What drives the price of a website

Every website quote form opens with how many pages. It is the wrong first question, and its persistence is mostly historical — it was a reasonable proxy in an era when pages were built individually, and it stopped being one when templates became standard.

A forty-page site built on five templates is a smaller job than a twelve-page site where every page is designed separately. Page count tells you almost nothing without knowing how many distinct layouts sit underneath it.

The four things that actually set the price

1. Where the design comes from. A purchased theme, a theme customised substantially, or an original design are three different orders of cost, and the gap between the first and third is usually the largest single term in the quote.
2. How many distinct templates exist. Home, standard page, blog listing, blog article, contact — that is five, and it covers most brochure sites at any page count. Each additional layout is real work.
3. What has to connect to what. Payments, booking, CRM, inventory, email, a client login. Each integration is scope, and each has an owner on the client side who must supply access at the right moment.
4. Who edits it afterwards. This one does not show up in the build price at all, and it dominates the three-year cost.

Notice that only the second has any relationship to page count, and even that is loose.

The platform question, in the numbers we have

Across the 27,169 project briefs we hold, the platforms people actually ask for are heavily concentrated:

WordPress outnumbers Webflow twenty-six to one. That is not a quality judgement — it is a statement about the market you are hiring in. A platform with a deep supplier pool is easier and cheaper to get help with in three years' time, and much easier to move away from. A platform with a thin one means your options at renewal are narrower, and that is a real cost even when it never appears on an invoice.

The decision that dominates everything

Whether someone in your business can edit the site is the highest-leverage variable in the whole exercise, and it is almost never priced explicitly.

A site nobody in-house can change generates a support request for every text correction, every new team member's photo, every price update. Each one is small, each one is billable, and each one carries a delay. Over three years those requests routinely add up to more than the difference between the cheapest and most expensive build quotes on the table.

Making a site editable costs something up front — a properly configured editor, some structure, and an hour of training. It is close to always worth it, and it is the first thing cut when a quote needs to come down, which is exactly backwards.

What a fair quote looks like

A quote worth taking seriously names the templates rather than the pages, states where the design originates, lists integrations individually with what each needs from you, says who can edit what after launch, and has an exclusions section.

A quote that gives a single number for a five-page website has not been thought about, and the number is either padded to cover the unknowns or will be revised upward once they surface. Both outcomes cost you; the second one also costs you the schedule.