How Much Does a Custom Website Cost? What Drives the Price

Short answer: it depends on what the site has to do, not how many pages it has. A brand site that tells your story, a storefront that takes payments, and a platform with client logins are three different builds, and an honest quote prices the job rather than the page count. Whatever you pay, you should own the result outright.

The five things that actually move the price

• What the site has to do: inform, book, sell, or run part of your business behind a login.
• Design: a custom design built for your brand, or a theme every competitor can also buy.
• Integrations: payments, booking, your CRM, email, YouTube or social feeds that update themselves.
• Content: who writes the copy and who shoots the photos and video. Stock imagery is cheap and looks it.
• Migration: moving off Shopify, Squarespace or Wix without losing your search rankings or breaking the links people already have.

Renting versus owning

Website builders look cheap because the price is monthly. Add up the subscription, the paid apps and plugins, and any cut of what you sell, and many brands pay more over a few years than an owned build would have cost, while owning none of it. With an owned build the code, the content and the domain are yours, and there is no platform fee keeping it online.

What you should get for the money

• A design built for your brand and your offer, not adapted from a template.
• A site that is fast and works properly on a phone, because that is where most of your visitors are.
• Search basics done from day one: titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap and clean URLs.
• Every form wired to somewhere a person will see it, ideally a CRM, so no inquiry sits unanswered in an inbox.
• The code and the domain in your name.

Questions to ask any web designer

• Who owns the code and the domain when we are done?
• What does it cost me every month after launch, and for what?
• Where does a form submission go, and who gets alerted?
• If I am moving platforms, how do you protect my rankings and old links?

Why we price per build

At Sequence we quote every site as a fixed figure after a scoping call, because a published bracket would be wrong for most people. You can see the kind of work we do on our website and app design page, and the RDCWorld migration off a rented Shopify theme on our rebrands page. When you are ready, start with a short brief.