What a website quote should actually include

The gap is almost never margin. It is scope and aftercare. Two quotes for the same website are usually two quotes for two different jobs, and only one of them says so.

The cheap quote assumes several things at once. You will write all the copy. You will supply the photography. You will approve the first design, and anything after that is billed hourly. The addresses your current site has are your problem. Nobody opens a screen reader. Support ends the day it goes live. That is not dishonest, it is a smaller job, and a smaller job costs less.

The expensive quote is not automatically the thorough one. Someone charging £8,000 for five pages with none of the above is overcharging you, and an itemised quote is where you would see it. Price is not evidence of scope, itemisation is.

A complete quote is boring to read. It reads like an inventory, because that is what it is.

Accessibility and performance are the items most often dropped from scope without anybody mentioning it. Skip links, labelled form fields, a sensible heading order, visible keyboard focus and images served at the size they are displayed are decisions taken while the front end is written. Retrofitting them onto a finished theme costs more than doing them first. If neither word appears in a quote, they are not in it. That may be fine. It is your decision to make.

This is the largest single swing between two quotes, and it hides in one line of small print: client to supply content.

Copy for eight pages, written from an interview rather than paraphrased off your old site, is days of work. If it sits with the supplier it is in the price. If it sits with you it is not, and the two quotes are no longer comparable. Most projects that stall, stall here: the build finishes and the words never arrive.

Scale matters more than people expect. A rebuild we did for two skip-hire brands carries 39 local landing pages across the LS and WF postcode districts, each with its own content, because 39 pages with a place name swapped in is not 39 pages. A compliance site we built runs to 138 pages carrying 15 browser-based tools and a CPC mock exam, and there the writing is the bulk of the work, not the design.

Two included rounds is normal and reasonable. What matters is what a round is, when it happens, and what the next one costs.

Ask to review the design as working pages in a browser on your own phone, not as flat images. Then ask when the rounds fall, because timing is most of the cost. Changing type, colour and spacing while those are still being settled costs an afternoon. The same change after forty pages are built against them is a different job.

Unlimited revisions is not generosity. It is priced for the worst case, or renegotiated when the worst case arrives. Get the day rate for out-of-scope work written down while you do not need it.

This is the most expensive omission on the list, and the easiest to miss because nobody finds it interesting.

Every page you have now has an address. Search engines hold those addresses, and so do other people's links, directory listings and old emails. A rebuild moves them, and without a redirect each one lands on a 404.

A redirect plan is hours of work with a deliverable, not a tick box. Someone has to inventory the old URLs, decide the destination for each, write the rules, then verify every one resolves after launch. On the skip-hire rebuild above, two WooCommerce sites moved onto a statically exported build with a shared booking API, that was 45 permanent redirects written against the old URL inventory and verified one at a time.

Your existing content is the same story. On a translation site we rebuilt, 37 articles and 7 pages came across through a migration pipeline rather than being retyped by hand. Ask which is in your price.

Ownership is settled by your contract, not by assumption. As a general rule in the UK the person who writes code is the first owner of the copyright in it unless something in writing says otherwise, and a purchase order is not that something. That is the usual shape rather than advice about your situation, so read your own contract.

Practically, ask who holds five things on launch day: the code, the design files, the domain registrar account, the hosting and DNS accounts, and the admin logins the site depends on. Your name on the domain and hosting decides how easily you can leave.

Some suppliers build on their own platform or licence. That is legitimate and often cheaper up front, and it means you cannot take the site with you. It should be a choice you made, not something you discover during a disagreement.

Aftercare is where quotes diverge a second time. Hosting, certificate renewal, security updates, backups and fixing what breaks are one kind. New pages, features and content changes are another, and usually not included.

Recurring costs continue regardless. Domains renew, hosting bills, mailboxes bill per user, a payment processor takes a percentage of every transaction, and a private admin area has to run somewhere, as true of the CRM behind a pre-opening self-storage interest funnel in Holbeck as of a login-only publishing portal. One number and no recurring line is an incomplete quote.

Each of these is written so vagueness shows. Somebody who has done the work answers in a sentence, somebody who has not will change the subject.

Sometimes it is, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

If you need five pages, you have already written the copy, there is no existing site to protect, nothing has to be booked or paid for on it, and you do not need an admin area, the cheap quote may be right. The expensive one is selling capacity you will not use. On that budget Squarespace or Wix will do it this week, and we would be the wrong place to spend the money.

It is the wrong buy in specific circumstances. There is an existing site people already find. The site has a job beyond looking presentable: taking bookings, quoting, collecting payment, or publishing without a developer in the loop. Nobody has written the copy and nobody is going to. There, the work in the expensive quote is real, and leaving it out moves it to you or to a later invoice.