What a Business Website Actually Costs to Build and Run

Almost all of it is somebody's hours, and that single fact explains most of what looks strange about website pricing. Software licences are rarely the expensive part, and hosting is not the expensive part either, at least not at the start. What you are buying is the attention of people who ask questions, draw things, write code, write words, and check that all of it works together.

Those hours split into a small number of stages, and the stages are worth naming, because when a quote leaves one of them out the work does not disappear. It lands on somebody in your office instead. Discovery, design, build, content, testing and launch cover the making of the site. Hosting, the domain, the certificate, updates and somebody to call cover the keeping of it.

The second half is where people get caught. A website carries on running long after the invoice is paid, and running costs money every month: a machine to sit on, a name to answer to, a certificate that expires, a stream of small updates, and a person who picks up when the contact form stops sending.

Nothing below is a price list. Rates differ by country, by the size of the team, and by how much risk somebody is carrying on your behalf. The list of work does not differ. If you can read a quote and match every line on it to a stage below, you can compare two quotes honestly for the first time.

Discovery is where somebody works out what the site has to do before anybody draws it. Who visits. What they came for. What you want them to do next. What has to connect to the software you already run, and what the site has to be able to become in a couple of years.

Skipping it does not save those hours. It moves them into the build, where they cost more, because by then somebody is redrawing screens and rewriting code rather than changing a sentence in a document. The classic version is the booking form. Nobody asks in the first week whether bookings need to appear in the system the office already uses. Somebody asks two months later, and the answer turns a form into an integration project with its own budget.

For a small brochure site, discovery can be an afternoon and a page of notes. For anything with logins, payments, stock or a link into existing software, it is days of work and it produces a document you will argue over. Both are reasonable. A quote that prices the second job as though it were the first is not.

You can tell how seriously a supplier treats this by what they ask before quoting. Questions about your customers and your internal systems mean somebody is trying to size the real job. A price arriving within the hour, off a one paragraph email, means somebody has guessed. The guess gets corrected later, at your expense.

Design is usually sold by the page, and the page is a poor unit. What takes the time is the number of genuinely different layouts, not the number of pages built from them. Forty product pages sharing one design is a small job. Six pages that each look completely different is a large one.

The other cost buried in design is revision. Two rounds of feedback from one person who can decide is quick. Two rounds from a committee, where a fresh opinion arrives each time, is the single most common reason a fixed price design goes over. Agree who signs off before the first draft is drawn, and agree how many rounds are included in the number.

Phones are not a separate design job the way they once were, and they are not free either. Every layout has to work on a small screen, and some need different thinking rather than a squeeze. Tables, long forms and anything with a map or a chart in it are the usual suspects.

A design system, meaning an agreed set of colours, type sizes, buttons and spacing rules, costs more up front and less every time afterwards. If you expect to add pages for years, it pays back. If the site is five pages and will stay five pages, it is a cost with nothing behind it.

Building is where the design becomes something a browser can load and an editor can change. For a straightforward site on a common platform this is the most predictable stage in the project. It stops being predictable the moment the site has to talk to anything else.

Anything with a login is a different animal from anything without one. Accounts mean passwords, resets, sessions, permissions and somewhere safe to keep personal data. Payments add a second set of concerns, most of them about what happens when a payment half succeeds. Neither of these is exotic. Both add far more work than the feature list suggests, because most of the work sits in the cases that go wrong.

Integration is the next multiplier. A form that emails you is a small job. The same form writing into your accounting software, checking stock against a warehouse system, or creating a record in the tool your sales team lives in is several small jobs plus the one nobody plans for, which is deciding what should happen when the other system is not answering.

Ask what happens to the content afterwards. A site where you can edit text, swap an image and add a page without a developer costs more to build than one where every change is a code change. It costs far less to live with. Make that trade explicit in the quote rather than discovering it the first time you want to correct a phone number.

Words and pictures arrive late on almost every project, and they are usually the part nobody budgeted. When a quote says content supplied by client, read that as a body of work moved onto somebody in your office who already has a full week.

