How much does a website cost?

Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five answers spanning two orders of magnitude — and all of them will be honest. The spread is not because anyone is overcharging. It is because “a website” describes a business card and a booking system with equal accuracy.

Why nobody can quote you a number

A five-page site for a hairdresser and a site with accounts, payments and a stock system share a word and nothing else. Before any quote means anything, someone has to know which one you are asking about. Any agency that gives you a price before asking what the site has to do is guessing, and you will pay for the guess later in change requests.

What actually drives the price

• Whether it does anything. A site that presents information costs a fraction of one that takes bookings, payments or logins. This is the single biggest factor.
• Whether the design is yours alone. An original identity — logo, colour system, commissioned photography — is skilled work that takes weeks. Starting from a professional template removes most of that cost without looking cheap.
• How much content there is, and who writes it. Twelve service pages someone has to research and write is a real project on its own.
• Integrations. A calendar, a CRM, an accounting system, a supplier feed — each one is work, and each one can break when the other side changes.
• Who maintains it afterwards. This is the cost people forget, and over three years it often exceeds the build.

The four routes, and what you are really buying

An agency

You are buying project management and accountability as much as design. Someone else owns the outcome, chases the photographer and answers for the deadline. That is worth real money when the site matters commercially and you do not have time to run it yourself. It is poor value for a straightforward five-page business site.

A freelancer

Usually the best value per unit of skill, with one risk that is rarely priced in: availability later. The site is fine; the question is who changes the phone number in eighteen months when they have moved on to a full-time job.

A drag-and-drop builder

Cheap in money, expensive in your time — and your time is not free just because nobody invoices for it. Fine if you enjoy the fiddling. Frustrating if you do not, because you will spend evenings nudging boxes instead of running your business.

An AI builder

You describe the business and the site gets written. The trade is that you start from a template rather than a bespoke design. For most business sites that is not a compromise, because bespoke was never going to change whether the phone rang.

The costs nobody mentions upfront

The build is a one-off. These are not, and they are where budgets quietly go wrong:

• The domain, every year, forever. Small, but it is the one bill that must never lapse.
• Hosting, or a subscription that includes it.
• Changes. Ask explicitly what a small edit costs and how long it takes. “We will sort it out” is not an answer, and this is the line item that surprises people most.
• Updates and security, if you are on a platform where those are your responsibility.
• Content. Photography and copywriting are separate skills and are often quoted separately, or not at all.

The real question is not what the site costs to build. It is what it costs to keep, and what it costs to change.

How to decide

Work backwards from what the site has to achieve. If it exists so people can find your number, see your work and know you are real, then almost any of these routes gets you there and you should optimise for speed and for how easy changes are afterwards. If the site is the business — bookings, sales, accounts — then it is software, and you should budget for it as software rather than as a brochure.

And if you genuinely do not know yet, the cheapest way to find out is to put a simple version live and learn what people actually ask for. A site you can change in minutes teaches you more in a month than a specification document does in three.