How much does a website cost?
What a professionally built, CMS-driven site actually costs.
What are you building?
What does it need to do?
How much design?
$5,000 – $25,000
- Effort
- 25–44 days
- Elapsed time
- 0–1 months
- Day rate assumed
- $320–$480
An indicative range, not a quote. Real scope moves these numbers, usually once we understand the parts you have not described yet.
Where the effort goes
- Build18–32 d
- Discovery & scoping2–4 d
- QA & testing3–5 d
- Project management2–3 d
Get a real number
Send this over and we'll come back with a scoped estimate — including the questions that would change it. Two business days, no sales script.
The gap between a template site and a built one is mostly editability, performance and whether it still works in three years. A cheap site is usually cheap because someone else's design has been filled in and the content model was never thought about — which is fine until you need to add a page type nobody planned for.
What a project like this usually includes
- A content model that fits you
- Pages, posts, case studies and team entries modelled around how you actually publish, so your team can add content without a developer.
- Custom design
- A layout built to your brand rather than a purchased theme with your logo dropped into it.
- Performance and Core Web Vitals
- Image handling, font loading and rendering strategy — the things that decide whether it feels fast.
- Technical SEO
- Metadata, structured data, canonicals, sitemap and Open Graph, set up once and correctly.
- Forms and enquiries
- Contact and newsletter capture, wired into wherever your team will actually see them.
What actually moves the number
- Page count and templates
- Cost tracks distinct templates, not pages. Fifty pages using six templates is far cheaper than fifteen pages each designed differently.
- Content readiness
- Waiting on copy and images is the most common cause of a site running late. Content that exists and is signed off is worth real money.
- Animation and interaction
- Considered motion is a design and engineering cost, and it is the difference people notice first.
- Migration
- Moving existing content, and preserving URLs so you do not lose the rankings you already have.
Why not just use Wix, Squarespace or WordPress?
For a simple brochure site with no unusual requirements, those are often genuinely the right answer, and we will tell you so. Building becomes worth it when you need performance a page builder cannot reach, a content model it cannot express, integrations it cannot support, or a design that is actually yours.
What is not included in the figure?
Copywriting, photography, domain and hosting, and ongoing maintenance. Content in particular is worth budgeting separately — it is frequently the largest line nobody planned for.
Will my team be able to edit it?
That is the point of the CMS. Text, images, pages and posts are editable without touching code. Changing the underlying design or adding a new type of page is development work.
How long does a website take?
Typically six to twelve weeks for a marketing site of this shape. The build is rarely the constraint; content and review cycles usually are.
A brief makes quotes comparable. Build one in a few minutes and send it wherever you like — including nowhere near us.