Most website projects we build land between $7,000 and $15,000, and the full range runs from about $5,000 to $35,000. The more custom the site, the more it costs. What drives the number is how many pages there are, how much of the design is built from scratch, and what the site has to connect to.
Most website projects we build land between $7,000 and $15,000, and the full range runs from about $5,000 to $35,000. The more custom the site, the more it costs.
Almost everyone who asks us this has already been quoted three very different numbers, and no two of the quotes explained what was included. That spread is not vagueness on our part. A five page site for a service business and a forty page site with an appointment system and a payment processor are both called a website, and pretending they cost the same is how projects fall apart halfway through. What follows is what moves the number, so you can tell where your own project is likely to land.
What sits at each end of the range
Between $5,000 and $7,000 we build a focused site for a business that needs to look credible and generate calls. That means a handful of pages, a contact form, your brand applied cleanly and a layout that works properly on phones. It is not a template with your logo dropped into it, and it is not a lot of custom design work either.
The $7,000 to $15,000 middle is where most of our projects land. More pages, design built specifically for you rather than adapted from something else, a few things the site actually does and content organized so you can grow into it. Service businesses, professional firms and local companies who want the site to do real work usually end up here.
Toward the top of the range we are building sites with a lot of pages or a lot of behavior, including online scheduling, payments, member logins, inventory, connections to the systems you already run, or a design built from nothing because the brand is new. Ecommerce with a real catalog belongs in this part of the range as well.
What moves the price
How much of the design is built from scratch is the single biggest factor, because the more custom the site, the more it costs. Designing every page specifically for your business takes more time than adapting a proven layout, and the difference shows in the result, so you should know which one you are buying.
Page count matters, though not as much as how different the pages are from each other. Twenty pages that follow the same three layouts cost far less than eight pages that are each their own design.
Then there is what the site has to do. A contact form is cheap. Appointment booking, payments, gated content or anything that has to talk to another system is not, because it has to work every time and all of it has to be tested. Most businesses already run on something, whether that is a CRM, an email platform, a booking tool or accounting software, and connecting the site to those systems is worth doing. It is also worth deciding early which of those connections the first version genuinely needs.
Who writes the content surprises people more than anything else on this list. If you supply the words and the images, the project moves faster and costs less, and if someone has to write them, that is real work with real hours attached. We partner with local content writers rather than keeping a writer on staff, and if you would rather write it yourself, we will give you prompts to work from. How much of your brand already exists has a similar effect, because a logo, colors and fonts you already use make design faster, while starting from nothing means brand decisions have to happen before design can begin.
WordPress or custom built
We build both, and the choice changes the price and what life is like afterward.
WordPress makes sense when you want to move sections around, add pages and upload your own photos without calling a developer. You trade some control over the fine details for flexibility you can use yourself. A custom build in HTML and CSS makes sense when performance and precision matter more than self-service editing, or when the design has to be exactly right. It tends to be faster and leaner with less to maintain, though changes go through a developer.
Neither one is the better answer in general. The question is who will be updating the site six months from now and how often.
What is not in the build price
Hosting is separate, because the site has to live somewhere. We offer hosting with monthly maintenance and security upkeep, and we support custom, WordPress and Webflow sites. Ongoing maintenance belongs in the same bucket, since plugins and platforms release updates, security patches arrive on their own schedule and forms quietly stop working. A site nobody maintains breaks slowly and then all at once.
Content and photography sit outside the build price unless we agree otherwise. So does SEO over time. We do SEO audits and on-page work, and it is worth knowing that search results take four to twelve months to reflect changes, so a new site does not arrive on page one the week it launches.
How long it takes, since timeline and budget are linked
Sites take anywhere from two weeks to six months depending on complexity and size. The short end is a focused build with content ready to go. The long end involves a lot of pages, custom functionality, or waiting on decisions and material.
Timeline affects cost mainly through scope, because the longer a project runs while things keep changing, the more it costs. Deciding what the first version includes and shipping that is the cheapest way to build a website.
How to get a number you can plan around
Ask any company three questions, whether that company is us or someone else.
Ask what exactly is included, meaning page count, whether the design is custom or adapted, what the site does beyond showing information and who writes the content. Ask what happens when something changes, because priorities always shift once you see real pages, and you want to know how changes are scoped and priced before you start. Ask what it costs after launch, including hosting, maintenance and any licenses, since a cheap build with an expensive tail is not cheap.
If a quote comes in far below this range, it is usually a template with your content poured into it, which is a legitimate product as long as you know that is what you are buying. If it comes in far above, ask what is in there that your business actually needs.
What you are paying for
It helps to know how the hours break down, because a website sounds like one thing and it is really four.
Design time covers deciding what every page looks like and how it holds together, then applying your brand to it, and on a custom design this is the largest single piece of the work. Build time turns approved designs into real pages that behave correctly at every screen size, either on WordPress or as a custom build. Testing covers every form, every link and every layout on a real phone rather than a simulator, and it is the part that gets skipped on cheap projects, which is why cheap sites so often have a broken contact form nobody noticed for months. Coordination is the fourth, meaning someone keeping the project moving, chasing the material we need and making sure what launches is what you approved. It is invisible when it is done well and obvious when it is not.
When a quote looks too cheap
A very low quote usually means one of three things, and none of them are dishonest as long as you know which one you are getting.
It may be a template with your content in it, which is perfectly reasonable for some businesses and much faster, though you are not getting a design built around your business. The scope may be smaller than you think, meaning five pages instead of twelve, a contact form instead of a booking system, your content instead of theirs. Or the real cost may be in the tail, with a low build price attached to a monthly fee you cannot leave or a platform you do not own. Always ask what happens if you walk away in a year.