Ask five agencies to quote the same website and you will get five numbers that do not look like they describe the same project. One comes back with a figure you could put on a credit card. One comes back with something closer to a car. Both are quoting honestly. They are just quoting different work.
The number is not arbitrary, and it is not a measure of how good the agency is. It is a direct function of seven things — and once you can see them, you can read any quote in about ten minutes and tell whether it is a plan or a guess.
The seven variables that move the price
1. Unique templates, not page count
Clients describe scope in pages. Builders price in templates. A 400-page site built from six templates — home, service, case study, blog index, blog post, contact — is cheaper to design and build than a 12-page site where every page is bespoke.
So when someone asks "how much for a 20-page site?", the honest answer is another question: how many of those twenty pages are genuinely different layouts? Usually it is four or five. Pricing by template also means you can add pages later for near nothing, which is exactly what you want if you are planning to publish.
2. Who produces the content
Content is the single most common reason projects stall and budgets drift. A build priced on the assumption that you supply final copy, and then run on copy the agency has to write and the client has to approve, is a different project. Decide this before the quote, not during week six.
Three honest arrangements: you write it, they write it, or they interview you and write it from the transcript. The third produces the best result for most service businesses, because the specifics that make a site persuasive are in your head and nowhere else. It also costs the most, and it should be a named line item rather than something absorbed into "design".
3. Integrations and data
Anything that has to talk to another system is where the hours go. A CRM push, a booking calendar, a payment flow, a members area, a product feed, a multi-step quote form that routes by territory — each one has an API to read, failure states to handle, and someone else's rate limits to respect.
A brochure site with a contact form and a site that syncs leads into HubSpot with field mapping and deduplication are not the same build, even though they look identical in a screenshot.
4. Platform and the editing model
Platform choice is mostly a choice about who edits the site after launch. WordPress costs less to hand over because your team probably already knows it and the hiring pool is enormous. A custom front end on a headless CMS costs more up front and is usually worth it when the site is large, fast-moving, or has to hit performance targets a plugin stack cannot reach.
The expensive mistake is picking the heavier option for a site that will be edited four times a year. The other expensive mistake is picking a page builder for a site that will be edited four times a week, then paying for the rebuild in two years.
5. Performance and accessibility as requirements
"Fast" and "accessible" are either in the scope with a measurable bar, or they are hopes. A site built to hit a Core Web Vitals threshold and pass a WCAG 2.2 AA audit involves real work: image pipelines, font strategy, deferred third-party scripts, keyboard-tested components, contrast decisions that constrain the visual design.
That work is not free, and it is not something you can bolt on cheaply afterwards. If a quote does not mention either, assume neither is included, and ask. For what the retrofit version looks like, see our speed optimization service.
6. Migration and redirects
If you have an existing site with traffic, the riskiest hour of the whole project is the hour it goes live. Every indexed URL that changes needs a 301 to its closest equivalent. Miss that and you lose rankings you spent years earning — the kind of loss that takes two quarters to recover and shows up in the revenue line, not just the analytics.
A redesign quote should include a line for crawling the current site, mapping every URL, and testing the redirects in staging. If it does not, the number is not comparable to one that does.
7. What happens after launch
A website is not a deliverable, it is a system that needs updates, backups, monitoring, and someone to answer the phone when a plugin conflict takes down the checkout. Some agencies price that in. Some price it separately. Some do not offer it at all, which is fine as long as you know before you sign.
Three pricing models, and when each one is honest
- Fixed fee. Right when the scope is genuinely knowable — a marketing site with a defined template set. It transfers estimation risk to the agency, which is correct, as long as the change-request process is written down and not a surprise.
- Time and materials. Right for discovery work, integrations with systems nobody has read the docs for yet, and long-running improvement work. Only honest with a cap and a weekly burn report.
- Monthly retainer. Right for SEO, conversion work and care plans, where the value compounds and there is no finish line. Wrong as a way to disguise the cost of a build by spreading it over 36 months with a lock-in clause.
Questions that separate a real quote from a guess
- How many unique page templates are in this number?
- Who writes the copy, and when is it due?
- What happens to the price if we add a template in week five?
- Is the URL map and redirect plan in scope?
- What performance and accessibility standard is this built to, and how is it verified?
- Who owns the code, the domain, the hosting account and the analytics property on day one?
- What does month two cost?
A quote that can answer all seven without a pause is a plan. A quote that cannot is a number someone picked because it felt right, and it will move.
Where the money is usually wasted
Not on design. The common waste is in three places: paying for pages nobody will read, paying for a bespoke build of something a well-chosen existing component does better, and paying twice because the first build did not account for the second year.
The last one is the big one. A site built without a content model — no structured case studies, no post type for the thing you will obviously want to publish, no way to add a service without a developer — is a site you will rebuild sooner than you planned. Ask what the site looks like with triple the content on it.
How we quote
We scope by template, name the content arrangement in writing, price integrations individually, and include the redirect map in every redesign. We will also tell you when a smaller build would serve you better, because a site you can afford to maintain beats one you cannot. Our current ranges are on the pricing page — real numbers, not "contact us".