Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team
Real numbers for every kind of website, plus the five variables that make identical briefs vary by ten times, the costs that never appear in a quote, the three-year total cost of ownership by platform, and the one deliverable that decides whether you keep your search traffic on launch day. Written by people who build these and who have been called in to fix a lot of them.
The short answer
Those are project prices. Hosting, maintenance, content and the eventual rebuild are separate, and together they usually exceed the build cost over three years. The section on total cost of ownership below has the arithmetic.
Why the same brief gets quotes that differ by ten times
It is almost never greed. Five variables account for nearly all of the spread, and a cheap quote differs from an expensive one on at least three of them. Ask both quotes to state their position on all five and the gap usually explains itself in ten minutes.
1. Custom design versus a template
Applying a template to your brand is a day of work. Producing an original design system — a type scale, a color system, spacing rules, twelve component states, responsive behavior at four breakpoints — is three weeks. Both produce a website. Only one of them produces something that looks like nobody else’s, and for many businesses the template is genuinely the right answer.
2. Who writes the content
‘Client supplies content’ appears in most cheap quotes and is the single largest cause of website projects launching four months late, or launching with placeholder text still in the footer. Writing twelve pages properly is thirty to sixty hours of work. If it is not in the quote, it is in your diary.
3. The number of unique templates, not the number of pages
A twelve-page site built from two templates is a fraction of the cost of a twelve-page site needing nine. When comparing quotes, count templates. A quote that says ’10 pages’ without saying how many are unique layouts is not a quote yet.
4. Integrations
CRM, payment, booking, inventory, membership, ERP. Each is a project inside the project and each is where fixed-price quotes go wrong, because the integration behaves differently than the documentation promised. Any quote including integrations should name them individually with an allowance each.
5. Whether search is designed in or bolted on
A site built with a keyword map, an information architecture derived from search demand, an internal linking plan and a redirect strategy costs meaningfully more than one built to a wireframe. It is also the difference between a brochure and a marketing asset, and it is the half of the quote that most buyers do not know to ask for.
Where the money actually goes
Buyers consistently over-value design and under-value discovery, content and quality assurance. On a well-run $16,000 build, design is about a quarter of the budget and development about a third; discovery, content and QA together are another third. Most disappointing website projects are decided in that final third, not in the design phase everybody focuses on.
What it costs by build type, in detail
| Site type | DIY | Freelance | Small agency | Mid / large agency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single landing page | $0–$200 | $400–$1,500 | $1,200–$4,000 | $4,000–$12,000 |
| Brochure site, 5–12 pages | $200–$600 | $2,500–$8,000 | $8,000–$25,000 | $25,000–$60,000 |
| Brochure site plus content program | Not viable | $6,000–$15,000 | $20,000–$45,000 | $45,000–$120,000 |
| Service business site, 20–60 pages | Not viable | $6,000–$18,000 | $18,000–$55,000 | $55,000–$150,000 |
| Ecommerce, under 200 SKUs | $500–$1,500 | $6,000–$20,000 | $20,000–$70,000 | $70,000–$180,000 |
| Ecommerce, 200–5,000 SKUs | Not viable | $15,000–$45,000 | $45,000–$140,000 | $140,000–$400,000 |
| Ecommerce with ERP or PIM | Not viable | Not viable | $70,000–$180,000 | $150,000–$500,000+ |
| Membership or subscription site | Not viable | $8,000–$30,000 | $30,000–$90,000 | $90,000–$300,000 |
| Booking or marketplace platform | Not viable | $15,000–$60,000 | $60,000–$250,000 | $250,000+ |
| Custom web application | Not viable | $15,000–$60,000 | $60,000–$250,000 | $250,000+ |
| Redesign of an existing site | $200–$600 | $2,000–$9,000 | $9,000–$40,000 | $40,000–$150,000 |
| Accessibility remediation | Not viable | $1,000–$5,000 | $4,000–$20,000 | $20,000–$80,000 |
The costs that are never in the quote
Add every row above to any proposal before comparing it with another. Two quotes where one includes copywriting and one does not are not comparable numbers, and the exclusion is almost never highlighted because highlighting it makes the quote look larger.
