Website cost estimator
How much does a website cost?
Answer five questions and get an indicative figure for your market. Nothing is hidden behind a form, and nothing here is a quote: every project is scoped properly before anyone commits to anything.
Estimated cost
Working out the rates for your region.
Indicative figures based on typical market rates for your region: a one off figure for the build, and a monthly subscription for what keeps running afterwards. This is not a quote. The build depends on your content, design needs and timeline; the subscription depends on what the site has to handle. Both are confirmed in writing before any work starts. The full list
What you are paying for
What each option actually gets you
In plain terms, without the jargon, so you can see what every site includes and decide what to add.
The build itselfAlways included
- What it is
- The pages themselves, built by hand rather than assembled from a template: layout, structure, and the code behind them.
- Without it
- A template site looks like every other template site and carries code you never asked for, which is what makes those sites slow and awkward to change a year later.
- What you get
- Pages shaped from the content you send, finished or raw, so they read well and work for search
- Two rounds of revisions are included: a round means you gather your comments and send them in one go, then I apply them. Further rounds are quoted separately
- Up to five pages plus a contact form in the base build, with further pages added per page
- Full ownership, with no monthly licence for the software it runs on
- Over 90 for speed, accessibility and search readiness on mobile, measured with Google Lighthouse at launch, on the pages I deliver. Scripts you add later, chat widgets and embedded video change those numbers and are outside my control.
Technical SEO setupAlways included
- What it is
- Making sure search engines can read your site, understand what each page is about and list it, including shaping the text you send me so each page answers the question people actually type. It is part of every build rather than something to add on. The guarantee on this page rests on it: the search and accessibility checks measure exactly these things. It is configuration, not promotion: nobody buys positions in Google, and this is not monthly work on rankings.
- Without it
- A site can look perfect and stay invisible. That is the ordinary state of a site built without this. Months later there is only silence: you paid for something nobody can reach.
- What you get
- A valid robots.txt and a sitemap, so crawlers are allowed in and find every page, plus structured data in the Schema.org format so results describe each page correctly
- A unique title and description on every page, and hreflang on multilingual sites, so each language is offered to the market it belongs to
- Your copy shaped into pages that answer a real search
- llms.txt, the file that tells an AI assistant what the site contains. A growing share of people reach a company through an assistant rather than a results page, and this is a young convention: publishing one is still unusual
Analytics and cookie consent
- What it is
- Seeing how many people visit, which pages they read and where they give up, set up to follow data protection rules from the first day.
- Without it
- You are guessing. You cannot tell whether a page fails to attract visitors or fails to convince them, and those two problems have opposite fixes. Measuring without the consent part is also a legal exposure in the EU and Switzerland.
- What you get
- Numbers you can actually read, not a dashboard you never open
- A consent banner that records real choices instead of pretending to
- Measurement wired up before launch, so the first month counts
Search performance monitoring
- What it is
- A direct line to the search engine, showing which of your pages are listed, which are not and why, along with the words people used to find you.
- Without it
- You cannot tell a page nobody wants from a page that was never looked at, and those two need completely different work. You wait months for traffic that was never going to arrive.
- What you get
- Google Search Console set up, verified and connected
- Your sitemap submitted and a first indexing check
- The search terms people already use to reach you
Global speed and attack protection
- What it is
- A layer in front of your website, so pages are served from a machine near your visitor instead of travelling from a single server, and so unwanted traffic is stopped before it reaches you. This layer is called a CDN, a content delivery network. It helps the visitor far from your server, not a score in a testing tool: those tools measure from one place with simulated throttling, so they never see the distance. The guarantee this page makes does not depend on this option.
- Without it
- A visitor on another continent waits noticeably longer, and a burst of automated traffic can take the site down at the moment somebody real is trying to reach you.
- What you get
- Cloudflare's global network in front of the site
- DNS moved over, caching configured and certificates handled
- Attacks and junk traffic absorbed before your server sees them, and the site still reachable when the server itself has a problem
Business email on your domain
- What it is
- Email at [email protected] instead of a free address, which is the difference between an offer that looks like a business and one that looks like a hobby.
- Without it
- Almost any hosting will hand you an address, but without the right configuration behind the domain your messages land in spam. That is why offers and invoices quietly go unread.
- What you get
- Mailboxes on your own domain, the first one included in the monthly plan
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC records set, so the receiving server can confirm the message really came from you
- Further mailboxes added per person whenever you need them
Managed hosting and updates
- What it is
- One monthly plan that keeps the site online, updated, backed up and monitored: the server, the software it runs on, the security patches, and someone who notices when something breaks. Hosting and updates go together, because uptime and response times can only be guaranteed on infrastructure I run myself.
- Without it
- A website is not finished when it launches. Software ages, and an unmaintained site becomes slow, broken or compromised, usually at the worst possible moment.
- What you get
- A normal site on shared infrastructure, on the monthly plan
- Backups, security updates and monitoring, without you chasing any of them
- Small text and image changes done for you, as part of the plan
- A dedicated server, quoted on its own, when the site runs an application, handles sensitive data or needs guaranteed resources
Questions
Common questions
Why does the estimate differ by market?
Rates follow local market levels, as they do for any professional service. That means you are quoted at the level of your own market rather than someone else's. The work, the process and the quality are identical; only the rate reflects where the project sits.
Is the price fixed once we agree?
Yes, after scoping. What you see here is indicative. After a short conversation that settles which pages exist and what each one has to answer, you get a fixed price, and it does not move unless you ask for something extra. That works both ways: a fixed price needs a fixed scope, so anything that turns up beyond it is quoted separately, and always before that work starts.
What is not included in this estimate?
Four things:
- Writing your content from a blank page. Rough notes are enough, and shaping them into pages is part of the build.
- Photography and video
- Translating your content. The multilingual structure is in the price; translating the words is not
- Migrating data from an old site
On images: your own or stock, with the stock licence paid by you.
How long does it take?
A presentation site of up to six pages usually takes one to two weeks, and a site of ten to twenty pages in several languages three to four weeks, counting from the day your content reaches me. That is the time to launch, not the time to rank: search results build up afterwards, at their own pace.
What do you need from me before we start?
Less than you expect. The content for the pages, finished or rough. Your logo and any images you already have. Access to your domain. And about an hour to talk through the structure, which is the part that saves the most time later. Everything after that is on me.
Who writes the content?
You do. The structure of the site is part of the build: which pages exist and what each one has to answer. The words themselves come from you, because nobody knows your business better, and they can arrive rough rather than polished, since shaping them is part of the build. Two rounds of revisions are included: a round means you gather your comments and send them in one go, then I apply them. Producing photos and video is not something I do, but every image you send me is optimised for speed. If you want help deciding what to say, that is separate work and we discuss it before it starts.
Can I change things after launch?
Small text and image changes are part of the monthly plan, so you are not billed for correcting a phone number or swapping a photo. New pages, new features and a redesign are quoted separately.
Who owns the site, and what happens if I move to someone else?
You do, and leaving is meant to be uneventful. You get the complete source code and a full backup of your content in a format another developer can import. Search Console and Analytics are created in your own account from the start, with me as an administrator, so there is nothing to hand over at the end: they were yours all along. Cloudflare sits on my company account. It is a layer in front of the site, the site does not need it in order to work, and the domain can be moved to your own Cloudflare account whenever you want.
Need more than a website?
A calculator can price a website. It cannot price a business application, an automation or an integration between systems, because those start from how your company actually works. If that is closer to your situation, the useful next step is a conversation, not a slider. The first one is free.
And if you already run several systems, the useful step may be reading them before building anything. Architecture and audits