this actually lands.
A custom small business website usually costs $1,500 to $6,000. A larger content or multi-service site runs $6,000 to $20,000. A custom online store typically starts around $5,000 and rises with catalogue complexity. Budget a further $500 to $3,000 a year for hosting, licences, and maintenance. The range is wide because you are not buying pages, you are buying decisions: how much strategy, custom design, and engineering the site actually needs.
Price tracks scope and decisions, not page count.
Under $1,000 almost always means a template with your logo dropped in.
Every quote should list what is excluded, not only what is included.
Running costs are real. Plan for them before you sign anything.
Jump to a section.
The argument in the order we would walk a client through it.
What you are actually paying for
Most website quotes look like a list of pages, which is why comparing them feels impossible. The page count is the least interesting part. What you are paying for is the time someone spends deciding what each page has to prove, in what order, and what has to be true for a stranger to trust you enough to act.
That work shows up in three buckets: thinking, making, and engineering. Thinking is research, positioning, structure, and messaging. Making is the visual design system and the content that fills it. Engineering is the build, the integrations, the performance work, and the testing. A cheap quote has usually removed the first bucket entirely and hopes you will not notice.
Real price bands, and what sits inside them
These are the bands we see across the market, not just our own pricing.
- Under $1,000: a theme or page builder with your logo and copy dropped in. Fine for validating an idea. It will not differentiate you and it rarely survives your first pivot.
- $1,500 to $6,000: a genuinely custom small business site, roughly five to twelve pages, with a design system, real copy support, technical SEO, and analytics. This is where most first serious websites land.
- $6,000 to $20,000: a larger content or multi-service site. Deeper information architecture, several page templates, a CMS your team can actually run, and usually a content or search programme alongside it.
- $5,000 to $40,000: an online store. The floor is a clean Shopify or WooCommerce build on a straightforward catalogue. The ceiling is custom merchandising logic, subscriptions, multi-currency, ERP integration, and a migration that cannot drop rankings.
- $40,000 and up: platform or product work. Web apps, portals, and multi-region systems where the website is the product rather than a brochure for it.
What pushes a quote up
If two quotes for the same brief differ by a factor of three, one of these is usually the reason.
- Content. If copy, photography, and product data have to be created rather than supplied, that is real labour.
- Integrations. A CRM, an ERP, a booking system, or a payment flow with rules attached will always cost more than a contact form.
- Migration. Moving a site with existing rankings means redirect mapping and careful launch sequencing. Skipping it is how businesses lose a third of their traffic overnight.
- Volume of decisions. Ten stakeholders with opinions costs more than one decision-maker, every time.
- Accessibility and compliance. Doing it properly takes time. Retrofitting it later takes more.
Where money usually gets wasted
The most common waste is not overspending on design. It is paying for a site nobody had a plan for. A beautiful build with no clear commercial goal cannot be judged, improved, or defended at budget time, so it quietly gets replaced in two years and you pay again.
The second most common waste is animation and cleverness bolted onto weak fundamentals. If your positioning is unclear and your pages load slowly, a scroll effect will not save the enquiry rate. Fix the order of the argument first.
The running costs most quotes leave out
- Hosting and CDN: $10 to $150 a month depending on traffic and platform.
- Domain and email: $20 to $150 a year.
- Platform fees: Shopify plans start around $29 a month, plus app subscriptions that add up faster than people expect.
- Premium plugins, fonts, and stock imagery: $100 to $1,000 a year.
- Maintenance: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and small fixes. Either your team does it or you pay $150 to $800 a month for someone to.
If a proposal has no line for year two, ask about it before you sign. The answer tells you whether you are buying a project or a relationship.
How to set a budget when you have no idea
Work backwards from one number. If a new client is worth $4,000 to you and the site currently produces two enquiries a month at a 25 percent close rate, one extra enquiry a month pays for a $6,000 site inside six months. That calculation is more useful than any average.
Then tell agencies your range. Withholding it does not get you a better price, it gets you a proposal built for someone else. A good studio will tell you what is achievable at your number and what it would take to reach the rest, and will say so plainly if your budget and your goal do not meet.
Where to go next
The questions this usually raises.
Why do website quotes vary so much for the same brief?
Because quotes cover different amounts of thinking. A low quote usually assumes you supply final content, need no strategy or migration work, and accept a template structure. A higher quote typically includes research, custom design, copy support, integrations, and launch protection. Ask each quote what is excluded and the gap becomes obvious.
Is a cheap template website ever the right choice?
Yes, when you are validating demand and speed matters more than differentiation. A template is a sensible first step for a brand new offer. It becomes expensive when you keep it past the point where your positioning is clear, because you then pay to rebuild what you already paid for.
Should I pay monthly for a website instead of upfront?
Subscription website plans are convenient but check ownership. If you stop paying and lose the site, the code, or the domain, you were renting. Confirm in writing that you own the design, the code, and every account before you commit.
How long should a website last before it needs replacing?
Three to five years for the visual design, longer for the underlying structure if it was built well. A site should be improved continuously rather than replaced wholesale, and a good build makes that possible without another full rebuild.
More from the journal.
Your website gets traffic but no enquiries. Here is why.
Seven reasons a busy website still produces almost nothing, how to work out which applies to you, and what to fix in what order.
Answer engine optimization: how to get cited by AI search
How AI assistants choose their sources, what to change on your pages, and how to measure visibility that never shows up as a click.
Is a website redesign worth it?
How to tell a redesign from a repair, which numbers to check first, and the five signals that genuinely justify a rebuild.
Shopify vs WooCommerce: which one should you actually choose?
Cost, control, SEO, and maintenance compared honestly, including the catalogue situations where each platform quietly falls apart.