What actually moves the number
Quotes vary mostly on five things, and page count is the one people fixate on and the least important.
- Whether the design is custom or a configured template — the single biggest fork in the price
- How much content exists. A site needing copy written for twenty service pages costs more than one where you supply it, and writing is usually the longest part of any build
- What it has to connect to: CRM, booking, payment, inventory, a product catalog with real data behind it
- Whether anything is being migrated — an existing site with rankings needs its URLs mapped and redirected, and skipping that is how a redesign loses traffic
- Number of locations, because each needs its own page, its own schema and its own Google Business Profile to rank locally
Why cheap sites get expensive
The template route looks like a saving and frequently is not, for reasons that only surface a year later.
Themes carry weight you are not using — sliders, page builders, a dozen plugins — and that weight is why the site loads in six seconds on a phone on a jobsite. Speed is a ranking factor and, more immediately, a conversion one: people leave.
The structural problem is worse. A template built for a restaurant does not have a place for service pages per trade or location pages per town, so the content that would rank either does not get written or gets crammed into pages fighting each other. By the time anyone diagnoses it, you are rebuilding rather than fixing — and you have paid twice.
None of which means template is always wrong. If the site is a credibility check for referrals and you have no intention of competing in search, it is the correct spend. The mistake is buying one and expecting it to produce leads.
The ongoing cost nobody quotes
A website is not a one-time purchase and quotes that present it as one are hiding the second half of the bill.
Hosting, domain, SSL, software and dependency updates, security patching, backups, and the small changes every business needs — a price change, a new service, a staff update. Left alone for two years, a site becomes a security liability rather than an asset.
Our maintenance is $150 a month and covers that, which is on the lower end for a managed custom site. The relevant comparison is not against zero but against doing it yourself or paying hourly whenever something breaks, which is how most businesses end up with a site nobody has touched since launch.
What we charge, and when we will tell you not to buy
Builds start at $3,500 and maintenance is $150 a month. Where a project goes above the starting figure, it is because of the five factors above rather than a markup, and we scope it before quoting so you can see which ones apply.
We will also tell you when a rebuild is not your problem. If your site is sound and nobody is finding it, that is a search problem and a new site will not fix it. If enquiries arrive and sit unanswered until Thursday, no website changes that either. Both are cheaper to fix than a build, and we would rather say so than sell you the expensive answer.
