How much does a website cost

We don’t ask for budgets to give us a marker of how much we can charge up to—budgets are a great indicator for our understanding of the complexity of a website and if your budget is realistic for:

We’ve put functionality first because it’s the most complex section when we’re quoting for a new website. Functionality can be as simple as a contact form to intuitive site search to the integration of payment systems. The level of bespoke development required impacts the time needed to develop and vigorously test the functionality. That’s why ecommerce websites tend to have a much higher price tag, as you’re dealing with a consumer's personal data too.

Alongside functionality, this includes third-party integrations and any need for APIs that all need to be included in a website build and have associated costs. Not to mention licences or if hosting is required too.

The planning phase of a website project generally covers a discovery workshop, workshop write-up, personas, customer journeys, call to action strategy, sitemap and component planning. This is the research stage and creates the foundations of what the website is built upon.

Other services can take action during this phase, too—SEO strategies and keyword research are performed during planning to further inform sitemaps and copywriting. In our experience, SEO often highlights other avenues that should be considered for websites that don’t always come to light through discussion or analytics alone.

As an agency that follows a content-first approach, we expect most content (for core pages) to be supplied before design, whether from the client or if we’re providing a copywriting service. This largely includes any assets that may be required alongside the design, such as photography.

UX Design is often calculated on the footprint of a website — how many unique pages need to be designed, the complexity of pages and the consideration for the persona types it needs to serve. User experience design can be much more complicated as its job is to ensure websites work much harder based on call-to-action strategies and the end goals of each page and journey.

We also design on a component basis with a UI Kit, allowing developers to more efficiently develop a website as components span multiple templates.

Alongside the functionality, web development — like our web design — is all bespoke, and we use Craft CMS and Commerce for all our web projects. By building bespoke, there’s no requirement to strip out needless development, functionality, and plugins often found with templates that lead to big security risks and clunky, slow web pages.

The content population can have a knock-on effect with timescales and pricing too. If a client is content populating, not only does Craft training need to take place, but they need to ensure they stick to a strict deadline to give enough time for testing before launch.

The browser and functionality testing put pressure on the website before it’s launched to ensure all functionality works, internal linking is correct, and a website looks great across all browsers. This also includes performance optimisation, performed on go-live to get websites working as efficiently and fast as possible

Project managing a website is a crucial part of ensuring its success. From keeping track of budgets, scope creeps, client meetings and liaisons, briefing team members on content, design and development and ensuring a project meets its deadline, it’s a complex role with many spinning plates. The bigger the website and the more functionality, the more project management is needed.

That’s only a top-level overview of a website project's many facets and inner workings, so it’s no wonder it can be quite costly for a new website.

So, that’s why we always ask what a client's budget is for their new website, else we run the risk of missing out on work because we’ve over-quoted based on a lack of budget and, sometimes, a lack of client understanding of exactly what’s involved with a website build. It’s swings and roundabouts!

We’re really big on transparency at Abstrakt, and setting expectations when it comes to cost is important in saving you time and money, as well as us.

Single pages tend to be built statically with HTML over benign content manageable. Typically, single or holding pages are combined with a larger website project and are used to replace outdated websites or introduce new products or venues to begin building interest. For the most part, we incorporate holding pages into the overall website cost, but for single static pages, they’d typically cost between £2-£6k. Again, that largely depends on functionality.

Brochure websites are anything outside of ecommerce and can be a small 2-5 page website all the way up to a multi-page, multi-lingual, editorial or solution-based offering.

Functionality largely depends on audience needs, from newsletter sign-ups to smart search integration such as Algolia. A brochure website typically costs between £20k — £80k.

Generally speaking, you’d be looking at Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce or Craft Commerce as your ecommerce platform.

At Abstrakt, we only develop on Craft Commerce due to its security, reliability, customisable nature and the fact that you can build the site with exactly what you need, and not all the “out-the-box extras” that bloat an ecommerce and make the content management of the backend cumbersome.

Ecommerce prices largely depend on licenses, scalability, functionality, and the introduction of APIs — aside from all of the security and payment gateways etc — so they can heavily range in price. And because we build sites on Craft Commerce, we build everything from scratch. An ecommerce website typically costs between £80k — £150k+