How Much Does a Professional Website Cost in Canada?

How much a professional website costs is the first question almost everyone asks, and the hardest one to get a straight answer to. Ask three companies and the three quotes can differ by ten times over — and plenty of the pages that promise to explain why never name a figure at all.

The reason is that “a website” is not one thing you can price, any more than “a vehicle” is. What actually decides the number is a short list of questions, and once you can answer them for your own business you can compare any two quotes properly — including ours.

There are two separate costs, and mixing them up is where most confusion starts

The build is one-time. It covers designing the site, setting it up properly, putting your content and branding into it, and getting it live and secure. You pay it once and you own the result.

Running it is ongoing. Hosting, security updates, backups, plugin and WordPress updates, content changes, and search-engine work are not a one-time job — they are the part that keeps a site working and findable after launch. This is usually a monthly figure, and it is the part people forget to budget for.

A quote that gives you one number for both is worth reading twice. Ask which part of it is the build and which part recurs, because a cheap build with no maintenance plan is how a two-year-old site ends up broken, slow, or hacked.

Five questions that move the number

1. Is the design being made from scratch, or chosen?

A design drawn from nothing is the single biggest cost in most quotes, and for most businesses it is also the least necessary. A professionally built design, customised with your branding, content and structure, gets you a site that looks like yours and costs a fraction of a bespoke one. That is why we start from a library of designs rather than a blank page — you can browse the designs and see exactly what you are getting before anything is built.

2. How much of the content already exists?

Text, photographs and a logo are work whoever does them. If you have them, the build is faster and cheaper. If they have to be written and made, that is real work and it belongs in the quote. The honest version of this question is: what can you hand over on day one, and what are you expecting someone else to produce?

3. How many pages, and do any of them do something?

Five pages of information cost less than five pages plus a booking system, a members area, or a shop. A page that only has to be read is cheap. A page that has to take money, take bookings, or know who is logged in is a different kind of work, and it also costs more to keep running afterwards.

4. Is this a first website or a replacement?

Replacing an existing site is not more expensive because it is harder to build — it is different because something already exists that has value. If your current site has pages that rank in Google, those addresses have to be carried across and redirected to their new homes, or you launch a beautiful new site and lose the traffic the old one earned. Anyone quoting you for a redesign should be able to tell you how they handle that. If redirects are not mentioned, ask.

5. Who is responsible after launch?

This is the question that decides your real cost over three years, and it is the one most quotes are quietest about. If the answer is “you are”, your cost is the build plus hosting plus your own time plus whatever a developer charges per hour when something breaks. If the answer is “we are”, your cost is the build plus a predictable monthly figure. Neither is wrong, but only one of them is predictable.

What it costs here

Here are our plans as they stand today. The one-time plans are the build; the monthly plans are the running. What each one includes is on the card, and if a price changes this list changes with it — we would rather not quote a figure in an article that then goes stale.

Full details, including what changes between plans, are on the pricing page, and the how it works page walks through what actually happens between choosing a design and going live.

Three things worth more than a lower price

• You own it. Your domain stays in your name and the site is yours. Ask any provider what happens to your website and your content if you leave. If the answer is complicated, that is the answer.
• It is maintained. WordPress, its theme and its plugins all get security updates. A site nobody updates is not a finished site, it is an expiring one.
• Someone answers. The cheapest build in the world costs more than it saves if a broken contact form sits broken for three weeks because nobody is responsible for it.

So, what should you budget?

Work out your answers to the five questions above, then read any quote against them. A quote that cannot tell you which part is one-time, what happens after launch, and how your existing pages are handled is not really a quote — it is a number.

If you would rather just see what fits, pick a design you like from the designs library and compare it against the plans above. Everything here is built, hosted and looked after by the same team, which is the point: one predictable figure, and nobody to chase.