What a website should cost — and what you are actually paying for

Ask three companies to quote a small-business website and you can get $800, $6,000 and $22,000 for what sounds like the same brief. None of them is necessarily lying. They are describing different products, and the brief was not specific enough to tell them apart.

What actually drives the number

Four things, mostly.

How much of the design is made for you rather than adapted from a template. A template configured well is a perfectly respectable outcome and costs a fraction of original design work; the mistake is paying original-design prices for it.

How much of the content you supply. Words, photographs, product data, prices. Content is the single most common reason a website project runs late, and the single most common thing a client assumes is included when it is not.

Whether the site does anything beyond presenting information. A contact form is not a feature. Booking, ordering, accounts, payments and integrations are, and each one roughly doubles the surface area that has to be tested and maintained.

And how much of the ongoing work is included. This is where quotes diverge most, because it is the part nobody itemises.

The costs that arrive after launch

A website is not a purchase. It is a subscription with a large first payment. Hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, software updates, security patching, backups, and someone to fix it when it breaks — these continue whether or not they appeared in the quote.

When a site is quoted cheaply, those costs have usually not gone away. They have been moved to you, and they surface a year later as an expired certificate showing every visitor a full-page browser warning, a contact form that silently stopped delivering, or a theme that no longer works with the current version of the platform it was built on.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary weather of running software, and the only question is who is standing in it.

Two honest ways to buy

The first: pay a larger fee up front, own the result outright, and separately arrange hosting and maintenance — with a written answer to who does what. This suits a business with someone technical in-house, or one that expects to change suppliers.

The second: pay monthly for a managed site, where the build, the hosting and the upkeep are one line item. This suits a business that wants the website to be somebody else's problem, and is willing to trade outright ownership of the build for that.

Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is a low build price with the maintenance question left unasked, which is neither of these things pretending to be the first.

What "cheap" usually means

Not always bad — sometimes it means a template, a small scope and an efficient builder, which is exactly right for plenty of businesses.

But be able to tell that apart from the other kind: no staging site, so changes are made live; no backups, so a bad edit is permanent; no updates, so the site ages into a security problem; and a build that only its author can modify, which converts every future change into a negotiation.

The tell is not the price. It is whether the supplier can describe what happens after launch without being asked twice.

What the ongoing part actually consists of

It is worth naming the work, because "maintenance" sounds like a subscription for nothing until you list it.

Hosting and a domain, which are the small, visible part. A TLS certificate, renewed automatically, with something watching in case renewal fails — an expired certificate does not degrade the site, it puts a full-page warning in front of every visitor.

Software updates, which on a typical content-managed site means the platform itself plus a dozen or more plugins, each on its own release schedule, some of which will conflict. Applying them is ten minutes. Checking the site still works afterwards is the actual job, and it is the step that gets skipped.

Backups, taken on a schedule, stored somewhere other than the server they came from, and restored occasionally to prove they work.

Uptime monitoring, so that a site going down at two in the morning is discovered by a machine rather than by a customer at nine.

And somebody who answers. That last one is most of what you are paying for, and it is the only line that cannot be automated.

What you should own when it is finished

This belongs in the conversation before the work starts, because it is almost impossible to negotiate afterwards.

The domain name should be registered to your business, with you as the contact — not to the agency, and not to an individual who happens to work there. The hosting account should be in your name even if somebody else manages it. You should have administrator access to the website itself, and know it works, because a login you have never tested is not access.

The same goes for the accounts that accumulate around a site: the analytics property, the Google Business listing, the email sending service, the domain's DNS. Each one is trivial to set up in your name at the start and a genuine ordeal to recover later.

None of this implies distrust. Good agencies set it up this way by default and will tell you so unprompted. But relationships end for ordinary reasons — someone retires, a firm is sold, a contractor stops replying — and the businesses that get stuck are never the ones that were treated badly. They are the ones where nobody wrote down whose name it was in.

The question to ask every quote

Not "how much" but "what does month thirteen look like".

Who hosts it. Who applies updates. Who holds the backups and when did they last restore one. What happens if I want to change a price myself. What does it cost me to leave, and what exactly do I take with me.

A supplier who answers those clearly is usually the one whose number you can trust. A supplier who has not thought about them has not priced the actual work — and the difference will be billed to you eventually, in money or in downtime.