How Much Does a Business Website Cost?

The honest answer is that a business website can cost a few hundred euros or six figures, and both numbers can be correct. What’s more useful is understanding which variables move the price, because then you can read any quote and know what you’re actually buying.

The five things that drive cost

1. How many distinct page types there are

Not how many pages — how many kinds of page. Fifty blog posts using one template is cheap. Five pages that each need their own layout is not. When you’re scoping, count templates: home, service, case study, article, listing, contact, legal.

2. Who writes the content

This is the single most underestimated line. Content is usually the reason projects run late, and if you’re asking an agency to research and write it, that’s a substantial part of the budget. If you write it yourself, you save real money — as long as you actually write it.

3. Whether the design is custom

Adapting a well-chosen template is legitimate and can look good. A custom design costs more and is worth it when the site itself is a significant part of how you’re judged — which is true for most B2B service businesses selling considered purchases.

4. What it has to connect to

A form that emails you is cheap. A form that creates a lead in your CRM, deduplicates against existing contacts, assigns an owner, triggers a sequence and posts to Slack is a project. Integration work is where "just a website" quietly becomes software.

5. Whether anything has to be migrated

Moving an existing site means auditing URLs, mapping redirects, preserving pages that already rank and checking indexing afterwards. Skipping it is how businesses lose traffic they’d spent years building.

Rough shapes of projects

These are shapes rather than prices — every market and every scope differs — but the relative effort is fairly consistent:

Project	What it involves	Relative effort
Landing page	One page, one goal, tracking, no CMS	Smallest
Small business site	5–8 pages, light CMS, contact form	Small
Service business site	10–20 pages, service pages, blog, CRM integration	Medium
Content-led site	Full CMS, editorial workflow, topic clusters, structured data	Medium–large
Multi-language or multi-brand	Everything above, times the number of markets	Large

A useful heuristic: if a quote for a serious business site is close to the cost of one month of a junior salary, someone is either using a template you could have bought yourself, or planning to cut the parts you can’t see — performance, accessibility, SEO foundations, testing.

The costs people forget

• Hosting and domains. Modest, but not zero, and they recur.
• Content updates. Someone has to write the next thing.
• Maintenance. Dependencies age, browsers change, forms break silently.
• Analytics and tooling. Often free at first, rarely free forever.
• The second round. Real user behaviour always suggests changes. Budget for them.

A reasonable rule is to plan 15–20% of the build cost per year for keeping the site healthy and improving it. Sites that get nothing after launch decay in about eighteen months.

How to get a quote you can actually compare

Ask every supplier the same five questions:

1. What exactly is included, page type by page type?
2. Who writes the content, and what happens if it’s late?
3. What performance and accessibility standard are you committing to?
4. What happens to our existing URLs and rankings?
5. Who owns the code and the content afterwards?

The answers will separate the quotes far more effectively than the numbers will. Two proposals with the same price frequently describe entirely different projects.

Where we sit

We scope the work first and give a fixed price for a defined scope, because open-ended hourly billing on a website usually means the scope was never agreed. If your budget doesn’t match what you’re describing, we’ll say so early — and often suggest doing less, properly, first.

If you want a specific number, tell us what you’re trying to achieve. It takes one conversation to give you a range you can plan against, and there’s no obligation attached to it.