What Does the Cost of Building a Website Depend On?

Building a website is not a single service. Filling a ready-made template with your brand and designing a site from scratch that needs software are jobs that ask for different effort. That is why prices cannot be set side by side. First separate which job is being quoted.

The table below is a classification. It contains no prices and does not claim an official division exists in the market. It is there so you can see which row the job description in a quote falls into.

Of two five-page sites, one may be five similar text pages, and the other a home page, a filtered list, a detail template and a form flow. The page count is the same. What is designed and tested is not. When looking at cost, asking about page types is a truer measure than asking about pages.

After launch, will you change a paragraph, a price line or an image yourself, or write to the developer for each change? That question decides whether you need a content management system, a CMS. A CMS is not a type of site. It is a layer that lets content be managed outside the code.

Setting up a CMS adds a line to the first quote. In return, later changes cost less and wait less. If it is not written from the start which areas can be edited from the panel, people assume everything can, and expectation and delivery part ways. Have the quote say which sections stay fixed.

Publishing a site in two or three languages does not mean running the text through a translation tool. For each language the text, title, description and internal links are set up separately. If a right-to-left language such as Arabic is added, the layout is mirrored and every page is tested in that direction as well. Google describes serving language versions at separate URLs and linking them to each other with hreflang.

Separate three things in the quote: who translates, who reviews the text through a local reader's eyes, and who updates every language when a new article is added. If these are not written, the number of languages shows up only in the interface, and the content drifts apart.

Connecting an outside service such as form notification, a calendar, payment, a CRM, an email list or a map often enters a quote as a single line. Yet the rules, quotas and changes of that service are now the site's concern. When the service changes an interface or removes a setting, the connection can break.

Four things are asked of every integration: who owns the data, in whose name the account is opened, who gets the alert when it fails, and what happens if the service shuts down. An integration with no answers looks like a small line in the quote and becomes an expensive job after launch.

When a site goes live, the work does not end. Renewing the domain name, the server or hosting service the site runs on, the security certificate and software updates should after a while be someone's responsibility. MDN describes the domain name and the web server as separate layers of a site. Each may sit under a separate contract and a separate renewal date. web.dev writes that HTTPS is needed both to protect the site and to avoid browsers' not-secure warnings.

Look for answers to these questions in the quote. In whose name is the domain registered. Who manages the hosting account and who holds the access details. Are backups taken, and where are they kept. Are updates and security monitoring part of this job, or is a separate maintenance arrangement needed. If the answer to these is 'we will talk later', the cost is not yet known. It has only been put off.

A maintenance arrangement is not always needed. A small site that rarely changes does not ask for the same care as a site where content and functions are added all the time. What matters is that the need is written down from the start.

The quality of a quote tracks the quality of what it was given. 'We want a website' fits three different jobs and produces three different prices. When the items below are filled in, the firm in front of you prices the same thing, and quotes become genuinely comparable.

If an item has no answer, do not hide it. Leave it open in the quote. Missing information comes back later as extra work. Working properly on mobile devices is not a feature to ask for separately. It follows from how Google reads a site under mobile-first indexing. You need not add it to the quote, but asking how it will be tested at handover is reasonable.

What this article deliberately does not do is give a number. A number means something only once each line above is known. A quote that has the scope written first and the price after is easier to read than one that states a figure first and opens the scope later.

At N2 Creative we think the first step in site and software work is to settle this list together. What a site that opens fast and reads on every screen should look like is covered separately in the corporate website checklist and in the piece on why a site opens slowly.