Build cost
What actually decides the price of a small business website.
Nobody can name a real price for a website they have not scoped. What anyone can do honestly is tell you which decisions move the number, so that two quotes stop being two numbers and start being two lists you can read.
How much does a small business website cost?
There is no honest single figure, because a website is priced by how much genuinely unique work it contains rather than by its page count alone. The things that move a quote are how many pages are truly different from one another, whether the copy and photography already exist, how many other systems the site has to talk to, whether it sells online, how much accessibility and performance work is done properly rather than skipped, and who looks after it afterwards.
Ask any proposal to itemise those, plus who owns the domain, hosting and code when the relationship ends, and two quotes that looked incomparable become comparable.
Why every range you find online is worthless
Search this question and you get a dozen confident price ranges, all different, nearly all published by companies that sell websites. None of them has seen your page list.
A range is only meaningful when the thing being priced is fixed, and a website is not fixed. Two businesses in the same trade on the same street can need builds that differ by a factor of ten, because one needs four pages and a contact form while the other needs sixty service pages, a shop, and a booking flow wired into the software the front desk already uses.
So the useful question is not what a website costs. It is what makes a website cost more, and which of those things you actually need. Once you can answer that, a quote stops being a number you either accept or flinch at.
Our own prices are published on the pricing page rather than invented here. Everything below is about how web builds get priced generally, including builds that have nothing to do with us.
The things that actually move the number
Roughly in order of how much each one changes a quote. If a proposal does not mention an item on this list, that is not because the item is free. It is because it has not been scoped.
- Page count, but only the pages that are genuinely different from one another. Twelve service pages built from one template cost a fraction of twelve pages that each need their own research, copy and layout.
- Whether the words already exist. Writing is usually the slowest and most underestimated line in a build, and a page cannot be designed properly around text nobody has written yet.
- Whether real photography exists. Pictures of your premises, your team and your finished work change a site more than most design decisions, and a shoot is a separate cost with its own calendar.
- Integrations. A contact form is cheap. A form that writes into your CRM, sends a confirmation, checks availability in a booking system and records a conversion is a small software project.
- Selling online. Products, variants, tax, shipping rules, payments, stock and returns turn a website into an application, and the care it needs afterwards rises with it.
See the full checklist: The things that actually move the numberHide the full checklist: The things that actually move the number
- Accessibility conformance. Building to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first template is inexpensive. Retrofitting it into a finished site is not, because contrast, focus order, heading structure and form labelling are structural rather than cosmetic.
- Migration from an existing site. That means a redirect map, keeping the URLs that earn traffic, and a decision about every page being retired. Skipping it is free right up until launch day.
- Ongoing care. Hosting, updates, backups, security patching and a person who answers. This sits outside the build price but inside the cost of owning the site, and a quote that ignores it is incomplete rather than cheap.
Notice how few of these are about taste. Design hours are real, but they are rarely the reason two quotes for the same brief are thousands apart.
What you are actually buying
A website is not a brochure with an invoice attached. It is the middle of a path, and it is the only part of that path you control completely.
Price the build against the job it has to do. If the site exists to turn searches into booked appointments, then load time, a next step that is obvious within one screen, a form that works one handed on a phone, and tracking that tells you which pages produce enquiries are not extras. They are the product.
This is why the cheapest build is often the most expensive outcome. A site that costs a quarter of the alternative and produces no enquiries has not saved anyone anything, it has just moved the loss somewhere harder to see.
Two quotes for the same website
Both columns below could describe the same brief at prices that look nothing alike. Only one of them is complete, and the gap is not margin.
Open the full comparison: Two quotes for the same websiteHide the full comparison: Two quotes for the same website
| What you are comparing | The quote that looks cheap | The quote that is complete |
|---|---|---|
| Page list | Up to ten pages, unspecified | A named list with a purpose and a URL for every page |
| Copy | Client supplies all content | Who writes what, and how many revision rounds are included |
| Images | Stock imagery throughout | Whether a shoot is included, or which real assets are being used |
| Accessibility | Not mentioned | A named conformance target and how it is checked before handover |
| Performance | Fast and fully responsive | A load time target and the measurement it will be judged on |
| Measurement | Analytics installed | Which actions count as conversions, and proof they fire |
| Migration | Not mentioned | A redirect map from every old URL that carries traffic or links |
| Ownership | Silent | Named: who holds the domain, the hosting and the code |
| After launch | Support available | What updates, backups and fixes are covered, and at what monthly cost |
A quote that answers the right hand column is not dearer because the agency is greedier. It is dearer because it describes more work, and you can now decide which of that work you want to buy.
Why accessibility is a real line and not a checkbox
WebAIM's 2026 automated analysis of one million home pages gives a sense of how rarely this work is done, and therefore how rarely it is priced into a build.