Your own time is the largest omitted cost
Content gathering, approvals, review cycles, sourcing photographs, chasing colleagues for copy. Budget thirty to eighty hours across a typical brochure project. Website projects that stall almost always stall on the client side, waiting for content or a decision, and every week of delay costs the agency nothing and costs you a week of not having a website.
Total cost of ownership over three years
The build price is the smallest number in this conversation. Over three years, hosting, maintenance, licenses and the eventual replacement usually exceed it — and platform choice determines almost all of the difference.
| Platform | Build | 3-year running cost | Exit cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | $0–$3,000 | $1,900 | Moderate — content exports, design does not | Predictable, limited extensibility |
| Wix | $0–$3,000 | $1,750 | High — poor export | Easy to start, hard to leave |
| WordPress, managed host | $5,000–$25,000 | $4,100 | Low — fully portable | The default for a reason |
| WordPress, cheap shared host | $5,000–$25,000 | $5,600 | Low | Cheaper hosting costs more in developer callouts |
| Webflow | $4,000–$20,000 | $3,200 | Moderate — code export is partial | Strong design control |
| Shopify | $5,000–$70,000 | $2,900 + transaction fees | Moderate | Ecommerce only |
| Headless (Next.js + CMS) | $25,000–$150,000 | $9,400 | Low | Fastest; needs a developer available |
| Proprietary agency platform | $3,000–$20,000 | $7,200 | Very high — full rebuild | Avoid unless there is a compelling reason |
The last row is the one that catches people. A proprietary platform is not merely a monthly fee. It is a guaranteed rebuild at an unknown future date, payable to whoever you move to, and it is precisely why some agencies sell them. Ask directly: if we leave, can we take the site?
Cheap versus good, counted properly
A $3,000 build and a $16,000 build cost roughly the same by year three, because the cheap one needs replacing. That is not an argument that expensive is always better — plenty of businesses are correctly served by a $3,000 site for three years. It is an argument for counting the rebuild when you compare.
What must be in the scope before you sign
Website projects go wrong in the scope document, not in the design phase. Fourteen items belong in every contract, and the absence of any one of them is where an argument will eventually happen.
- A written definition of done. What has to be true for the project to be complete and the final invoice to be payable.
- A fixed number of revision rounds, per stage, with what happens beyond them.
- Named page templates, counted. Not ‘ten pages’ — ‘four unique templates covering ten pages’.
- Who writes the content and who approves it, with dates.
- A redirect map covering every existing indexed URL. This is the deliverable that decides whether you keep your search traffic.
- Which CMS, and written confirmation that it is self-hostable.
- Who owns the domain, hosting and DNS. The answer must be you.
- Source files and design files transfer on final payment.
- Browser and device support matrix.
- The accessibility standard the build will meet — WCAG 2.2 AA is the sensible default.
- Performance targets stated as numbers, not as ‘fast’. Mobile LCP under 2.5 seconds is measurable; ‘optimized for speed’ is not.
- What happens after launch, for how long, and at what cost.
- Training, and whether it is included.
- Payment milestones tied to deliverables, not to calendar dates.
The redirect map: the single most important deliverable
The most common way a business loses a year of search visibility is a redesign launched without one. It is entirely preventable, it costs a few hours, and it is skipped constantly because it is invisible to everyone except the person who notices the traffic three weeks later.
Ask for it before development starts Not before launch — before development. A redirect map produced after the new site is built is a reconciliation exercise. A redirect map produced first shapes the information architecture, because it forces someone to look at which existing pages actually earn traffic before deciding to delete them.
