A professionally built small business website in Australia typically costs $3,000 to $10,000 + GST from a small agency, $1,000 to $3,000 for a template site from a freelancer, and $10,000 and up for larger custom builds. DIY builders cost tens of dollars a month, plus your time. Hosting, maintenance and licences come on top of the build.
So quotes can range from a few hundred dollars to well over $20,000 for what sounds like the same job: “a five-page site for my business”. Owners reasonably assume someone is ripping them off. Usually nobody is. The quotes just include very different amounts of work, and the cheap ones leave a lot of it to you.
This is how we’d explain the price of a website to a friend, including where our own pricing sits.
Where the money goes
A website is not one job. It’s six or so jobs bundled together, and the price depends on how many of them the quote includes and how seriously each one is done.
| Part of the job | What it involves | Often skipped in cheap quotes? |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy and planning | Working out who the site is for, what pages it needs, what each page has to achieve, what to keep from the old site | Yes, almost always |
| Content | Writing or editing the words, sourcing photos, writing service pages that answer real questions | Yes, left to the client |
| Design | Layout, typography, colours, how it looks on a phone, how the brand carries through | Replaced with a template |
| Build | Putting it together in WordPress, Shopify or similar, forms, menus, responsive editing, speed | No, but done quickly |
| Launch and setup | Redirects from old pages, Google Analytics, Search Console, Bing, email testing, backups | Often |
| Hosting and maintenance | Somewhere decent to live, updates, security, someone to call when it breaks | Varies a lot |
Content is the big one. In our experience it’s the part that most often delays projects, and the part a cheap quote quietly hands back to you. If a quote says “client to supply all text and images”, that’s fine, but count your own hours as part of the cost.
Strategy is the other gap. A site built without anyone asking what it needs to do tends to look fine and achieve nothing. We’ve written separately about what a small business website should actually do, and that thinking is what you’re paying for in the planning stage.
Realistic price bands
These bands are based on the quotes we see clients bring to us and the work involved at each level. They’re rough, they overlap, and prices are before GST unless stated.
DIY website builders: tens of dollars a month, plus your time
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify’s basic plans and similar. The monthly fee is low and the tools are good now. What you’re not paying for is someone else’s time, so planning, writing, design decisions and setup all fall to you.
This works well for a new business testing an idea, or an owner who enjoys this sort of thing and has the hours. It works badly when the owner is already flat out and the site never gets finished. Check the plan terms carefully, because some features sit on higher tiers, and you’ll want to know what happens to your content if you leave.
Template site from a freelancer or budget provider: roughly $1,000 to $3,000
You get a pre-made theme with your logo, colours and text dropped in. It can be perfectly decent for a simple business. The risks are that content is entirely on you, there’s little thought about what each page should do, and you may get a site that’s hard to edit or tied to the builder’s own account.
Small agency build: roughly $3,000 to $10,000
This is where most small business sites we build sit. You should expect a planning conversation, help with content, a design that suits your business rather than a theme demo, proper mobile layouts, and the launch setup done for you. Our web design packages start from $3,000 + GST, and e-commerce builds from $4,500 + GST, with training, a written guide and 30 days of support included.
For tradies who just need a solid, fast site, we also run tradie.agency, with a one-page site from $1,000 + GST. It’s a fixed-scope product, so the price is lower because the decisions have already been made.
Larger custom builds: $10,000 to $30,000 and up
More pages, custom functionality, integrations with booking or CRM systems, multiple locations, membership areas, large catalogues, or a full brand process alongside the site. If someone quotes this for a five-page brochure site, ask what’s driving it.
What moves a quote up or down
Within any band, a handful of things push the price around. If you want to bring a quote down, these are the levers worth discussing:
- Number of unique page layouts. Ten service pages that share one layout cost far less than ten pages each designed differently.
- Who writes the content. Supplying finished, edited text saves real money. Supplying rough notes for the designer to rewrite doesn’t save as much as people expect.
- Photography. Using your own decent photos is cheaper than a shoot. Using stock is cheaper again, but usually costs you in trust.
- Functionality. Online booking, quote forms with uploads, memberships, product filters and integrations with other software all add time. Ask which ones you need at launch.
- Migration. Moving 200 old blog posts and setting redirects for each takes longer than starting with eight fresh pages.
- Decision-making. A project with one decision-maker moves faster, and costs less, than one where five people give feedback on every round.
The costs that come after launch
The build is a one-off. These keep going:
- Domain name. A .com.au is licensed for a term, not bought outright, and has to be renewed. The rules for who can hold one are set by auDA. Make sure it’s registered in your business’s name, not your web person’s.
- Hosting. Anything from a few dollars a month to hundreds. Our hosting is $25 a month + GST. Very cheap shared hosting is a false economy for a WordPress site: slow pages, poor support and unpredictable security.
- Maintenance. WordPress, its plugins and themes need regular updates. Either you do it, you pay someone, or the site slowly becomes a security problem. Our website care plans start from $79 a month + GST.
- Licences. Premium plugins and page builders (Elementor Pro, for example) have annual licences.
- Changes and additions. New services, staff, photos. Budget a few hours a year at least.
- Marketing. A website doesn’t bring its own traffic. If you’re expecting Google to send people, read how long SEO takes before you set expectations.
Why the cheapest quote often costs more
This isn’t a pitch to spend more for the sake of it. Some cheap sites are fine. But these are the patterns we see when people come to us after the budget option:
The site was never finished. The quote assumed the client would write all the content. The client was busy. The site sat at 80% for eight months.
It can’t be edited. Built with a heavily customised theme or a builder only the developer understands, so every small change means a paid request.
It isn’t really yours. Some low-upfront deals are subscriptions in disguise. You pay monthly, and if you leave, the site stays with them. We go through the five-year maths of renting vs owning your website in a separate article, and the numbers are often a shock.
The old Google rankings vanished. Nobody set up redirects from the old page addresses, so years of search history got thrown away at launch.
It’s slow and keeps breaking. Cheap hosting, too many plugins, no updates. The rebuild ends up costing more than doing it properly the first time would have.
How to compare quotes that look nothing alike
Before you choose, ask each provider the same questions and put the answers side by side:
- Who writes the content, and how many rounds of edits are included?
- Is the design custom or based on a template? Can I see two sites you’ve built recently?
- What platform is it built on, and could another developer take it over?
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the website files when we’re done?
- What’s included at launch: redirects, analytics, Search Console, email testing, backups?
- What does hosting and maintenance cost per month or year, and what does it cover?
- Will I be trained to edit it myself? Is there a written guide?
- What happens, and what does it cost, if I want to leave?
A quote that answers all eight clearly is worth more than a cheaper one that dodges half of them.
Feel free to put us through the same eight questions. Our web design packages answer most of them in writing, and if you send us the details, we can place your project in one of the bands above. Already paying monthly for a site you don’t own? Our website ownership rebuild starts from $3,800 + GST.