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What a business website costs
and why quotes differ so much
The same brief gets quotes that differ tenfold. Not because some are expensive, but because they are selling different things. What you are actually paying for, and what it costs you afterwards.
Three different things sold under one name
At the cheap end is a purchased theme with the text and photos swapped. It takes a few days, looks fine for the first month, and is cheap because nobody thought about your company. It works when all you need is a presence, quickly.
In the middle is a site built around your structure: the pages your customers actually look for, the text written for them, speed and search treated seriously. This is where the difference in traffic from Google is made.
At the expensive end is a site that does more than inform: a configurator, a price calculator, a customer account, a link to your management system. At that point you are not buying a website, you are buying an application that looks like one.
What moves the price, concretely
- The number of pages that actually have to be written, not the number of menu items
- Who writes the text: you, or the team building the site
- Whether photographs exist or have to be taken
- How far the search optimisation goes, beyond page titles
- How many languages, because a second language means all the content twice
- Whether it connects to anything: stock, bookings, invoicing, CRM
The costs afterwards, which nobody puts in the quote
A website does not end at launch. The domain and hosting are paid annually. The certificate renews. If it is built on a platform with plugins, those plugins have their own subscriptions and their own updates, and when one falls behind a hole opens up.
Then there is real maintenance: backups that are actually tested, monitoring, updates. A company with nobody watching finds out the site is down from a customer phoning in.
Ask of any quote: what do I pay monthly or annually after launch, to whom, and what happens if I stop paying.
How to spot a quote that hides work
- It asks nothing about your customers before giving a price
- It counts pages rather than content
- It guarantees first place in Google
- It does not say who writes the text
- It does not say who owns the domain and the hosting account at the end
- It says nothing about speed, even though half the result depends on it
What is worth paying for even on a small budget
If the budget is tight, cut the number of pages, not the quality of the ones that remain. Five well-written, fast pages that get found in Google bring more than twenty written in a hurry.
Never cut speed, search structure, or text written for your actual customer. Those three are the only things that bring people in. The rest only impresses them once they have arrived.
What this is about, in full
Frequently asked questions
How long until the site shows up in Google?
Indexing takes days. Ranking on words that bring customers is measured in months and depends on competition, content and how often something new is added.
Is WordPress better, or something built from scratch?
It depends who maintains it. A plugin platform is convenient at first and demands discipline afterwards. A site without plugins has nothing that breaks on its own, but every change goes through someone who writes code.
Do I need an online store or is a website enough?
If you sell standard products in volume, you need a store. If you sell work or services that get quoted, a business website with good forms brings more than an empty store.
Do the domain and hosting stay mine?
They should, always, in accounts in your company name. It is the first thing worth checking in any contract.