Website Maintenance: What It Should Actually Cover
Most maintenance retainers are a backup plugin and an invoice. Here is what the line items should be.
Website Development
How Much Does a Business Website Cost?
The honest answer is that it depends, which is useless. So here are the ranges we quote against and what moves a project between them.
The broad ranges
A few hundred
Five to eight pages, existing content, a template-derived design, standard contact form. Fine for a local service business that needs a credible presence and a phone number.
Low thousands
Custom design, ten to twenty-five pages, a blog architecture, service pages structured for search, forms wired into a CRM. This is where most serious business sites sit.
Mid thousands and up
E-commerce with real catalogue complexity, membership or booking systems, integrations with back-office software, or a custom application with a marketing site attached.
What actually drives the number
- Page count, but less than people expect — templates get reused
- Whether the design is custom or derived from an existing system
- Content: writing it costs more than laying it out
- Integrations, which are usually the most underestimated line
- E-commerce logic — variants, pricing rules, shipping, tax
- Data migration from an existing site, especially with redirects
What is usually underestimated
Content is the single biggest cause of delay and cost creep. Everyone assumes copy will appear. It does not. Either budget for someone to write it or accept that the project timeline is really the content timeline.
Integrations are second. “Just connect it to our CRM” is a sentence that can mean two hours or two weeks depending on whether the systems have decent APIs and whether anyone has decided which one owns each field.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions
- Hosting — modest for a brochure site, more for e-commerce
- Domain renewal, annually
- Premium plugin or theme licences, if the build depends on them
- Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring, small changes
- SSL, usually free now but worth confirming
Questions to ask before you accept a quote
- Is this fixed, or an estimate that can move?
- What specifically is out of scope?
- Who owns the domain, hosting and code at the end?
- What happens if I need a change halfway through?
- Is the design custom or a purchased template?
- What are the ongoing costs after launch?
- Can I edit content myself without breaking the layout?
On cheap quotes
A quote far below everyone else usually means one of three things: the scope is much smaller than you think, corners are being cut somewhere you will discover in month four, or there is a subscription attached that makes it expensive over time.
None of those are automatically disqualifying. But ask which one it is, and get the answer in writing.