What a good redirect map contains
- Every URL from the Search Console Pages report, indexed and not
- Every URL in the current XML sitemap
- Every URL a full crawl of the live site finds
- Every landing page from twelve months of analytics, sorted by sessions
- The new destination for each, as a specific URL, never the homepage
- The redirect type (301 for permanent, and it is almost always 301)
- A tested column, ticked on staging before launch
What happens if you skip it
Every URL that 404s loses whatever authority it had accumulated. Every URL redirected to the homepage is treated by Google as a soft 404 and loses the signal anyway. Backlinks pointing at those URLs stop passing value. Rankings for pages that were working disappear and, because Google recrawls slowly, the damage becomes visible over four to eight weeks — long after everyone has stopped associating it with the launch.
Rebuild or repair?
Agencies favor rebuilds because they are large, well-defined and profitable projects. Frequently they are the wrong call, and repairing costs a fraction while risking nothing that already works.
| Situation | Recommendation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Converts acceptably but looks dated | Repair, restyle in place | Aesthetics rarely cause the loss you think |
| Unsupported CMS or security issues | Rebuild | Technical debt compounds and the exposure is real |
| Fast, indexed and ranking, but ugly | Repair | Never risk working rankings for appearance |
| 15 pages and you need 80 | Rebuild on a scalable structure | Repairing into a structure that cannot scale wastes the work |
| Mobile experience is broken | Repair first, then assess | A responsive fix may be two weeks |
| No analytics, no Search Console | Neither — instrument first | You cannot judge a site you cannot measure |
| Traffic dropped after a previous rebuild | Diagnose, do not rebuild again | Almost always unmapped redirects |
| Changing business model or service mix | Rebuild | Information architecture must follow the business |
| You cannot edit it yourself | Depends | Sometimes training; sometimes a genuine CMS problem |
| On a platform you cannot leave | Rebuild | The cost only grows |
Performance: what it costs and what it is worth
Speed is a modest ranking input and a substantial conversion input, which is the reason to care. Almost nobody needs a rebuild to pass Core Web Vitals — the top three fixes are a week of work on an existing site and typically move a failing score into the passing band.
| Metric | Good | Measures | Most common cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | ≤ 2.5s | When the main content appears | Oversized hero images, render-blocking CSS, slow hosting |
| INP | ≤ 200ms | Responsiveness to interaction | Heavy third-party scripts, unoptimized JavaScript |
| CLS | ≤ 0.1 | Visual stability while loading | Images without width and height, injected banners, web fonts |
- Measure with field data in Search Console, not only with a Lighthouse score
- Test on a throttled mobile connection, never on office fibre
- Serve images as WebP or AVIF at the dimensions actually displayed
- Set explicit width and height on every image
- Never lazy-load the largest above-the-fold image
- Audit third-party scripts ruthlessly — chat widgets and heatmaps are usually the largest cost
- Server response time floors everything else, so hosting is not the place to economize
Launch day
The ‘staging noindex removed’ item causes more catastrophic launches than everything else on that list combined. A site launched with a noindex tag left in place disappears from Google entirely, and because traffic decays over days rather than instantly, it is frequently not noticed for a fortnight. Check it on launch day and check it again the next morning.
What a website is actually worth
The build price is a cost. The relevant question is what the site returns, and that depends almost entirely on whether it was built as a brochure or as a marketing asset.
Three sites, the same traffic. The cheap template with no search foundation produces nine leads a month in month one and nine leads a month in month eighteen. The good design without a content program roughly doubles. The site built with a keyword map, real service pages and an internal linking structure reaches seventy-four. The divergence has nothing to do with how the sites look and everything to do with a decision made in the scope document.
Calculating whether a build pays for itself
- Take your current monthly leads from the website and your close rate.
- Estimate the conversion improvement honestly. A typical local service site moves from about 0.8% to 2–3% with competent conversion work; that is two to three times the leads from the same traffic.
- Multiply the additional leads by your close rate and your average customer value.
- Divide the build cost by that monthly figure to get months to payback.
- If the answer is over eighteen months, either the build is too expensive for your business or the site is not your binding constraint.
How to brief a website project so it does not overrun
- Write down what the site must do, in business terms. ‘Produce fifteen commercial inquiries a month’ is a brief. ‘Look modern’ is a mood.
