Ask four agencies to quote for “a website for my business” and you will get four numbers that do not resemble each other. That is not because three of them are cheating you. It is because the phrase describes almost nothing, and each agency has filled in the blanks differently. This is what actually moves the number, so you can compare quotes that are not comparing the same thing.
1. How many pages, and who writes them
Page count is the obvious driver, but it is the smaller half of it. The expensive part is not building a page; it is deciding what goes on it and writing that.
A five-page site where you supply finished copy is a fundamentally different job from a five-page site where someone has to interview you, work out what your customers actually ask, and write it. The build hours might be identical. The total can differ by a factor of two.
When you read a quote, find the line that says who is writing. If it is not there, ask. “Content to be provided by client” is the single most common reason a project that was quoted for six weeks takes five months.
2. Templates versus pages
A 40-page site is not eight times the work of a five-page site, because most of those 40 pages share a handful of templates. What costs money is the number of distinct layouts.
So a site with a home page, a service template, a blog template and a contact page is four designs, whether you then create 6 service pages or 60. If a quote prices per page rather than per template, you are probably paying for repetition.
3. Whether anything has to talk to anything else
Integrations are where estimates go wrong, because they look like a line item and behave like a project. Common ones:
- Payments. Configuring a gateway is an afternoon. Handling declined cards, refunds, partial payments and reconciliation is not.
- Booking or appointments. Simple until you add staff availability, holidays, buffers and cancellations.
- CRM or ERP. The cost depends entirely on whether the other system has a usable interface. Some do. Some require a middle layer that nobody budgeted for.
- Stock. If stock lives in a shop till or an offline sheet, syncing it is its own piece of work.
Each of these should have its own line and its own price in a quote. If they are bundled into “development”, nobody has thought about them yet.
4. Ecommerce changes the shape of the job
An online store is not a website with a cart bolted on. It is a logistics product with a shop front. The work that decides whether it succeeds mostly happens away from the design:
- Category and filter structure that matches how people shop, not how your stock sheet is arranged.
- Shipping zones, weights and rates — including the places you do not deliver to.
- Tax configured properly and invoices your accountant will accept without reformatting.
- Variants and stock behaviour, so an out-of-stock item does not quietly take an order.
- Return and warranty pages, which buyers read before they buy.
A store quote that is cheaper than a brochure-site quote is a warning, not a bargain.
5. How it is built, which you pay for later
Two sites can look identical on launch day and cost completely different amounts to own.
A page-builder site assembled from a theme and fifteen plugins is faster to produce. The bill arrives later: every plugin is a licence, an update, and a thing that can break the layout. A year in, the page weight has doubled because each plugin loads its own scripts, and nobody can make a change confidently because nobody knows which plugin owns which part of the page.
Hand-written templates cost more up front. What you buy for that is a site another developer can take over, pages that stay light because there is simply less code, and changes that do not require anyone to hold their breath.
Neither is automatically right. But you should know which one you are buying, because the three-year cost is not the same.
6. The parts that are always in the quote and rarely discussed
Ask whether these are included, because each one costs real hours and each one is frequently dropped to make a number look better:
- Redirects from your old URLs. Skip this and you throw away every link your old site had earned. It is not optional work; it is the difference between keeping your search visibility and starting over.
- Tracking. Analytics and conversion tracking, tested with a real form submission. Without it you cannot tell which marketing worked.
- A speed pass. Images sized and converted, scripts trimmed, checked on a mid-range phone rather than on a developer’s laptop.
- Backups and a restore you can actually run. A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a backup.
- Handover. Code, hosting, domain and admin logins in your name, plus someone showing your team how to use it.
7. Ongoing costs, kept separate
These are not build costs and should never be hidden inside one. Domain renewal, hosting, email, SSL, paid plugins or themes, stock imagery, and — if you are running campaigns — the advertising budget itself. A straight quote lists them at cost, or tells you to pay the provider directly.
How to compare two quotes properly
Put them side by side and check these five things rather than the totals:
- Who writes the content.
- How many distinct templates, not pages.
- Whether redirects, tracking and a speed pass are named explicitly.
- Whether you own the code, hosting and accounts at the end.
- What happens to the price if you add a page or a round of revisions.
If one quote is dramatically cheaper, the difference is almost always in that list. Find out which item is missing before you decide it is a better deal.
What we do
We quote a fixed price after a short call and a look at your current site, and the proposal lists what is included and what is not, in plain language, before any invoice. If your situation does not need something, we take it out and the price comes down. If a rebuild is not what you need, we will say so — sometimes three fixed pages do more than a new site does.
Send us your URL and we will send back a written teardown within two working days, with no pitch attached.
Written by WebbotX — a website design, development and search studio in Najafgarh, New Delhi. We take six clients at a time, which means the person who audits your site is the one who builds it.