What determines a website’s price: item by item.
The question of how much a website costs has no correct answer in a single figure; the scope determines the price. And the scope is made up of five items: how many different page templates are needed, how many languages it will be published in, who will prepare the content, which external systems it will connect to and who will take on maintenance after handover.
There are no amounts on this page, and that is deliberate. Two sites requested with the same sentence — “a corporate website” — can carry workloads many times apart; an average figure would be the price of a scope that does not belong to your site. Instead, we open up one by one the items that drive the cost up and down, so that you can compare the proposals in front of you in the same language.
In corporate web design projects we give the price in a written proposal based on the scope; we do not publish a list of ready-made packages. The items below are the very questions we ask when preparing that proposal.
Why can’t the question of how much a website costs be answered with a single figure?
Because “a website” is not a product but a definition of scope. A five-page single-language brochure site and a three-language site with a product catalog and a quote form, connected to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, go by the same word. The difference between them lies not in the designer’s taste but in the amount of work to be done. The right question is not “how much” but “which items are in scope”.
Number of pages or number of templates?
The cost is determined less by the number of pages than by the number of different templates. If dozens of product pages share the same layout, they are a single template: designed once, coded once, tested once. By contrast, the home page, a service page, a case study page, a blog post and the contact page are five separate templates, and each one requires its own design, its own mobile behavior and its own accessibility testing.
- Drives the cost up → pages each with a different layout, page-specific interactions, animated narrative sections.
- Drives the cost down → a small number of well-defined templates; content prepared so that it fits these templates.
How does the number of languages affect the cost?
A second language is more than translating the text. Each language gets its own address tree; pages are linked to one another with language version tags (hreflang); the menu, forms, error messages and structured data are translated too. The design is affected by language as well: the same heading can run longer in German than in Turkish, and the layout is tested accordingly. The details of this layer are in the guide multilingual site architecture.
Our own experience: this site is published in three languages, and the language versions of every page are linked to one another reciprocally. The Fersan Tekstil case has seven languages; there the cost accumulated less in translation than in building and maintaining a complete, bidirectional set of links in each of the seven languages. What grows as the number of languages increases is not the text but the burden of keeping things consistent.
How much does the price change depending on who handles the content?
Will the company supply the texts and images, or will the provider prepare them? This question is one of the items that changes a proposal the most, and the one most often left vague. The depth of the content is also a cost: on 22 August 2026, 13 pages of this site had the status “Crawled – currently not indexed” in Google, and the diagnosis was thin content — that day none of the 58 pages exceeded 800 words. A site whose look is finished but whose text is weak gets rewritten later in order to appear in search; in other words, the content budget is spent either up front or twice.
Why do integrations make the item bigger?
Having a form go to an email address is a simple job; having the same form create a record in a customer management system, feeding a product list from the ERP or syncing an appointment calendar with the site are each a separate software job. Every external system brings its own access permission, its own error states and its own maintenance burden. Writing the integrations into the proposal one by one, by name, prevents work added later as “let’s have this too” from quietly expanding the scope.
Should speed and accessibility be separate items?
Not in our approach: an accessibility baseline and a performance target are part of the deliverable, not an option added later. Because both are expensive when added later; making a finished design accessible or fast after the fact usually takes more work than building it right from the start. This site’s contract states an LCP below 0.8 seconds for real users and a layout shift of 0; every release passes an automated accessibility audit and a suite of 1462 tests before going live.
If another proposal prices these items separately, that is not wrong; what matters is that how much of them is in scope is written down. “Mobile-friendly and fast” is not a criterion; a criterion has a number and a measurement method.
How does the timeline affect the price?
A short timeline makes the same scope more expensive or the same price a narrower scope. In a site built in a hurry, the first things cut are usually the invisible items: content depth, accessibility testing, migrating old addresses, measurement. These are tasks whose absence goes unnoticed on launch day but comes back months later. If the timeline is tight, openly narrowing the scope — for example, one language first, the second language later — is a more honest path than quietly lowering quality.
When is the cheapest proposal the right choice?
When the scope really is narrow. For a single-language brochure site of a few pages, with content ready and a short time online, a ready-made theme and a simple setup are a reasonable choice; devoting more resources to it would be waste. The problem is when the price of a narrow scope and the expectations of a broad scope meet in the same proposal. If you write down your expectations — how many languages, how much content, which criterion — before requesting proposals, the proposals you receive start pricing the same job.
Is what comes after handover included in the price?
Maintenance is the least visible item in most proposals but the one that accumulates most over the years: software updates, domain and certificate renewal, backups, content changes and measurement. If a new site replaces an old one, there is one more item: redirecting the old addresses to their new counterparts. In September 2026 this site’s Search Console had 70 addresses returning 404, and the samples tested were left over from the domain’s previous site — the traces of a relaunch without a migration plan last for years. The work itself is on the page website redesign and migration.
Why can two proposals differ many times over?
Because more often than not the two proposals are not pricing the same job. One has a ready-made theme, a single language, text supplied by the client and a relationship that ends on launch day; the other has a custom design, several languages, content preparation, a measured speed target, accessibility testing, migration of old addresses and transfer of the source code. Both go by the name “corporate website”.
- Number of templates and originality of the design
- Number of languages and the multilingual structure
- Who prepares the content
- Integrations with external systems
- Measured speed and accessibility criteria
- Migration of the old site
- What is handed over at delivery, and maintenance
The safest way to compare two proposals is to write these seven lines side by side for both. The lines left empty show where the difference comes from. Which questions to ask about the proposal text is covered in the guide how to read a web design proposal; the general framework of the scope is in the guide what to watch for when having a website built.
There are no cheap or expensive proposals; there are proposals whose scope is written down and proposals whose scope is not.
If you want to see these answers on your own site, corporate web design delivers design, code and technical SEO from one hand, on a measurable budget.