"How much does a website cost" is one of the first questions almost every business owner asks, and it's also one of the hardest to answer honestly with a single number. Not because we're avoiding the question, but because the true answer, it depends, is genuinely the accurate one. What it depends on is a specific, knowable set of factors, and going through those properly is far more useful than a vague estimate that turns out to be wrong once a project actually starts.
Page count sounds obvious, but it isn't the whole story
A five-page brochure site for a sole trader and a fifty-page site covering multiple service areas or locations are different builds in an obvious way, but page count on its own doesn't tell you much. A ten-page site where every page needs custom layout and detailed content takes longer than a thirty-page site built from a handful of repeating templates. It's less about the number and more about how much of that number is genuinely unique.
Whether the content already exists
This is the factor most business owners don't think about until it's slowing everything down. Photography, copy, service descriptions, all of it has to come from somewhere, and if it doesn't already exist, someone has to create it before the site can be built around it. A business that arrives with strong photography and clear, ready-to-use copy is starting from a completely different position to one that needs all of that written and shot from scratch, and it's one of the biggest, quietest cost drivers on any project. We've written separately about how much this specific factor can hold a build up if it's not planned for early.
Ecommerce, booking, and anything the site needs to talk to
A site that just needs to explain the business and generate an enquiry is a different scope to one that needs to take payments, manage bookings, or sync with a CRM or stock system. Every integration is another thing that needs setting up, testing and maintaining, and that adds real time to a build, not because anyone's padding the scope, but because each one is genuinely extra work.
Bespoke design versus working within a system
Building a design completely from scratch takes longer than working within an existing, well-built system or theme, and neither approach is automatically the right or wrong choice, it depends on what the business actually needs. If strong branding and guidelines already exist, the design phase moves faster because there's less to decide from a blank page. If a business is starting without any of that, developing a visual identity alongside the site itself is a bigger piece of work, and it's worth knowing that going in rather than being surprised by it partway through.
How clear the brief is at the start
A client who arrives with a clear sense of who the site needs to speak to and what it needs to do is easier and faster to build for than one who's still working that out. That's not a criticism, plenty of businesses come to a web designer precisely because they need help figuring that out, but it does affect timeline and cost, because shaping a rough idea into a proper brief is its own piece of work before the build can really start.
How quickly feedback comes back
This one has almost nothing to do with the site itself and everything to do with how the project runs day to day. A build can only move as fast as the slowest thing feeding into it, and that's very often how quickly a client can turn around a decision, a piece of feedback, or a missing photo. Fast, consolidated responses keep a project moving. Feedback that trickles in over several separate messages across a couple of weeks stretches a project out regardless of how good the initial quote was.
Why asking for "just a rough number" rarely helps
It's a completely understandable question to ask early, before you know whether a project is even realistic for the business right now, but a rough number given without any of the factors above attached tends to do more harm than good. Too low, and it sets an expectation that a proper quote later can't match, which feels like the price has gone up when really the first figure was never grounded in the actual scope. Too high, and a business rules itself out of a project that might genuinely have been more modest than they assumed. A number without the reasoning behind it is guesswork dressed up as an answer, and it rarely survives contact with the real project.
Why "it depends" isn't a dodge
None of this is about finding the cheapest possible way through a build, and it isn't a way of avoiding a straight answer either. It's about being upfront, before a single figure gets mentioned, about which of these factors actually apply to your specific project and why. Once that's understood, a quote makes sense as a reflection of real scope, rather than landing as a single number with no explanation behind it. If you want to talk through where your own project sits against this list, that's exactly the conversation we'd start with.
