Ask three studios what a website costs and you may get five hundred pounds, five thousand and fifty thousand. That looks like nonsense from the outside. It is not, but the reasons are rarely explained, so here they are.
What you are actually paying for
Very little of the cost of a good site is the pages themselves. It is the thinking beforehand, what the site is for, who it is talking to, what you want them to do, and the work afterwards, making it fast, findable, accessible and easy for you to keep current. A cheap site is usually cheap because that work did not happen.
Template, tailored or bespoke
A template site is the fastest and cheapest, and for some businesses it is genuinely the right answer. A tailored build takes a solid foundation and shapes it properly around your content and brand. A bespoke build is designed and written from scratch, which is what you want when the site has to do something specific or when it is the main way you win work. The prices differ because the amount of thinking differs.
The costs that turn up later
The quote is rarely the whole picture. Hosting and a domain are small but ongoing. Content is the one that catches people out, because writing good copy takes real time and someone has to do it. And there is upkeep: things break, plugins age, standards move. A site nobody maintains starts costing you in other ways within a year or two.
Where the money is worth spending
Spend on clarity before decoration. A fast, well-written, accessible site with a clear path to getting in touch will out-earn a beautiful one that loads slowly and buries the point. Accessibility in particular is worth building in from the start, not just because the law is tightening, but because it is far cheaper than retrofitting.
How to compare quotes honestly
Ask each studio what is included, what is not, who writes the content, what happens after launch, and what you own at the end. The cheapest quote is often the one with the most missing from it, and the dearest is not automatically the most thorough. When we quote, we tell you which of the three routes we think you actually need, including when that is the cheap one.