Ask three people to quote for a website and you will get three wildly different numbers. That is not because someone is cheating you. It is because "a website" describes anything from a single page to a full booking system.
Here is what actually moves the price.
Five pages that share one layout is a small job. Five pages that each work differently is not. When you compare quotes, compare the number of distinct layouts, not the number of pages.
A contact form is cheap. Online booking with availability, or payments, or a customer login, is a different category of work because it has to handle mistakes, failures and edge cases. Be honest with yourself about whether you need these on day one.
This is the most commonly hidden cost. Many quotes assume you will supply all text and images. If you will not realistically do that, the project stalls for months. Ask explicitly who is responsible.
Hosting, domain renewal, SSL, backups and updates are ongoing costs. A quote that does not mention them is not cheaper — it is incomplete.
You should not pay extra for the site to work on phones. More than half your visitors will be on a phone, so that is not an upgrade, it is the baseline. You should not pay for a design that takes several seconds to load because of large images. And you should not pay for a site you cannot make small edits to yourself.
Work out roughly what one new customer is worth to you over a year. If a site brings you a handful of extra enquiries a month, most sensible quotes pay for themselves. If you cannot see how the site would produce a single enquiry, the price is not the problem — the plan is.
We are happy to tell you what we would build and what we would leave out, before you commit to anything.
