What actually drives the cost of a website

The number of screens is not the number of pages

A site with five pages of text and a site with five pages plus a product catalogue, a search, a filter and a form that writes into your existing system are not the same size of job. The first is design and copy. The second is software with a website attached to the front of it.

So the first question worth answering before anyone quotes anything: does this site need to do things, or does it need to say things? Both are legitimate. They cost differently.

Where the hours go

In practice, the work on a website distributes across a handful of areas, and the ones people expect to dominate usually do not.

• Structure — deciding what the site says, in what order, and what a visitor is supposed to do next. Cheap to change now, expensive to change once everything is built on top of it.
• Design — the part clients think they are paying for. Real, but bounded.
• Content — text and photographs. The single most common reason a finished site sits unlaunched for months.
• Integrations — anything that has to talk to software you already run. Each one is its own small project with its own surprises.
• Performance and accessibility — being fast on a phone on mobile data, and usable with a keyboard or a screen reader. Much cheaper built in than retrofitted.
• Handover — whether you can edit the site afterwards without calling anyone, and whether anyone can pick the code up two years from now.

The costs that arrive after launch

A website is not a one-off purchase, and a quote that treats it as one is quietly incomplete. Domain and hosting renew. Certificates renew. Dependencies get security updates, and a site left un-updated for three years is a site that will eventually be defaced or quietly used to send spam.

Ask what happens in year two. If the answer is vague, the cost has not disappeared — it has just been moved somewhere you cannot see it yet.

Cheap builds that become expensive

There is a specific pattern worth naming, because it is the most common way a business ends up paying twice. A site gets built quickly on whichever platform was fastest for whoever built it. It works. A year later the business needs something the platform cannot do, or the person who built it is unreachable, or the theme it is built on stopped being maintained. Now the choice is a rebuild.

The way out is not to buy the most expensive option. It is to ask two boring questions before work starts: who can maintain this if you disappear, and can I export everything in it. A vendor who answers both plainly is worth more than a discount.

What a serious quote contains

Before you compare prices, compare what the prices are for. A quote you can actually evaluate says what is being built, what you have to supply, what happens when something breaks, and what you own at the end.

• The scope, written down in plain language rather than as a list of features
• Who provides text and images, and by when
• What happens to the site after launch, and who pays for it
• Where the code and the domain live, and whose account they are in
• What is explicitly not included

If you are weighing up quotes right now and they are hard to compare, tell us what the site has to do and we will tell you where the work actually is — including the parts nobody quoted you for.