"How much does a website cost?" is one of the hardest questions to answer honestly, because it genuinely depends on what you need. This is a breakdown of what actually drives the price, so you can ask the right questions before you hire anyone.
What actually affects the cost
Number of pages
A single-page site is cheaper and faster to build than a multi-page site with separate pages for each service, case study, or location. More pages usually means more content to write and more SEO work, not just more design.
Custom functionality
A basic informational site costs less than one with a booking calculator, payment integration, or a backend that stores form submissions somewhere useful. Anything that needs to "do" something beyond display content adds development time.
Design work
A site built from a generic template will always cost less than one designed specifically around your brand. That difference shows — a custom design is usually what makes a site feel trustworthy rather than generic.
SEO setup
Basic SEO (page titles, descriptions) is quick. Full technical SEO — schema markup, sitemap submission, Search Console setup, Google Business Profile configuration — takes real time and should be scoped separately if it's not already included.
Questions to ask before you hire someone
- Does the price include deployment — domain, hosting, and SSL setup?
- Do I own the code and domain outright, or is it locked to a platform?
- Is SEO included, or is it a separate add-on?
- What happens after launch — is support included, and for how long?
- Will I get the actual source files, or just access to a page builder?
The real cost isn't just the invoice
A cheap site that isn't properly deployed, isn't SEO-ready, and that you don't fully own often costs more in the long run — in lost search visibility, in being unable to make changes yourself, or in having to rebuild it later. The better question isn't "what's the cheapest option" but "what does this price actually include."