Ask three agencies to quote the same website and you can easily get numbers that differ by a factor of ten. That’s not because two of them are ripping you off. It’s because “a website” isn’t a product with a fixed spec, and each quote is pricing a different amount of work. Here is what’s actually inside the number, so you can compare quotes properly.
What you’re paying for
1. Discovery and planning
Someone has to work out what the site is for, who it’s talking to, what pages it needs and what each page has to achieve. A cheap quote usually skips this and assumes you’ll tell them. An expensive one usually includes workshops and a written plan. Neither is wrong; they’re just pricing different things.
2. Design
This is where quotes diverge most. At one end, a pre-made template with your logo and colours dropped in. At the other, custom layouts designed page by page, tested on phones and tablets, with a style guide you can reuse. A template can be the right choice for a simple site. It’s the wrong choice if you need to stand out from six competitors using the same one.
3. Content
Are you writing the words, or are they? Are you supplying photos, or are they sourcing or shooting them? Copywriting and photography are often the difference between a site that looks finished and one that looks like a demo. If a quote assumes you’ll supply everything, and you don’t, the project stalls.
4. Build
The platform, the theme, the plugins, the forms, the integrations. A five-page brochure site is one job. A site with online booking, a shop, a members area or a connection to your CRM is several jobs. Ask what’s included, and specifically ask what happens when you want to add a page yourself later.
5. Search and performance
A site can look perfect and still be invisible on Google. Proper page structure, titles, descriptions, schema, fast loading and a clean migration of your old URLs are all separate work. Some quotes include it, some list it as an add-on, some don’t mention it at all. The last group is the one to be careful of.
6. Aftercare
Hosting, updates, backups, security, small changes. Some agencies bundle a year; some charge monthly; some hand you the keys and disappear. A low build price with a high monthly fee can cost more over three years than the reverse.
Why the cheapest quote is often the most expensive
The pattern we see most often: a business takes the lowest quote, gets a site that looks fine, then discovers it loads slowly, doesn’t rank, can’t be edited without a developer, and needs to be replaced within two years. The second site costs what the first one should have. If a quote is far below the others, ask what’s been left out, because something has.
Why the most expensive quote isn’t automatically the best
Equally, a high price can be paying for things you don’t need: a custom design system for a three-page site, a content strategy for a business with one service, an enterprise platform for a local clinic. A good agency will tell you when the simpler option is the right one.
How to compare quotes fairly
- Ask each agency to list what’s included and what isn’t, page by page and feature by feature.
- Ask who writes the copy and supplies the images.
- Ask what’s included for search, and whether old URLs will be redirected.
- Ask what it costs to run for the next 12 months, not just to build.
- Ask to see two sites they’ve built that are still live, and check them on your phone.
Once every quote is answering the same questions, the price differences start to make sense, and the right one is usually obvious.
What we do
We give a fixed quote before any work starts, with the inclusions written down, so there are no surprises later. If you’d like one, tell us about the project, or have a look at some recent sites we’ve built first.