Key takeaways
- Price is driven by functional scope, content and maintenance, not by page count.
- A campaign landing page, a corporate website and a custom build are three different products, not three sizes of one.
- Copy and photography delay projects more than anything else, and are almost never in the quote.
- A website without maintenance decays: domain, hosting, updates and backups carry an annual cost worth planning for.
How much does a website cost?
Three different products get called the same thing, which is why quotes seem to make no sense when you line them up.
A landing page is a single page built to turn campaign traffic into enquiries. Ours start at €1,500 and ship in two to three weeks. A full corporate website, with its sections, blog and technical SEO, starts at €4,500 and takes six to eight weeks. A custom build starts at €9,000. It carries bespoke functionality, a private area or connections to other systems, and has no clear ceiling because it depends on what has to be built.
Those figures are ours and they are starting points. The useful part is understanding what moves them.
A word on comparisons. A €600 quote and a €6,000 quote are rarely bidding for the same work. The cheap one usually covers assembly on a template, with copy supplied by the client and no measurement. The expensive one includes research, writing, custom development and analytics configuration. Both are legitimate; the problem starts when they are compared as though they were the same thing.
First: what the website has to do
A site that informs is one project. A site that also books appointments, takes payments, builds quotes or talks to the CRM is another, however similar they look from outside.
Every function beyond showing content adds three invisible jobs. Thinking through the cases where something fails, proving it does not fail, and maintaining it when the connected system changes. A normal contact form is cheap. One that creates the record in the CRM, fires an email and alerts the salesperson costs considerably more, even though the visitor sees the same thing.
Before asking for a quote, write the list of things the site has to do rather than pages it has to have. With that list, two quotes become comparable.
One decision moves the price more than people expect: language. A bilingual site does not cost double, but it adds 30 to 40% to the content work and commits you to maintaining two versions of every page forever. Decide it at the start, because adding it later means redoing the architecture.
The line item nobody quotes: the copy
This is the number one cause of delay in web projects, and it rarely appears in the quote. Somebody has to write the text for every page and decide which photo goes where.
There are three routes. The client writes it, which is free and usually takes months because it is never the priority. The agency writes it, which costs money and moves fast. Or it is shared, with the client supplying the knowledge in an interview and the agency doing the writing.
The third works best, and it is what we use. An hour of conversation per section produces more usable material than three months waiting for somebody to find a Sunday.
Photography works the same way. Stock is cheap and it shows. A proper shoot costs between a few hundred and a couple of thousand euros, and it is what separates a real website from a template.
For a service business, photographs of the team and the premises usually return more than any design improvement. People buy from people, and a familiar face on the contact page does more for trust than three scroll effects.
Template or custom build?
A WordPress theme or a builder like Wix solves the shop window cheaply, and for many businesses that is enough. The cost shows up later, in two forms.
The first is speed. Templates load a lot of code your site never uses, and that is paid in visitors who leave before seeing anything. It is a measurable problem rather than an aesthetic one, and we cover it in Core Web Vitals.
The second is the ceiling. A point arrives where what you need is not what the template does, and then it is either one more plugin or a rebuild. We have seen sites with thirty plugins installed: each one is a door in and a maintenance job.
Our rule is simple. If the website is a shop window that rarely changes, a well-chosen template is reasonable. If it has to sell, measure and grow, a custom build is cheaper over three years even though it costs more on day one.
There is a third route people forget: keep the template and spend the money on content. For a business starting out, a modest site with five well-written pages usually brings more customers than an immaculate one with generic copy.
What it costs after day one
A website is not a purchase, it is something to be maintained. Four recurring items are worth planning from the start.
- The domain, a few euros a year, and the day it lapses everything stops.
- Hosting, from a few euros a month on shared plans to considerably more with traffic or requirements.
- Security updates, which on WordPress are mandatory and frequent.
- Tested backups, which differ from having backups: a backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup.
Our maintenance starts at €150 a month. The figure matters less than the fact that somebody is contracted to do it: most of the disasters we have seen start with a site nobody was updating.
Why do web projects run late?
Almost never because of development. In our experience the overwhelming majority of delays come from two places, and both sit on the client side without anybody having flagged it at signing.
The first is content, which we have covered. The second is sign-off. A project where every screen needs approval from four people in different departments takes twice as long as one with a single decision-maker.
There is a cheap way to avoid it: agree it before starting. One person responsible for deciding, a maximum response time per delivery, and the rule that silence within that window counts as approval. It reads harshly and it saves months of drift.
How to compare two quotes that look nothing alike
When three proposals arrive at wildly different prices, it is rarely that one is expensive. They are quoting different things. These questions make them comparable.
- Is the copy included, or do I supply it?
- Who owns the domain, the hosting and the code?
- What happens if I want to change supplier in two years?
- Does it include measurement configured, or only the design?
- How many rounds of changes are in the price?
The second question prevents the most trouble. Some suppliers register the domain in their own name, and recovering it afterwards is slow and expensive.
The last one deserves attention too. A quote with no stated number of revisions ends one of two ways: the supplier stops when they tire of it, or the project never ends. Two or three rounds per phase is a reasonable settlement for both sides.
When not to build the website yet
There are two moments when we recommend not spending on a new site. When the business is not yet clear who it sells to, because the site will end up saying generalities and will need redoing. And when there is no budget to bring traffic, because a website with no visitors is an expensive brochure in a drawer.
A third case is less obvious. When the current site converts well and merely offends the eye. Rebuilding a page that works is the fastest way to lose whatever was working before anyone identified what it was, and it happens more than you would think.
In the second case it usually pays to start with a €1,500 landing page wired to a small campaign. Measure which message lands, and build the larger site afterwards with that information on the table.
Where to start
Write down on one sheet what the website has to achieve, how many enquiries or sales a month would make it pay, and who is writing the copy. With those three answers any serious agency can give you a tight figure in one conversation, and you can compare quotes without trusting the headline price. If you want us to look at it with you, it sits inside web design and development, and the starting figures are on pricing.
Frequently asked questions
What does a simple website for a small business cost?
A one-page landing aimed at generating enquiries starts at €1,500 with us. A full corporate website starts at €4,500. The difference is scope rather than size.
Is WordPress cheaper?
Usually on day one. Over three years the sums change, once you add plugins, security updates and the visitors lost to a slow-loading site.
Is the copy included in the price?
It depends on the supplier, and it is the question that explains most of the gap between quotes. Worth asking explicitly before comparing figures.
What does it cost to maintain a website per year?
Domain, hosting, updates and backups. Our maintenance starts at €150 a month; what matters is that somebody owns it, not who.
How long does it take to build?
A landing page, two to three weeks. A corporate website, six to eight. Delays are almost never development: they are copy and photographs that never arrive.
