What a “simple website” really costs

A lot of conversations about building a website start with “we need a simple site, nothing fancy.” Behind that line there’s almost always an expectation that it will be cheap and quick. Then the proposal arrives, and the estimate is noticeably higher than expected.

It isn’t that agencies inflate their prices. “Simple” describes how the site should look to a visitor. The price is made of how much work sits behind that simplicity.

What hides behind the word “simple”

Here’s an example. The client wants a company website: home, services, about, contact. Sounds like four pages. Then the questions start:

• services: one page, or a separate page for each?
• who writes the copy?
• where do the photos come from?
• where do inquiries go: email or a CRM?
• do you need testimonials, a portfolio, news?
• will you be editing the content yourselves?
• do you need a version in another language?

Every answer adds or removes work. Four pages easily turn into fifteen, and a “little contact form” turns into a CRM integration, lead routing between managers and messenger notifications. And that’s before anyone asks what happens after launch: who updates the site, who keeps an eye on it, who you call when something breaks.

What the price is made of

Break the work on a website into parts and you get roughly this:

• discovery and site structure;
• prototype;
• copywriting;
• design and mobile versions;
• front-end and back-end development;
• content management system;
• integrations: CRM, analytics, maps;
• testing and launch.

In a “simple website,” not every item shrinks equally. You can simplify the design by choosing a calm style without complex graphics. You can skip animation. But discovery, copy, the mobile version and testing don’t go away: without them the site comes out cheaper, but it works worse.

A word about design. A calm style doesn’t mean “thrown together.” For a simple page to look clean, someone has to think through the grid, fonts, spacing and behavior on different screens. Restrained design often takes as much attention as bold design; the work is just less visible.

The costs people forget

Sometimes a site really was built cheaply, but the full cost only became clear later. Here’s what usually doesn’t make it into the first estimate:

• the copy had to be rewritten after launch;
• a photo shoot was needed because stock photos didn’t fit;
• fixes once it turned out leads were being lost;
• reworking the mobile version;
• renewing paid plugins and hosting;
• the time staff spend filling the site with content.

That last item is the one most often underestimated. If updating an apartment’s price or availability in the admin panel is a hassle, the sales team will do it once a week, and the site will keep showing sold units. It’s not a line in the estimate, but it is money.

Where you can honestly save

You can save by cutting scope, not quality. For example:

• launch with fewer pages and add sections as needed;
• build on proven solutions instead of designing everything from scratch;
• prepare copy and photos in-house ahead of time;
• put off complex integrations until you see first results.

Discovery and pre-launch testing are not where to save, though. Mistakes made at those stages surface when the ads are already running and the budget is already being spent.

How to get an estimate you can understand

To compare proposals from different agencies, ask not for a single total but for a breakdown by stage: what’s included and what isn’t, how many rounds of revisions, who is responsible for copy and photos, what happens after launch.

Another useful question: what happens if the scope changes along the way. Almost every project picks up something new: an extra page, another form, a new section. It helps when you know upfront how such changes are estimated and approved, so the final total doesn’t come as a surprise.

Two identical totals can mean completely different amounts of work. And two different totals can mean the same work, where one agency honestly included what the other left for “later.”

An affordable website isn’t the one that cost little to order. It’s the one you didn’t have to rebuild six months later.

If you have a project in mind and want to understand what its cost will be made of, we can go through it item by item: what you really need at launch and what can comfortably wait.