A small business website in Australia typically costs between $3,000 and $8,000. A larger marketing site with custom design and integrations runs $8,000 to $25,000, and ecommerce usually starts around $10,000 and climbs from there. Those are market ranges rather than our quotes, but they are the numbers most Australian businesses will see.
The more useful question is why quotes for the same brief differ by a factor of five, because the answer tells you what you are actually buying.
What each price band buys
Under $3,000 you are buying a template, populated with your content, by one person working quickly. That is a legitimate product for a business that needs a credible presence and nothing more. What you will not get is original design, meaningful search work, or anyone available in six months when something breaks.
Between $3,000 and $8,000 you get a properly structured WordPress site: a design shaped around your content rather than the other way round, sensible page structure, mobile behaviour that has been checked rather than assumed, and basic search fundamentals in place at launch. This band covers most service businesses.
Between $8,000 and $25,000 the difference is depth rather than polish. Custom design, more pages, real copywriting, integrations with a CRM or booking system, performance work, and a testing pass that includes accessibility. This is where a website stops being a brochure and starts being infrastructure.
Ecommerce sits apart because the complexity is in what happens after the click: payment, shipping logic, tax, inventory sync, abandoned carts, and the returns process. A simple store on a hosted platform can be done for less. A store that talks to your accounting and inventory systems will not be.
What actually moves the number
- Page count, but far less than people expect. Ten pages built from four templates is not much more work than four pages.
- Whether the copy exists. Writing it is often a quarter of the project and is the most common cause of delay.
- Integrations. Each system your site has to talk to adds testing time and a dependency you do not control.
- How many people approve. A single decision maker is materially cheaper than a committee.
- Whether the design is bespoke or adapted. Bespoke is not always better, but it is always more expensive.
What quotes usually leave out
Read any quote for these four items before comparing it with another. Their absence is the most common reason a project that looked cheaper ends up costing more.
- Content: who writes the words and sources the images, and whether that is in scope.
- Revision rounds: how many are included and what happens after they are used.
- Migration: moving existing content, redirects from old URLs, and preserving search rankings.
- Training and handover: whether your team is shown how to edit the site before the developer leaves.
A quote that is thirty per cent cheaper and excludes content, migration and redirects is not cheaper. It is a smaller quote for a smaller amount of work.
The ongoing costs
A website is not a one off purchase, and budgeting as though it is causes the slow decay you see on most small business sites. Realistically, expect hosting from around $200 a year for a small site and considerably more for ecommerce, a domain at roughly $20 a year, premium plugin or theme licences where used, and either your own time or a maintenance arrangement for updates, backups and security patching.
Ongoing maintenance in Australia is commonly quoted between $80 and $400 a month depending on how much is included. The cheap end is usually updates and backups. The upper end includes content changes, monitoring and someone who answers when something breaks.
Where an offshore team changes the maths
The largest single input into an Australian web quote is Australian labour. An offshore team removes that input without removing the work, which is why the same scope commonly lands lower. What it does not remove is the need for the scope to be right in the first place. A cheap build of the wrong thing is still the wrong thing.
Whoever you use, the sequence that protects you is the same: agree the scope in writing, agree what is excluded, agree the revision rounds, and agree who owns the site at the end. Every expensive website project we have seen go wrong went wrong at that stage rather than during development.
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