Why There's No Single Number
Search this question and you'll find a lot of confident-looking price tables — and almost none of them apply to your specific project. Website development cost varies so much between a five-page brochure site and a custom web application with booking, payments, and user accounts that any single number is either wildly wrong for most readers or vague enough to be useless.
What actually helps is understanding the factors that move the number up or down, so you can look at a quote you receive and understand whether it makes sense — rather than just comparing it to a figure you saw somewhere else with no context.
What Actually Drives the Price
Number and complexity of pages. A straightforward five-page business site is fundamentally less work than a fifty-page site with varied layouts, or one requiring custom page templates for different content types.
Custom functionality. A booking system, a client portal, a membership area, or anything beyond standard content pages adds real development time — often more than the base site itself.
Design complexity. A fully custom design with unique layouts and interactions takes longer to build than a simpler, more standardized approach, even on the same platform.
Integrations. Payment gateways, CRM connections, third-party booking tools, and similar integrations each add setup and testing time, and complexity varies significantly between different tools.
Content management needs. A site where you'll frequently update content yourself needs a properly configured CMS built with non-technical users in mind — more setup work than a mostly-static site.
WordPress vs. Custom Development
This is one of the biggest cost decision points, and it's worth understanding before you request quotes. WordPress and similar content management platforms handle a huge amount of common functionality out of the box — meaning less has to be built from scratch, which generally makes them faster and less expensive for standard business websites.
Fully custom development means building more from the ground up, which typically costs more but gives full control over functionality that off-the-shelf platforms don't handle well. Neither approach is universally "better" — the right choice depends on what your site actually needs to do, not which sounds more impressive.
Costs That Get Left Out of Quotes
A few things are worth confirming are included before comparing quotes, since they're sometimes left as separate line items or omitted entirely: hosting (where the site actually lives once built), domain registration or renewal, ongoing maintenance after launch, and any premium plugins, themes, or third-party tool subscriptions the site depends on. A quote that looks lower may simply be excluding these — ask directly rather than assume.