What determines the price of a website, and what usually pushes it up

Ask three suppliers to quote on the same brief and you get three different numbers — and usually that does not mean anyone is wrong. They read the brief differently. Below is what actually creates the scope, so you can make the brief sharper and put quotes side by side.

Scope comes from page types, not page counts

Twenty pages are not twenty times the work of one. The work comes from types: a home page, a service page, a portfolio page, a blog article, a contact page. Each type has its own layout, its own fields in the content system and its own logic. Once there are five types, adding twenty pages is data entry, not development.

So it pays to put types in the brief rather than a number. “Five page types, around twenty pages in total” produces a sharper quote than “twenty pages”.

Four things that move the price

1. Number of languages. A second language adds work in every layer: translations, separate addresses, hreflang, keywords per language. Three languages are not three times the price, but considerably more than one.
2. Integrations. Payments, CRM, stock, booking, accounting. One integration can be more work than ten pages, because it also means thinking through what happens when the other system does not answer.
3. Content. Whether text and images come from you or are produced for you. This is often the largest single line.
4. Migration from an existing site. If a site already runs and has traffic from search, every old address has to be carried to a new one with redirects. Without that, traffic drops the moment you launch — and that costs more than the migration itself.

Three things that overrun a budget mid-project

Waiting for content. The most common reason a project drags. Development is done, the copy is not. Every week of waiting is a cost on the supplier’s side too, and at some point it starts to break the assumptions the quote was built on.

Wishes that arrive once the design is finished. They are normal — seeing a real design produces ideas. But if the agreement does not anticipate them, every idea becomes a separate negotiation.

“Let us add one small special feature.” Usually a calculator, filtering, a personal-account area or a multi-step form. As a page it looks like one page; as work it is a piece of functionality in its own right.

What to specify so the quote is honest

• Page types, and roughly how many pages per type.
• Languages, and who produces the translations.
• Whether content comes from you or from the supplier.
• Which external systems have to talk to the site.
• Whether this is a new site or a replacement — and if a replacement, whether the old site has traffic from search.
• Whether monthly maintenance is needed after launch, or you will take the site over yourself.

What the price should include even if nobody asks separately

A mobile version, speed within reasonable limits, metadata and a heading structure, content management such that you can change the copy yourself, and redirects from the old addresses. If these are absent from a quote, the quote is not cheaper — that work simply arrives later and separately.

What exactly belongs to building a website and what makes up the scope is set out on the development page. If you are weighing repairing the old site against building a new one, the common visibility problems are a good place to check whether the trouble is in the foundation or the superstructure.