The same brief produces quotes of £800 and £25,000. Both are serious, and they describe entirely different things. This page sets out the five factors behind that gap, so you can compare quotes rather than line up numbers.
Typical UK and Irish market bands, before recurring costs.
A ready-made template, your copy, your time. Useful for testing whether an idea has legs. Not useful when the site has to produce enquiries: it looks like a thousand others and is effectively invisible in search.
Five to ten pages, adapted design, written copy, SEO groundwork, enquiry form. For most trades and service businesses, this is where the spend starts paying for itself.
More pages, multiple languages, product catalogue, customer area, connections to systems you already run. Most B2B projects land in this band.
Product data, variants, payment, shipping, stock integration. The price depends almost entirely on how many products and connections are involved, and very little on the design.
First, page count — though not the way people assume. The expensive page is not the tenth, it is the first, because that is where the whole design system gets built. Second, the copy. Supplying it yourself lowers a quote noticeably; having it written costs money and usually produces a site that is found more easily, because the text is written towards phrases people actually search.
Third, languages. A second language version does not double the price; it adds roughly a third, provided it is planned from the start. Added afterwards it costs considerably more, because the structure has to be rebuilt around it.
Fourth, integrations: stock system, CRM, booking platform, payment provider. This is the factor that spreads quotes furthest apart, because it rarely appears in the original brief and only surfaces in conversation. Fifth, the SEO groundwork — which some suppliers price as an extra when it is simply part of the job. A site that cannot be found is not finished.
Domain and hosting run to roughly £100 to £300 a year for an ordinary business site. On top sit updates and backups, either as a maintenance retainer or as your own time. Ignoring both leaves you, two years on, with a site carrying known security holes — which is not a theoretical risk.
The cost that actually matters, though, appears in no website quote at all: the budget for being found. A website is not a shop on a busy street; nobody walks past until someone makes them. Spending £5,000 on the site and nothing on visibility produces a good site nobody sees.
Asked of every supplier, they make quotes comparable that did not look comparable at all.
Two routes, same website. Either you pay a little each month with everything included, or you pay once and the site is yours. Neither is the poor relation: pick the one that fits your cash flow.
€24.80per month
VAT included · 24-month minimum term · no setup fee
€350one-off
+ €150 for SEO optimisation on Google and Bing
VAT included · no subscription, no lock-in
Website + SEO: €500, once
Usually three things: whether copy is included, whether the design is bespoke or a bought template, and whether systems are being integrated. Location matters too — a London agency carries a very different cost base from a supplier in Northern Italy for identical work.
No, but a very cheap one is almost always worse. Below about £800 there is simply no time left for original copy, a considered structure and the SEO groundwork: the price is reached with a ready-made template and your own labour.
From around £6,000 for a shop with real product pages, payment, shipping and a stock connection. Price follows the number of products and variants and the integrations; design is the smallest line item.
For testing whether an idea works, yes. As soon as the site has to produce enquiries seriously, you meet three limits: an interchangeable look, mediocre load times and restricted SEO control. Then there is the monthly fee, which never ends.
Three signs: a number given without a single question about your business, a guaranteed first place on Google, and hosting that is not in your name. Any one of them is enough of a warning on its own.
