How much should a small business website cost?

Website quotes are famously all over the place. The same brief can come back at £500 and at £15,000, which leaves you with no idea what is reasonable. Here is what sits behind the numbers.

Roughly what each level buys you

• Up to about £1,000. Usually a template filled in, often by you. Fine for getting something online quickly. Rarely written for your customers or built to be found.
• £1,750 to £2,500. A focused site of around five pages, properly structured, written with your customers in mind and set up to be found. This suits most small professional businesses.
• £2,750 to £4,000. A larger site with room to tell the full story, more pages, more thought on how people move through it.
• £4,500 and up. Online shops, bookings, anything with moving parts to build and test.

Why the quotes vary so much

Mostly it is what is included beyond the design. A cheap quote is often design only, and assumes you will supply finished words, photos and structure. Most people cannot, so the project stalls or the site goes live half empty.

The other big factor is who does it. A one person studio has lower overheads than an agency with account managers. That does not automatically make either better, but it explains a lot of the gap.

The questions worth asking

• Who writes the words? If it is me, when do we do that, and is it included?
• Who supplies photography?
• Is search set up properly, or just installed as a plugin?
• Can I edit it myself afterwards without breaking it?
• What happens if something goes wrong in six months?
• Do I own everything at the end?

The cost people forget

A website is not a one off purchase. It sits on software that updates constantly, mostly to close security holes. Hosting, updates, backups and monitoring are an ongoing cost, usually a couple of hundred pounds a year upwards. Ignore it and you end up paying far more later to clean up a hacked or broken site.

How to avoid paying twice

The most expensive websites are the ones built too cheaply first. If the structure is wrong, the words are vague and it was never set up to be found, you end up rebuilding within two years and paying for the whole thing again.

Be honest about what the site actually needs to do. If it just needs to look credible and let people contact you, do not buy something elaborate. If it needs to bring in enquiries, do not buy a template and hope.

If you want a real figure for your own project, the tool in the corner will give you a ballpark in about a minute.