What a business website costs, and what drives the price

The five cost drivers

Page count and page-type variety. Whether the design is custom or adapted from a template. Integrations such as CRM, payments or inventory. Content: who writes it, and how much migration is involved. Whether the site needs accounts, search or dynamic data.

A twenty-page site built from four page types costs far less than twenty unique pages, because the second is twenty design and build tasks rather than four.

Realistic ranges

A focused brochure site with custom design typically lands in the low five figures. A content-heavy site with a structured CMS and SEO migration sits in the mid range. Commerce with payments, inventory and fulfilment moves higher again.

Treat any quote far below these ranges as a scope question. Something has been excluded, and it is worth knowing what before signing rather than after launching.

Where to spend and where not to

Spend on structure, content and performance. Save on animation nobody asked for and stock imagery you will replace in a year. The parts that age well are the information architecture, the content model and the speed budget.