Real content work means writing the pages, getting the wording approved by whoever cares about wording, taking photographs that are actually yours, and preparing every image at the sizes the site needs. Product data is its own project, particularly when it currently lives in a spreadsheet with inconsistent capitalisation and three different ways of writing the same size.

If you buy the writing, what you are paying for is somebody to interview your staff, because good copy about a business comes out of the heads of the people who run it. If you write it yourself, budget the hours honestly and put a name and a date against every page. Content with no owner and no deadline is what stalls launches.

Photography deserves its own line. A day with a photographer in your building costs real money, and it is one of the few items where the difference is visible to every visitor within a second of arriving. Stock images of people in a meeting room that is not yours are free, and they read as free.

Testing is the line most often cut and most reliably regretted. It covers browsers and phones, forms actually sending, payments actually taking money, the site working for somebody using a keyboard or a screen reader, and the whole thing staying upright when more than a handful of people arrive at once.

Accessibility is worth calling out separately. In a growing number of places it is a legal expectation rather than a courtesy, and it is far cheaper to build in than to add later. Adding it later means going back through every layout you have already signed off and every page somebody has already written.

Launch itself is small if somebody planned it and painful if nobody did. Moving a domain, pointing it at the new machine, installing a certificate, keeping email working through the change, and sending every old address to its new home is a list of steps that needs an owner on the day.

Then budget the fortnight afterwards. Things surface in real use that no test finds. A form that works perfectly and lands in a spam folder. An image nobody noticed was cropped badly on a phone. A page somebody in your company bookmarked years ago and still uses every Monday. That fortnight is part of the project, and suppliers who pretend otherwise are the ones you end up chasing.

The domain is the smallest bill on the list and the one that ends businesses. It renews yearly, it renews against a card that eventually expires, and when it lapses the site goes dark and your email stops on the same morning. Keep it on a company card, in an account owned by the company, with automatic renewal on and the reminder going to more than one person.

Hosting scales with what the site does. Something static and mostly read is cheap. Something with a database, a login and a search box costs more, and the cost climbs with traffic and with how much you care about staying up during a busy hour. Certificates are often included now, and not always, depending on what your platform gives you.

Then the ongoing work. Platform and plugin updates, which are security work as much as housekeeping. Backups, plus somebody who has actually tested restoring one. Monitoring, so you find out the site is down before a customer tells you. Small changes, because there are always small changes. And a person who answers when something breaks on a Friday evening.

That last item is the one people cut and then buy back at the worst possible price. A site with no support arrangement gets fixed by whoever is free during an emergency, at emergency rates, by somebody who has never seen the code. A modest monthly arrangement buys somebody who already knows how it was built. Even the smallest version of this is worth having in writing: who to call, and how quickly they answer.

Two suppliers quoting the same brief can land a long way apart, and it is rarely because one of them is dishonest. Usually they have read the brief as two different jobs.

The cheap quote is often a template. Somebody buys a ready made theme, drops your logo and your text into it, and ships. That is a legitimate product and for plenty of businesses it is exactly right. What you get is a site that looks like other sites, sitting on a stack of plugins somebody else maintains, with no discovery, no testing beyond a look on one laptop, and content you supply. Buy it knowingly and it is good value.

The expensive quote is usually buying you three things the cheap one is not. Somebody senior thinking about what the site is for before it is built. Code written for your case rather than configured around a theme's assumptions. And a named arrangement for what happens after launch. Whether that is worth the difference depends on what the site does for your business. A site that takes orders is a machine you depend on. A site that exists so people can find your phone number is a leaflet.

The dangerous quote is neither of those: a low number against a bespoke brief. Somebody has underpriced the work, and they will meet the price by cutting testing, cutting discovery, or by losing interest once the job stops being profitable. Ask any quote that looks too good which stage has been compressed. A supplier who answers that clearly is one you can work with. A supplier who insists nothing has been cut is telling you they have not read the brief properly.