Price a website by the work in it
The hours below are starting points, not industry data — every one of them is editable, because your fifth page is not my fifth page. Change them until they look like your last project.
| Phase | Hours | Cost |
|---|
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Send it as a quote
Every phase becomes a line the client can read, which is the difference between a price they argue with and a price they understand.
Templates, not pages: the mistake that ruins website quotes
Clients count pages and designers build templates, and almost every underpriced website project starts in that gap. Forty blog posts are one template and forty pieces of content entry. A home page, a service page, a case study and a contact page are four templates and four pieces of content. The first project is cheaper than the second despite having ten times the pages.
So the first question to settle with a client is never how many pages, it is how many things look different. The answer usually surprises them downward, which is a pleasant conversation, and it makes the price defensible: if they want it cheaper, the lever is one fewer template rather than the same site with the testing quietly removed.
It also gives you a sanity check. Divide the total by the number of templates and ask whether that figure is plausible for a unique, designed, built and tested screen. If it comes out very low, something has been left off the list rather than done efficiently.
The phases that get left out of the estimate
Content entry is the largest of them. Someone has to put the words and images in, check the headings, crop the photographs, and fix the tables that came from a Word document. It is unglamorous, it takes roughly twenty to thirty minutes a page when the content exists and much longer when it does not, and it is very often assumed to be free.
Testing is second. A site that works on the designer's laptop is not a delivered site: there is Safari, there is a narrow phone, there is the form that has to actually send an email, and there is the client's own device that behaves unlike any other. Two hours plus something per template is a floor rather than a generous allowance.
Project management is third and the most consistently unpriced. Calls, briefs, chasing content, the email thread with fourteen replies — real hours that the work cannot happen without. Charging ten to fifteen per cent for it is not padding; leaving it out is a decision to work those hours for free, and on a long project it is the difference between a good margin and none.
Revisions: the line that decides whether the project ends
A quote that does not name the number of revision rounds has not described the work, and the missing sentence is where most website projects go over. Two rounds is a common default: one after the first design and one before launch, each with consolidated feedback rather than a stream of individual comments.
The wording matters as much as the number. A round is one set of collected feedback, delivered once — otherwise a round becomes eleven emails and the second round begins before the first has finished. Saying so in the quote is not bureaucracy; it is the thing that lets you say yes cheerfully to the first two and charge for the third without it feeling like a penalty.
The calculator prices rounds against the number of templates, because that is what actually drives the cost of a revision: changing a heading style on eleven templates is eleven times the work of changing it on one. If your revisions are usually cosmetic, lower the hours; if clients tend to reopen structure, raise them.
Contingency, rush work and the price you finally send
Contingency is not a fudge factor, it is the honest name for the part of every project nobody can foresee: the API that changed, the font licence that did not cover web use, the stakeholder who appears in week three. Fifteen per cent is a reasonable default. Setting it to zero is not optimism, it is a decision to absorb those hours personally.
A rush surcharge is worth having as a published number rather than an improvised one. Compressing a six-week project into three does not halve the work; it removes the slack that keeps the work efficient and displaces other clients. Twenty to fifty per cent is common, and having a figure ready turns an awkward negotiation into a menu.
What you send should be a total with the phases visible, not a list of hours with a rate. A client who can see that testing and content entry are separate pieces of work will argue about scope, which is a productive conversation. A client shown only an hourly rate will argue about the rate, which is not.
A quote with phases in it is a quote that survives
The document this page produces is the first half. The second is what happens when they accept it: the quote becoming an invoice without being retyped, and the phases invoiced one at a time as they finish. The demo opens on the quotes view with examples in it.
Open the demo →Questions
How much should I charge for a five-page website?
There is no answer that survives contact with a real project, which is why this page does not publish one. Five pages could be five templates or one template and four pieces of content, with or without a CMS, copy, migration and accessibility work. Price the work in it at your own rate — that is what the calculator does — and treat any published average as marketing rather than data.
Should I quote a fixed price or hourly for web design?
Fixed, in almost every case, with the hours behind it visible to you and the scope written down. Clients buying a website are buying an outcome and want to know the number; hourly billing on a design project turns every decision into a meter reading. Keep the hourly rate as the tool you price with, not the thing you sell.
What do I do when the client says it is too expensive?
Remove work, not margin. Offer the version with three templates instead of five, or with content entry handed back to them, and show the price that goes with it. Discounting the same scope teaches the client that your first number was not real, and it is the discount you will be held to next time.
How many hours does a website take?
It depends almost entirely on the number of unique templates and how much of the content you are responsible for, which is why the calculator asks for those two things first. What is more reliable than any average is your own last three projects: put their real hours into the phase rows and the estimate becomes yours instead of someone else's.
Should hosting and maintenance be in the project price?
No — keep them separate and recurring. Bundling a year of hosting into a project price hides an ongoing obligation inside a one-off payment, and when the year ends the conversation is harder than it needed to be. Quote the build, then quote care as its own thing.