What a business website costs and what it really depends on
Why the same job gets quoted at 400 and at 8.000, which costs appear after delivery and how to tell whether what you are being offered is a website or a template with your logo on top.
· Web design and e-commerce
You ask for quotes for a business website and figures arrive that bear no resemblance to each other. It is not that some are expensive and others cheap: it is that you are being offered different things and none of them says so. Let us separate out what is being paid for.
The four things that move the price
1. The content, which is almost never there
Most projects that stall do not stall on design or on programming: they stall because nobody has written the copy. If the quote does not say who writes it, you are writing it, and that is the part that costs the most weeks. If the supplier writes it, it is a piece of work with its own price.
2. Whether it is a template or it is yours
A purchased and adapted template is quick and cheap, and for many businesses it is perfectly fine. A bespoke design costs several times more and it shows in one concrete thing: you do not look like the other forty in your sector who bought the same template.
The honest question is not which is better, it is how much it matters to you to look like them. In a sector where the customer compares three suppliers before writing, it matters quite a lot.
3. What it has to do, beyond being seen
A five-page site that informs is one project. One that takes payment, manages stock, issues invoices, connects to your management software or books appointments is a different project, with integrations that have to be tested one by one. Every connection to an external system is where the real time goes.
4. Who maintains it afterwards
Here is the cost almost no quote mentions: domain, hosting, certificate, updates and backups. An unmaintained website is, two years on, the biggest security hole in the business.
What to demand in any quote
- That the domain is in your name. If the supplier registers the domain on their own account, you do not have a website: you have a borrowed one. This has left many companies trapped.
- The accesses, all of them. Hosting, control panel, domain, analytics. The day you want to change supplier, that list is the difference between migrating and starting from scratch.
- That it loads fast on a phone with poor coverage. That is where half your audience will read you, and it is the first thing search engines look at.
- What happens in month thirteen. Maintenance price, what it includes and what is billed separately.
- Legal notice, privacy and cookies done properly. If the site sets third-party cookies and does not declare them, the penalty does not land on the designer.
Signs you are being sold smoke
«Guaranteed first on Google.» Nobody can guarantee that. Whoever promises it either does not know, or knows and says it anyway.
A fixed price with no questions asked. If they have not asked how many pages, what content exists and which systems have to be connected, that number is a template.
Nothing about measurement. A services website that does not measure how many visits end in a contact cannot be improved, and then it is not an investment: it is an expensive brochure.
When you do not need a new website
We say it even though it takes work away from us: if the one you have loads well and is merely disorganised, what is often needed is rewriting the copy and reordering the home page, not rebuilding it. It costs a fraction and usually moves the phone more than a full redesign.
If this sounds like you
We design and build websites that can be maintained and measured: that is web design. If what you need is not a website but an application that does something — quotes, bookings, an internal dashboard — that is custom development. And if the failing part is that you do not know what is happening on the one you already have, it gets fixed by measuring: digital marketing.
And before deciding whether to rebuild or repair, it helps to know what is wrong with the site you already have: that is the website review, in 48 hours and at a closed price.
We are Mindset & Code: automation, data and development for small businesses. That means the website we build for you understands how your business invoices, because we build the invoicing and the payments of businesses like yours. You can see what we do and what it costs, published one by one.
General guidance. Any specific quote depends on the scope, the content available and the integrations needed.