You describe the same business, the same page count and the same goal to three web companies, and the quotes come back so far apart that you assume somebody is trying it on. Usually nobody is. You have been quoted for three genuinely different products that happen to share a name.
This is worth understanding before you choose, because the cheapest quote is sometimes correct and sometimes the most expensive decision you will make this year, and the difference is knowable in advance if you ask the right four questions.
The four things that actually move the number
1. Whether anyone is deciding the structure
The largest single cost difference is not design. It is whether someone is doing the work of deciding what pages should exist, what each one is for, and what a visitor does next on each.
A quote that starts with "how many pages?" has skipped this. It is a build-to-spec quote, and it will be cheaper, because you have been handed the hard part. A quote that starts with "how do you get customers now?" is pricing the thinking as well as the building.
Both are legitimate. If you genuinely know your structure — because you have an existing site that works and you are refreshing it — the first is not a compromise, it is the right purchase. If you do not, you are buying a faster horse.
2. Template, theme, or built
There is a real spectrum here and the words get used loosely:
- A site builder — Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You are buying a subscription and a layout. Genuinely fine for a simple brochure site, and materially cheaper.
- A premium theme, lightly customised. Most of the WordPress market. The theme brings a large amount of code you will never use, which is where the speed problems start, but it is quick and it is inexpensive.
- A theme plus a page builder, which is the most common local build. Fast to produce, and it carries the heaviest performance cost of anything on this list.
- Built for the business. Slowest, most expensive, and the only option where every kilobyte on the page is there because someone chose it.
A quote three times another is often simply the fourth of these against the second. Neither party is lying; nobody said which one they were pricing.
3. Who writes the words
Content is where projects stall and it is where quotes quietly differ. "Client supplies content" reduces a quote substantially and moves a large job onto your desk — and the job is harder than it sounds, which is why so many half-built sites sit waiting on it for months.
Ask explicitly. A quote including interviews, drafting and revisions is buying something a quote saying "client supplies copy" is not, and the second one will not be finished by the date on it if you are busy.
4. What happens after launch
Some quotes end at launch. Some include redirect mapping from the old site, Search Console setup, analytics, structured data, training and a recording of it. The second list is not padding — the redirect mapping in particular is the difference between keeping the search rankings you already have and losing them on launch day.
That single item is worth more than most of the design decisions in the project, and it is invisible in a proposal that does not mention it.
The questions that make quotes comparable
Ask all four companies these and the numbers usually explain themselves:
- Is this a template, a theme, or built for us? And if it is a theme, which one — the name is findable and you can look at it.
- Who writes the content, and what happens if I am slow getting it to you?
- Is redirect mapping from my current site included? If they do not know what that means, that is your answer about what happens to your rankings.
- What do I own, and what happens if I leave? The domain, the hosting account, the code, the content. Anything held on their side is leverage, and it is fair to ask why it needs to be.
Where a cheap quote is the right answer
Genuinely: if you need a presence rather than a channel — a handful of pages, nobody is searching for what you do, the phone rings from referrals — then a builder subscription is the correct purchase and anything else is over-engineering. We tell people this and lose the work, because the alternative is selling something that will not pay for itself.
The point at which it stops being the right answer is when the site has to earn something: rank for competitive terms, handle a traffic surge, integrate with the system your team uses, or serve a service-area structure with real local pages. Builders hit a ceiling there, and the migration off is a rebuild because the content does not export in a usable form.
Where an expensive quote is worth it
When the site is a revenue channel rather than a business card. When speed matters commercially — an emergency trade after a storm, a store where a second of load time is measurable in orders. When you need something specific enough that a template will fight you. And when you want the thing to still be maintainable in three years by someone who is not the person who built it.
The honest summary
There is no market rate for "a website", because the phrase covers products that differ by an order of magnitude in cost and in what they do. Anyone who gives you a price before understanding which one you need has decided for you.
What you can do is make the quotes comparable. Ask the four questions, get the answers in writing, and the spread will stop looking like a negotiation and start looking like a menu.
If you want a starting point that is not a sales call, run the free audit on your current site first. It takes about two seconds and tells you whether your problem is a rebuild or a fix — and quite often it is a fix, which is a much smaller number than any of the three quotes.