- Name one decision-maker. Approval by committee turns a six-week project into a sixteen-week one, and it is the most common cause of overrun by a wide margin.
- Gather your content before design starts, or pay someone to write it. Design fitted to real content is better than real content squeezed into a design.
- Book the photography early. Real photographs of your work, your premises and your people outperform stock on every measure, and they take weeks to arrange.
- Provide access on day one: domain registrar, DNS, current hosting, current CMS, analytics, Search Console.
- Say what you will not do. If nobody will appear on camera or write a blog post, say so before somebody plans around it.
- Agree the launch date backwards from a content deadline, not forwards from a kickoff.
Common questions about website cost
Is a $500 website ever a good idea?
For a brand-new business testing whether a market exists, yes. A one-page site with a clear offer, a phone number and a working form is genuinely enough to start. It stops being a good idea the moment you have revenue to protect, because a $500 site cannot be extended and rebuilding early costs more than building properly once. See service business website design.
Why is ecommerce so much more expensive?
Because a shop is a system rather than a document. Product data, variants, inventory, payments, tax, shipping rules, returns, fulfillment integration and a checkout that must never break. The design is frequently the cheapest part. See ecommerce website design.
Should I use WordPress, Squarespace or Webflow?
Squarespace if you need twelve pages and want to maintain it yourself. WordPress if you need to scale past twenty pages, want full control and can tolerate maintenance. Webflow if design control matters more than extensibility. See Squarespace vs WordPress and Wix vs WordPress.
How long should a website take?
Six to ten weeks for a brochure site where content is ready. Twelve to twenty weeks if content has to be written. Four to nine months for ecommerce with integrations. Almost every overrun is caused by content or approvals rather than by development.
What is a fair deposit?
Thirty to fifty percent up front is normal for a project, with the balance tied to milestones. A hundred percent up front is a risk you should not accept, and nothing up front is a risk no small agency should accept.
Do I need to pay for hosting separately?
Usually yes, and you should want to — hosting in your own name means you can leave. Expect $20 to $60 a month for good managed hosting on a business site. Cheap shared hosting saves $300 a year and costs more than that in performance and developer callouts.
What does website maintenance actually include?
Core and plugin updates, security monitoring, backups with a tested restore, uptime monitoring, and a small allowance of content edits. $50 to $250 a month for a small site, $150 to $800 for a larger one. See website maintenance.
Should the agency host my site?
It is convenient and it is a mild lock-in. Acceptable if the hosting account is in your name or the contract guarantees migration assistance. Not acceptable if leaving means rebuilding.
How much does a redesign cost compared with a new build?
Usually sixty to eighty percent of a new build, because most of the work is the same. The exception is a restyle in place — new colors, type and imagery on the existing structure — which can be a fraction of the cost and risks nothing that already ranks. See website redesign services.
Who should own the domain?
You, at a registrar you control, with the login in your possession. This is not negotiable. Domains registered by an agency are the single most common hostage situation in this industry and the resolution is always slower and more expensive than anyone expects.
What if I already have content?
Say so early and specifically, because it materially reduces the quote. Then be honest about whether the content is finished or is a folder of Word documents from 2019 that somebody will need to rewrite.
Is a template site bad for SEO?
No. Templates are neutral. What harms search performance is the absence of a keyword-led information architecture, thin service pages, no internal linking and a broken migration — all of which happen just as easily on a custom build. See what is SEO.
How many pages should my site have?
One per service you want leads for, one per genuine sub-service, one per location you can write distinctly about, plus supporting cost guides, comparisons and problem-diagnosis pages. For a typical service business that is twenty-five to eighty pages built over a year, not four hundred built in a month.
What is accessibility remediation and do I need it?
Making the site usable with a screen reader, by keyboard, and at sufficient contrast — measured against WCAG 2.2 AA. It is increasingly a legal exposure in the US rather than a nicety, and it is dramatically cheaper to build in than to retrofit. Ask for it in the original scope.
