How much does a website cost?

There is no single website price

A website is not one product. A five-page brochure site and a multi-vendor marketplace share a delivery medium and almost nothing else. Any figure quoted without scope attached is close to meaningless, which is why credible estimates are ranges tied to explicit assumptions.

The useful question is not 'what does a website cost' but 'what does this website, built this way, in this market, cost' — and then whether a specific quote sits sensibly inside that range.

The five factors that move the number most

In practice, most of the variance in website pricing comes from a short list.

• Website type — the purpose sets the baseline. Transactional and multi-sided sites cost several times what informational sites cost.
• Page and template count — more unique templates means more design, build and testing.
• Design approach — reusing a theme, adapting one, or designing from scratch can span a 2.5× range on its own.
• Functional features — accounts, payments, booking and integrations are discrete blocks of engineering, not adjustments.
• Delivery market — the same scope varies substantially depending on where the team is based.

What is usually excluded from a quote

Most quotes cover design, build, testing and launch. They rarely include hosting, domains, third-party licences, content production, photography, translation or ongoing maintenance. Those costs are real and recurring, so compare quotes on what they exclude as much as what they include.

How to sanity-check a quote

Generate a range for your scope, then compare. A quote well below the low figure usually signals a narrower scope than you described, or a template-first approach. A quote well above the high figure is not automatically wrong — it may include research, accessibility, migration or compliance work that the estimate does not model — but it should be explainable line by line.