What determines the cost of a business website?

Ask three suppliers to quote for "a business website" and you may receive three prices that differ several times over. That isn't necessarily because anyone is overcharging. It's usually because each supplier has imagined a different website. Understanding what drives cost helps you write a better brief and compare proposals fairly.

1. Number of page templates, not just pages

A site with forty pages built from four templates (for example home, service, article and contact) can cost less than a site with ten pages that each need a unique layout. When requesting quotes, list the types of page you need as well as an approximate page count.

2. Who provides the content

Copywriting, photography and illustration are often the most underestimated parts of a website project. If your content is ready, the work is mostly design and development. If it needs to be written, structured or sourced, that is additional work and frequently the main cause of delays.

3. How the site will be updated

A content management system (CMS) lets your team edit pages without a developer, but it adds set-up, configuration and sometimes licence costs. If your site changes rarely, a simpler approach may be cheaper to build and run. If you publish frequently, a CMS usually pays for itself.

4. Integrations and functionality

Connecting forms to a CRM, adding booking, payments, search, multiple languages or customer logins all add design, development and testing effort. Each integration also introduces a dependency that must be maintained.

5. Quality requirements

• Accessibility: designing and testing so people using assistive technology can use the site.
• Performance: optimising images, code and hosting so pages load quickly on mobile networks.
• Search fundamentals: page structure, metadata, sitemaps and clean URLs.
• Security: keeping forms, dependencies and hosting protected.

These are sometimes treated as optional extras. They shouldn't be, but the level of rigour does affect effort, so it's worth confirming what each proposal includes.

How to compare proposals

1. Check that each proposal lists the same page templates, features and integrations.
2. Confirm who is responsible for content, and what happens if it arrives late.
3. Ask what testing is included, especially on mobile devices and for accessibility.
4. Ask what ongoing costs to expect: hosting, licences, maintenance and support.
5. Confirm who will own the domain, hosting accounts, code and design files.

A clear brief and a like-for-like comparison usually reveal that the differences between quotes come down to scope. Once scope is aligned, the decision becomes much easier.