"How much does a website cost?" is one of the most common questions we get, and one of the hardest to answer honestly with a single number — because the honest answer is that cost is driven by a handful of specific decisions, not by "website" as a category.
What actually moves the price
- Platform choice — a Webflow or Squarespace build is typically faster and cheaper to deliver than a custom WordPress or bespoke build, but trades off some flexibility
- Integrations — connecting a website cleanly to a CRM, booking system, or payment gateway adds real technical work beyond the visible design
- Content volume — a 6-page site and a 60-page site are different projects, even on the same platform, because content structure, SEO planning and internal linking scale with page count
- Custom vs template — templates are faster and cheaper upfront but constrain what's possible later; custom builds cost more initially but flex further as the business changes
Where businesses commonly overspend
The most common overspend isn't design — it's scope drift during the project, where new pages, features or integrations get added mid-build without the budget or timeline being revisited. Locking scope clearly upfront, and treating additions as a deliberate decision rather than a quiet addition, keeps a project's cost close to its original estimate.
Where businesses commonly underspend
The area most often under-resourced is technical SEO foundations at launch — site structure, page speed, and structured data. It's invisible in a design review, easy to skip to save budget, and expensive to fix retroactively once a site is live and indexed. Read more on why this matters in our guide to SEO & Technical Optimisation.
A more useful question than "how much"
A more useful starting question than "how much does a website cost" is "what does this website actually need to do" — because the answer to that question determines almost everything about the answer to the first one. Our website redesign planning guide walks through how to answer that properly before pricing gets involved.
Where to start
Our Website Design & Development service scopes projects against what a site actually needs to do, not a fixed package — and if you're deciding between a custom build and a template, our guide on custom website vs template is a useful next read.
