What A Website Should Actually Cost

Three quotes for the same website will come back at wildly different numbers, and all three can be honest. They are pricing three different things.

The cheapest is buying a template with your logo on it. The most expensive is buying a custom build with strategy, copy, photography and a conversion process attached. Both are called a website.

What actually drives the number

Custom design versus template. A template is a solved layout you fit your business into. A custom design is built around what your business needs to prove, in the order it needs proving. That is design work, and it is the largest single line.

Copy. Most quotes assume you supply it. Most businesses cannot, so the site sits half built for three months waiting on text. Copy written by someone who interviewed your customers is a different price and a different result.

Photography. Stock photos are the fastest way to look like everyone else. Real photography of your work, your team and your premises is what makes a site read as a real business, and it is a separate cost people forget entirely.

Page count. A five page site and a fifty page site are not the same project. If you want to be found for a service in a suburb, you need a page about that service in that suburb, and that scales.

Custom function. Booking, calculators, portals, integrations. Every one of these is software, priced as software.

The three tiers, honestly

Entry. A template, your logo, your colours, copy you supply. It exists, it loads, it is better than nothing. It will not out-convert a competitor who invested properly, and it will need replacing within two years.

Mid. Custom design, professionally written copy, proper technical foundations, built to be found. This is where most established service businesses should sit, and it is where the return actually shows up.

High. Custom design and build, original photography and video, a content architecture built for search and for AI answer engines, plus the conversion work that follows the visitor after they land. This is a revenue asset rather than a brochure, and it is priced like one.

The question that matters more than the price

What is one new client worth to you.

If a client is worth fifty thousand dollars over their life, a site that brings in two extra clients a year has paid for almost any version of this. If a client is worth four hundred dollars, the maths is completely different and the entry tier is the right call.

Nobody asks this before getting quotes, which is why the conversation ends up being about price rather than about return.

Where the money gets wasted

Paying for design and skipping copy. A beautiful page that says nothing converts nothing.

Paying for a site with no plan to add anything to it. A site that never changes stops being found, because search rewards the ones that stay current.

Paying for animation before conversion. The scroll effects are the last five percent, and they matter far less than whether the first screen tells someone what you do.

Rebuilding every two years instead of maintaining. Three rebuilds cost more than one good build plus five years of upkeep, and you lose the accumulated search position each time.

What to ask for in a quote

A line by line breakdown. Who writes the copy. Whether photography is included. How many pages. What happens after launch, and what that costs monthly.

If a quote is one number with no breakdown, you cannot compare it to anything, and that is usually the point.