When you’re asking for a “new website”, it’s important to understand what that means.
Website pricing works like home renovation pricing. A small refresh and a full build with e-commerce are two completely different projects, so calling it “a new website” isn’t enough information. Depending on how long you’ve been in business, you might need a few things first.
We don’t start any website projects before talking about branding. Your brand is the playbook we use to justify every decision. It includes colour, fonts, language, and “the vibe”, and a rebranding (or your first branding) requires market research, strategizing, and collaboration to get it to where it needs to be.
Our larger clients already have brands, but sometimes the brands can be decades old with a brand book that looks like it was handwritten by candlelight. In these cases, it’s important to audit the brand to make sure we’re still making decisions based on the present. If the last strategy was written about targeting young parents in the late 90s, chances are, those are now grandparents!
We should be researching the next generation if you want your website to live long and prosper.
The biggest cost driver isn’t the number of pages, it’s the amount of custom work behind them. A templated site with your branding dropped in is going to be cheaper up front, but you’re trading flexibility and differentiation for that lower price.
When your business grows, your website will need functions that a template can’t handle. We’ve had to rebuild websites from scratch for not being able to integrate with charitable receipt programs, not being able to publish job postings, or even not being able to change the copy on certain pages. And when we compared the costs, it would have been more effective to build it the right way, the first time.
In most cases, a custom site costs more initially. But, when it is built around your actual goals, your actual content, and your actual customer journey, that investment tends to pay off over the life of the site.
Other things that move the number: custom functionality like calculators or client portals, integrations with your CRM or booking system, how much new photography and copywriting the project needs, and how many stakeholders are signing off on each round of revisions. That last one surprises people, but every extra layer of approval adds real time and real cost.
Here’s what we’d tell you to ask any agency quoting you a website project: what’s actually included in that number: strategy and discovery, or just design and build? Is copywriting in scope, or are you supplying it? Who owns the SEO foundation, and is migration planning included if you’re moving off an old platform? A quote that looks cheap on paper can get expensive fast once those pieces show up as add-ons.
One more thing worth budgeting for beyond the build itself: ongoing maintenance. A good rule of thumb is 15 to 20 percent of your build cost annually for updates, hosting, and small fixes. Skipping that line item is how a beautiful new site turns into a neglected, outdated one in under two years. Your website as an asset you maintain, not a one-time purchase you check off a list.
