How to budget for a website when you have never bought one

Nobody buys their first website confidently. You have no reference price, the quotes you get back differ by a factor of five, and the expensive one and the cheap one describe the same thing in nearly the same words.

Here is how to build a number you can defend to a board or an owner, without pretending to know things you cannot know yet.

Price follows scope, and scope is mostly about pages and behaviour

Two things drive most of the cost. How many distinct page layouts the site needs, and how much the site has to do.

Distinct layouts, not pages. Forty staff profiles that share one design are one layout. A home page, a services page, a service detail page, a contact page and a news article are five. Layouts are the unit of design and build work.

Behaviour is everything beyond publishing text and pictures: taking payments, member logins, event booking, a searchable directory, a donation flow, an application form that routes to different inboxes, a second language. Each of these is a step change in cost, not a small addition. A brochure site and a brochure site with memberships are different products.

The line items that are usually missing from the quote you were sent

Assume the quote covers design and build. Assume it covers nothing else until it says so in writing.

• Content. Someone has to write the words and choose the pictures. If that someone is you, it is free in cash and expensive in calendar time, and it is the single most common reason a website launches late.
• Photography. Stock photography of people who do not work for you is visible from a distance. Real photographs cost money.
• Migrating what already exists. Moving two hundred old news items is not a rounding error.
• Hosting, domain and certificate. Small, annual, and easy to forget until something expires.
• Paid plugins and licences. Forms, bookings, translation, search. Some renew every year.
• Training. An hour or two so your staff can edit a page without calling anyone.
• Maintenance after launch. Updates, backups, security, small fixes. This is a running cost, not a one-off.
• Contingency. Ten to fifteen per cent for the thing nobody thought of. Something always comes up.

Build cost and running cost are two separate budgets

This is the mistake that hurts most, and it is nearly universal among first-time buyers. The whole budget goes into the build. Nothing is left for the year after.

A website is closer to a vehicle than a piece of furniture. It has a purchase price and it has a cost of ownership. Plan for both from the start, and if the numbers do not stretch to both, reduce the build rather than the upkeep. A smaller site that stays current beats a larger site that quietly rots.

Why the quotes differ so much

When the same brief comes back at wildly different prices, it is usually one of these:

• Template versus custom. A configured off-the-shelf theme is fast and cheap and looks like other sites. A design built for you costs more and is yours. Both are legitimate. They are not the same purchase.
• Different assumptions about content. One firm priced writing every page. One assumed you would supply it. Neither said so.
• Different assumptions about revisions. Two rounds or unlimited rounds is a large difference in exposure.
• Seniority. A team with a project manager, a designer and a developer costs more per hour than one person working evenings. You are buying a different amount of reliability.
• One of them has not understood the brief. This happens more than people admit, and it is nearly always the cheapest quote.

To compare fairly, send every firm the same brief and ask each to price the same explicit list of assumptions.

Work out what the site has to earn

A budget with no return attached is just a number you argue about. Try to attach one, even roughly.

If you know roughly what a new client is worth to you over the time they stay, and you know roughly how many enquiries turn into clients, you can work backwards. How many extra enquiries a year would pay for this? Two? Twenty? Two hundred? The answer changes the conversation from “this feels expensive” to “this is or is not plausible.”

For a nonprofit, run the same logic on the thing you actually need: volunteer sign-ups, programme registrations, funder confidence, staff hours saved by a form that routes itself.

A sequence that keeps the number honest

• Write down what the site must achieve, in one paragraph, in plain words.
• List the distinct page layouts.
• List the things the site must do, and mark which are essential this year.
• Decide who writes the content and put a date on it.
• Ask for quotes against that list, with assumptions stated.
• Add ten to fifteen per cent contingency.
• Set a separate annual figure for hosting, licences and maintenance before you sign anything.

If the budget will not stretch

Cut scope, not quality. Launch six pages that are genuinely good and add the rest over the following year. A site built to grow can take new sections later without being rebuilt; a site built cheaply and quickly usually cannot. Ask any firm you are talking to which of those they are proposing, and get the answer in writing.

Our plans page shows what ongoing costs look like, which is the half of the budget most first-time buyers have no reference point for.