What decides the price of a business website.

The number and kind of pages

The price of a business website depends less on the page count than on how many different layouts it needs. Many service pages built on one layout take less work than a handful of pages that each need their own design. A layout designed from scratch for your business also takes more work than a ready-made theme adjusted to your colours.

Some pages carry more work than they look: a searchable list of properties or products, a price calculator, a members area or anything behind a login. Name these separately when you ask for a quote. If the site has to meet an accessibility standard, say so at the start, because checking every page against it is real work.

A website redesign adds work of its own. The old content has to be moved and the old page addresses redirected, so you keep the searches they already bring.

Who writes the words and supplies the photos

If you write the text yourself, the quote covers design and build. If the studio writes it, the quote also covers the time to learn your business and draft every page with you. Decide this early and agree dates, because a site cannot launch on placeholder text.

Photos change the price too. Stock photos cost little but look like every other site in your trade. A photographer costs more and shows your real premises and team, which visitors are more likely to trust.

An online store

A store adds products, payments, shipping and taxes, and each one brings decisions. The price depends on how many products and variants you sell, whether product data can be imported from a spreadsheet or another system, how complicated your shipping rules are and whether you sell in more than one currency.

Shopify and WooCommerce cover the usual store needs out of the box. Custom work starts where your business differs: bundles, made-to-order items, trade prices for business customers or stock that has to match a shop till or warehouse system. Product photos and descriptions are content too. Someone has to write or import every one, and a large catalogue needs a plan for that before the build starts.

Connections to your other tools

Each connection to another system is its own piece of work: a booking tool, customer records, an email list, accounting software or online payments. How much work depends on what that tool's API allows, so a studio should check before quoting.

A booking widget placed on a page, or a form that sends an email, is quick. Two systems that must stay in step both ways, with an alert when one of them is down, take far more work to build and test. Ask what happens when a connection fails: a careful build logs each failed step and alerts someone, so no booking disappears without a trace.

How you will edit it after launch

Decide what you want to change yourself. Editing opening hours and prices in a simple editor is standard. Page sections your team can rearrange freely without breaking the design take more work to build. So do staff roles: if the team should edit news but not prices, the editor has to know who may change what.

If changes are rare, sending them to the studio can cost less than an editor nobody uses. Either way, ask who makes changes after launch and how they are charged.

More than one language

An extra language means translating the text, the page addresses, titles and descriptions, adding a language switcher and setting hreflang tags, which tell Google which version to show to whom. Forms and confirmation emails need translating too.

Machine translation needs checking by a fluent speaker, and every later update has to be made in each language. One language kept up to date beats two that drift apart.

Hosting, support and running costs

After launch a site needs hosting, domain renewals, security updates and backups, plus any paid plugins, store plan or booking tool. Ask which of these the quote includes and which you pay for directly.

Support is a separate choice. Fixing what breaks is one job. Ongoing work on content and search is another, and it is usually agreed and priced on its own.

Ask for quotes you can compare

Send every studio the same short brief: what the site is for, the pages you expect, who supplies text and photos, the features from this list, the languages and any date that cannot move. If you have a budget, say so. Each studio can then tell you what fits inside it.

Then compare line by line. Check how many rounds of design changes are included, whether phone testing and the search setup are part of the price, and who owns the site, domain and accounts at the end. When one quote is far below the others, find out what it leaves out.

GGSites quotes after a free consultation, once we understand the scope. See websites for what every build includes, and the FAQ for short answers about cost and timing.