Should I pay for professional photography?
Almost always yes, and it is usually worth more than an equivalent spend on design. Real photographs of your work, your premises and your people outperform stock on trust and on conversion, and stock imagery of a smiling model in a hard hat actively reduces credibility with buyers who have seen it a thousand times.
What happens to my SEO when I launch a new site?
Everything, if the redirect map does not exist. With a proper map, expect two to six weeks of volatility and full recovery by week eight. Without one, expect to lose a meaningful share of organic traffic permanently. See website not showing up on Google.
Can I build it myself and hire someone later?
Yes, and for early-stage businesses it is often the right sequence. Build something simple that works, get revenue, and hire when the site becomes the constraint. Just keep the domain in your name and avoid platforms you cannot export from.
Why do agencies charge for discovery?
Because deciding what the site should contain, for whom, and in what structure is the work that determines whether it succeeds. Skipping it produces a beautiful site organized around your org chart rather than around what customers are looking for.
What is the most expensive mistake in a website project?
Launching without a redirect map. Second: rebuilding a site that already converted. Third: treating content as something that will happen later. All three are free to avoid and all three are common.
How do I know if my current site is the problem?
Check three things before assuming it is. Is the contact form actually working when tested from a phone? How many of your pages are indexed in Search Console? What is your conversion rate against a 2–5% benchmark? If those three are fine, the site probably is not your constraint. See why is my website not getting traffic.
Watch: budgeting and build quality
Three from Google Search Central that bear directly on the material above.
Want an honest opinion on whether you need a new website?
Send us your URL. We will check whether your forms work, how many of your pages are indexed, what your conversion path looks like and whether a rebuild would actually help — and if the answer is that you should repair rather than rebuild, we will say so. Free, and no obligation.
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Getting found in search
AI, AEO and what is changing
Paid media and lead generation
Websites and design
Choosing and working with an agency
Social, content and brand
By industry and by situation
Frequently asked questions
How much does a website cost in 2026?
Why do website quotes vary so much?
What is not included in a website quote?
How much does a small business website cost?
How much does an ecommerce website cost?
What is the cheapest way to get a website?
How long does it take to build a website?
Should I use WordPress or Squarespace?
What is the total cost of owning a website over three years?
Do I need to pay for website maintenance?
Will a new website improve my Google rankings?
What is a redirect map and why does it matter?
Should I rebuild or repair my website?
Who should own my domain and hosting?
How much should I budget for content?
Is website speed worth paying to fix?
What should I ask before signing a website contract?
How do I know if my website is the actual problem?
What is accessibility remediation and do I need it?
Can I get a website for free?
How much does a new website cost for a small business?
Sources and further reading
- web.dev: Core Web Vitals explained
- web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint
- web.dev: Cumulative Layout Shift
- web.dev: Interaction to Next Paint
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Rich Results Test
- Google Search Console
- W3C Markup Validation Service
- Schema.org: LocalBusiness type
- Schema.org: Service type
- Schema.org: FAQPage type
- Schema.org: HowTo type
- W3C: WCAG 2.2 quick reference
- Google Search Essentials — SEO starter guide
- Google: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Google: intro to structured data
- Google: LocalBusiness structured data
- Google: FAQPage structured data
- Google: Article structured data
- Google: Product structured data
- Google: title links in search results
- Google: control your snippets
- Google: robots.txt introduction
- FTC: CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide
- FCC: telemarketing and robocall rules (TCPA)
- FTC endorsement guides — reviews and testimonials
- FTC: rule on consumer reviews and testimonials
- HHS: HIPAA guidance on online tracking technologies
- US Census Bureau QuickFacts: New Jersey
- US Census Bureau: American Community Survey
- US Census: Statistics of US Businesses
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: New Jersey data
- BLS: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
- US DOJ: web accessibility guidance under the ADA
- W3C: WCAG standards overview
- WordPress documentation
- MDN: web performance
- Shopify: ecommerce site guidance
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