Every quote you get will be different, and the spread will be enormous. This page explains why, so you can tell the difference between a bargain and a bill you have not seen yet.
There is no honest answer to this question without knowing the scope, which is exactly why the ranges you find online are useless. The cost of a website is not set by the word "website". It is set by how many pages exist, whether the design is custom or a template, who writes the content and supplies the photographs, what the site has to connect to, and whether you are buying a one off build or an ongoing relationship.
We do not publish figures, and we are not being coy. An honest number requires knowing what is being built. Two projects both described as "a small business website" can differ by a factor most owners would not believe, and the difference is almost never the design. It is the content and the upkeep.
Read the factors below and you will be able to read any quote you receive, including ours, and see what is actually in it.
These are the levers. Every quote you receive is a set of assumptions about them, whether the quote says so or not.
The obvious one, and the least interesting. Pages are not equal: a contact page is not the same job as a service page that has to rank and convert. What matters more than the count is how many distinct page types exist, because each type is designed once and then reused. Twenty pages across three templates is a smaller job than eight pages that are all different.
A template is a design somebody else already made, adjusted to fit you. Custom is a design made for your business from scratch. Templates are faster and cheaper and there is nothing shameful about them. The honest trade is that a template constrains what your site can say and look like, and if your differentiator is that you are more credible than your competitors, looking exactly like them is working against you. If it is not, a template is fine. Our web design page covers where the line usually sits.
This is the big one, and it is the reason quotes drift. Somebody has to write every word on the site and supply every photograph. If that person is you, the quote is smaller and the timeline depends entirely on you finding the evenings to do it. If that person is the agency, the quote is bigger and the project moves. Neither is wrong. What is wrong is a quote that never says which, because that ambiguity resolves itself later, and it resolves in favour of whoever wrote the quote.
Stock photography of a smiling stranger in an office is free and it fools nobody. Photographs of your actual premises, your actual team and your actual work are the single strongest credibility signal a small business site has, and they are also the thing most likely to be missing on the day the site is meant to launch.
A page with a contact form is a small job. A site that has to talk to a booking calendar, a CRM, a mailing list, a menu system or a scheduling tool is a different animal, because each connection is a thing that can break and a thing that has to be maintained. Integrations are where quotes diverge quietly: two sites that look identical can have entirely different amounts of plumbing behind them.
Selling online is not a feature you bolt on. It brings a product catalogue, stock, tax, shipping rules, order handling, refunds, and a set of legal obligations that a brochure site simply does not have. If you sell things online, expect the site to cost meaningfully more than one that explains your business and asks people to call, and expect the ongoing side to cost more too, because a shop that breaks is losing money by the hour.
A website is not a painting. It is closer to a vehicle: it runs, it has moving parts, and left alone it degrades. Software gets updates, certificates expire, forms silently stop delivering, and search engines change what they expect. A quote for a build with no plan for any of that is not cheaper. It is deferred. Some businesses genuinely can run a simple site with occasional attention, and we will say so when that is true. The point is that the decision should be made deliberately and not discovered eighteen months later. See website maintenance and the maintenance checklist for what upkeep actually involves.
Ask this before you ask the price. There is a real difference between buying a website and renting access to one. Ownership covers the code, the design, the content, the domain name, and the ability to move the whole thing somewhere else without permission. A quote that is cheap because you never own the result is not a quote for the same thing as one where you do.
These are small recurring costs individually, and they are frequently left out of the headline figure, then appear as separate bills. Ask whether hosting is included and for how long, whether the domain is registered in your name or somebody else's, and whether business email on your domain is part of the deal or a thing you will be sorting out yourself the week before launch. See Google Workspace setup for what business email involves.
This is the trade almost nobody puts in front of you, and it decides what the site really costs over the years you actually use it.
Usually free because the site is not yours and never becomes yours. The monthly fee is the product. The trap is not the fee, it is that leaving means starting again from zero, so the fee can rise and you have no leverage. Free is a rental agreement with the word removed.
Some builds are locked to one provider by design: proprietary page builders, licences in the agency name, a domain registered to somebody else. Everything works fine until you want to leave, which is precisely when you discover the terms.
The most common one, and rarely deliberate. The quote assumes you will supply finished copy and photographs. You assumed the opposite. The project stops at the point where those were needed, and both sides feel misled.
Your domain is the one asset you genuinely cannot afford to lose. It should be registered to you, in an account you control, whoever built the site. Check this even if you love your current provider.
A build quote that promises a search position is selling something nobody owns. Organic placement is not for sale by anyone at any figure. See local SEO for what can honestly be promised, which is the work and the measurement.
A low build figure attached to a plan whose useful features sit one or two tiers up. The site works on the cheap tier right until you need a form, a shop, or your own domain on the email.
None of this is an excuse to avoid answering. It is the reason the answer has to come second.
When somebody asks us what a site costs, the useful reply is a handful of questions: what does the site need to make happen, how many genuinely different kinds of page are there, who has the words and the photographs, does it need to talk to anything, and who is looking after it once it is live. Those answers are the quote. The figure is arithmetic once you have them.
A quote given before those questions is one of two things. It is a number pitched low to win the job, with the gap recovered later through changes and exclusions. Or it is a number pitched high enough to cover the worst case, which means you are paying for the seller's uncertainty. Neither is dishonest exactly. Both are avoidable by talking for twenty minutes first.
That is also why the figure we give you is written down with what it includes and what it excludes, and with the running cost stated separately. A number you cannot compare to another number is not much use to you, and a number that changes after you say yes is worse than no number at all.
We quote after we understand the scope, and we put the exclusions in writing next to the inclusions. The aim is a number you can actually compare to the other quotes on your desk.
Because a range published without knowing your scope is marketing, not information. The same phrase "a small business website" covers a five page brochure site where you supply the words, and a site with a booking system, a members area and forty pages that somebody has to write from scratch. Any range wide enough to be honest about both is too wide to be useful, and any range narrow enough to look useful is quietly excluding something.
What we can do is tell you exactly which decisions move the number, which is what this page is for. Once we know your scope, you get a real figure in writing rather than a bracket. That is what a quote conversation is.
Content. Words and photographs, specifically. Most quotes assume you are supplying finished copy for every page and usable images, and most owners assume that is included. That gap is where projects stall and where "surprise" costs appear. Ask any quote you receive one blunt question: who is writing the words, and who is supplying the photographs? See how long a website takes to build, because the same gap is the main cause of delays.
Not automatically. A cheap build with sane upkeep can serve a small business well for years. The false economy is a cheap build with expensive or impossible upkeep: a site you do not own, cannot edit, or cannot move. The number to look at is not the build, it is the build plus the next few years of running it. Our care plans page explains what ongoing care actually covers.
Five things. Who owns the site and the domain when it is finished. Whether you can leave and take it with you. Who is writing the content. What is explicitly excluded. And what it costs to run per year once the build is done. If a quote cannot answer those in plain language, the number on it is not comparable to anything else.
Usually because they are not for the same website. One includes content, hosting, email, a year of updates and a site you own outright. The other is a template with your logo dropped in, on a platform you rent forever. Both are legitimate products. They are just not the same product, and the number is doing a poor job of telling you which is which.
Where the time really goes, and what speeds it up.
What to verify before and after a site goes live.
What each one does, and why most businesses need both.
Design and build a site that explains your business and brings in enquiries.
Edits, updates, backups and monitoring so the site keeps working.
Ongoing website care and support options.
Tell us what the site needs to do and who has the content. We will scope it honestly and put a figure in writing, including what it costs to run afterwards.