SourceWebAIM Million 2026 (automated analysis of 1,000,000 home pages)
WebAIM is explicit that real conformance is worse than these figures suggest, because only automatically detectable failures are counted. Whether alternative text is actually useful, or whether a keyboard user can complete a booking, cannot be judged by a scanner. That is the honest framing, and it is why this is priced as work rather than as a plugin.
Performance is a budget, not a polishing step
Google publishes the thresholds a page is measured against, which means performance can be quoted against a target instead of promised as an adjective.
Whether a site hits those numbers is mostly decided early: how heavy the images are, how many third party scripts run before the first paint, whether fonts block text from appearing, and whether space is reserved for anything that arrives late. Those are build decisions, made once.
Fixing the same things afterwards means revisiting every one of those decisions with a finished site in the way. A build quoted with a performance budget and a build quoted without one are not the same product, even when the page counts match exactly.
What to make any quote state in writing
None of these are unreasonable requests, and a company that will not answer them in writing has told you something useful at no cost.
- The exact page list, with one line on what each page is for, so both quotes describe the same site.
- Who writes the copy, who supplies the photography, and how many rounds of changes are included before the work becomes billable.
- What performance and accessibility targets the build is held to, and how they will be demonstrated at handover rather than simply asserted.
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account, the code and the analytics property on the day the relationship ends. The correct answer is you, all four.
- What happens after launch: who applies updates, who holds backups you have actually tested restoring from, who fixes a dead form on a Saturday, and what that costs each month.
Get those five in writing and the price question mostly answers itself, because you will be comparing like with like for the first time.
Where the money usually goes wrong
The most common overspend is uniqueness nobody needed. Fifty individually designed pages produce a site your own team cannot add to, which means every future change has to be bought back from whoever built it. A small set of well made templates is cheaper to build and far cheaper to live in.
The second is buying a rebuild when the problem was one page. If enquiries are the complaint, the fault is often the single service page people actually land on, a form that fails on a phone, or a load time that loses visitors before the headline appears. Diagnose before you demolish.
Read the full breakdown: Where the money usually goes wrongHide the full breakdown: Where the money usually goes wrong
The third is treating launch as the finish line. A site with no owner drifts quietly: plugins go unpatched, the contact form stops delivering, and nobody notices until a customer mentions it months later. Budget for the care or expect the decay.
The fourth is accepting the lowest number without noticing what it excludes. Content, migration and measurement do not disappear when they are left out of a quote. They get paid for later, usually in a hurry, usually at a worse rate.
Read next
The questions that usually come immediately after this one.
What we actually charge
Our published prices, rather than a range collected from other people's blogs.
What we actually chargeThe web design guide
How a site gets planned, built, measured and maintained, in one place.
The web design guideMaking a site load faster
The diagnosis order for speed work, and why field data is the number that counts.
Making a site load fasterWhat a good conversion rate is
Why a single benchmark is close to meaningless, and what to measure instead.
What a good conversion rate isTracking where leads come from
How to know which pages and channels produced the enquiries you paid for.
Tracking where leads come fromGet a scoped number instead of a range
Send the page list and the systems the site has to talk to, and we will tell you what it involves. Our standard prices are published, not quoted on request.
Straight answers.
How long does it take to build a website?
Longer than the building takes, and the variable is almost never development speed. Launch dates are decided by how quickly copy is written, photography is taken and approvals come back.
A build waiting on content sits still while the developer has nothing to do. If you want a fast launch, have the words ready or pay someone to write them, and name one person who can approve things.
Is a template cheaper than a custom build?
Usually cheaper to buy, not always cheaper to own. A template gets you a working site quickly and limits what you can change later. A custom build costs more at the start and fits the pages you actually have.
The real question is how far your business differs from the template's assumptions, and how much you expect the site to change over the next couple of years.
Do I own my website if an agency builds it?
You should own all of it: the domain, the hosting account, the code and the analytics property. Ask before you sign and get the answer in writing.
An agency that keeps the domain or hosting in its own account has given itself a hold over you that has nothing to do with the quality of its work.
What is the difference between web design and web development?
Design decides what each page says, in what order, and how it looks. Development decides whether that page loads quickly, works on every device, survives an update and can be edited afterwards.
Most disappointing websites are one of those done well and the other skipped.
Does a cheap website hurt my Google rankings?
Price is not a ranking factor. What can hurt is what cheap builds tend to skip: pages that are indexable, a sensible URL structure, redirects from the old site, and a load time that does not lose visitors before anything appears.
Check those four rather than the invoice.
What is included in website maintenance?
At minimum: platform and plugin updates, backups someone has tested restoring from, security monitoring, uptime checking, and a person who fixes things when they break.
Anything beyond that, such as content edits, new pages or performance work, is worth naming explicitly so both sides know what is covered before the first request arrives.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in a new tab)
- Google web.dev: Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)The current thresholds for LCP, INP and CLS, and the 75th percentile rule.
- Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: How to specify a canonical URL (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.