How much does a website cost in Australia? A small-business guide

A website for an Australian small business costs $4,000 to $8,000 ex GST with us, for 5 to 8 pages on a content management system you can edit yourself, and it goes live in 3 to 6 weeks. The price includes mobile-first design, contact and booking forms with spam protection, the search setup (titles, structured data, a sitemap and Search Console), analytics, hosting set up in your name and a 30-day warranty. Where your site lands within the range depends on how many pages it has, how much of the design is custom, whether it takes bookings, and how much of the writing we do with you. This guide explains each of those, walks through an example, and covers what a website costs to run once it is live.

Our business website package is the same set of foundations on every site, because those are what make a site fast and findable. The design is yours.

• 5 to 8 pages on a content management system, so you can change text, prices and photos without calling a developer.
• Mobile-first design, because most visitors to a local business arrive on a phone.
• Contact and booking forms with spam protection, so enquiries reach your inbox and spam does not.
• The SEO setup: a unique title and description on every page, structured data for your business and services, a sitemap and Search Console, verified before launch.
• Analytics and hosting setup, on accounts in your name.
• A 30-day warranty after launch. It covers defects in what we built at no charge, and it sits alongside the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law rather than limiting them.

What it does not include is a promise of rankings. Where a site ranks depends on its content, its reviews and the links to it over time. We set the foundations and show you what to do next.

The price follows the amount of work. These are the five things that move a site from $4,000 towards $8,000.

The number of pages. Five pages (home, services, about, contact and one more) sit at the low end. Every extra page needs its own content, its own layout decisions and its own testing.

Custom design. A site built from a consistent set of page layouts in your colours and type costs less than one where every page type has its own design, such as a services section laid out differently from the rest.

Bookings and quote requests. A contact form is in every package. A booking or quote form that asks the right questions and lands in your inbox in a usable shape takes more work, and so does connecting it to a calendar.

Content. The single biggest variable in a website project is the words and photos. If they are ready at the start, the site moves quickly. If we write the service pages with you, or move years of content across from an old site, that is time the quote has to include.

An articles section. A blog or news section you publish to yourself is a good long-term investment for search, and it is extra work to design and build properly.

Imagine a physiotherapy clinic in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Its current site is slow, the booking link goes to a page that does not work on a phone, and the contact form sends half of its messages to spam.

The new site has seven pages: home, three service pages, the team, fees and contact. The clinic already uses an online booking system, so the site links to it from every page rather than rebuilding it. The clinic owner has the service descriptions and photos ready, and wants an articles section to answer the questions patients ask most.

That site would sit in the upper half of our $4,000 to $8,000 range: seven pages, an articles section and some custom design, with the content ready at the start. Because it is under $10,000, there is no paid discovery workshop: after a discovery call, the clinic gets a written scope and a fixed price, and the site goes live in 3 to 6 weeks from the signed scope.

Building the site is one cost. Running it is another, and it is easy to forget when comparing quotes.

• A domain name, renewed every year with the registrar, in your name.
• Hosting and an SSL certificate, so the site loads quickly and securely. We set these up in your name as part of the package.
• Updates and backups. The software underneath a website needs security updates, and someone needs to check that backups can actually be restored.
• Small changes. New prices, a new service, a new photo of the team. The content management system handles most of these, and some need a developer.

You can run all of this yourself: we hand over the logins and the documentation at launch. Or our care plan handles it for $300, $700 or $1,500 a month ex GST, with hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security updates, bug fixes, 2, 5 or 10 change hours and a monthly report. It starts when the 30-day warranty ends and runs month to month after the first three months. What a website maintenance package should include explains what to look for in any plan, ours or someone else's.

A website is for being found, trusted and contacted. If your customers need to sign in and do something, such as book and pay, upload documents or see their own jobs, you need a web app, and that is a different project: our web apps cost $15,000 to $40,000 ex GST and take 6 to 12 weeks. If you are not sure which you need, website vs web app vs mobile app walks through the decision, and the fit check on our services page gives a suggestion in five questions.

1. Tell us about the site. Describe the business, the pages you think you need and any booking or quote forms on our quote page. A founder replies with an estimate range within one business day.
2. Discovery call. We talk through the pages, the content and what the site has to do for your customers.
3. Written scope and fixed price. You get a page plan and a fixed price in writing. A 30 to 50 percent deposit starts the work, and the rest is paid at milestones.
4. Build and launch. You approve the designs before we build, see the site with your content loaded before launch, and it goes live on your own domain.

Every price we charge is on our pricing page, so you can check the figure before you talk to anyone.