The honest answer to “how much is a website?” is “it depends”. Annoying, but two sites with the same page count really can differ several times in price. Here is what makes up an estimate and which decisions move it most.
Research and structure
Before design you need to know who visits the site, what matters to them and what they should do. That means interviews, a competitor review, a page structure and a prototype.
This stage is the one people want to skip to save money. Yet it decides whether the site brings leads. A structural mistake costs more later than any colour choice.
Design
Design cost depends on the number of unique templates, not pages. Ten service pages on one template cost less than three pages that are each built differently.
- Number of unique page templates
- Responsive versions: phone, tablet, wide screen
- Illustration, 3D, photography
- Animation and micro-interactions
Development and technology
A site builder is cheaper and faster at the start. Custom code costs more but gives an admin panel shaped around your processes, integrations and full control. For SWAY Media we built a platform with a 1,000+ channel catalog and three user roles, which a site builder cannot do.
- A CMS where your team edits content
- Integrations: CRM, payments, external APIs
- Accounts, filters, calculators
- Speed, security, SEO foundations
Content
Copy, photos and video are a separate line people often forget. If the client prepares content, the timeline depends on them. If the studio does, it goes into the estimate.
Launch and support
After launch you need hosting, updates, backups and ongoing work: new pages, banners, experiments. This can be one-off tasks or ongoing design support.
Where to save without losing anything
- Launch the key pages first, the rest in phase two
- Build service pages on one template
- Write copy yourself using our structure
- Choose a site builder if you need no integrations or admin panel
Do not save on research and structure: a beautiful site with the wrong logic is the most expensive kind, because it gets rebuilt.
In short
Website cost is driven by unique work — structure, templates, technology and integrations — not by page count. Send us a few lines and we will prepare an estimate by stage, showing what can wait.
