How Much Does a Professional Marketing Website Cost?
What actually drives the price of a website, what a starter scope covers, and where a cheap build creates expensive maintenance work later.
“How much does a website cost?” has no honest single answer, but it does have an honest structure. Price is driven by a short list of decisions, and once you know that list you can read any proposal properly — including mine.
For reference, a clearly scoped starter marketing website at Atado Studio starts at EUR 1,200, a single focused landing page at EUR 750, and a small static migration at EUR 750. Those are starting points, not quotes. What moves a project above them is the subject of this article.
What actually drives the price
1. Content readiness
The single biggest variable. A project with final copy, real images, and a signed-off structure moves quickly. A project where copy gets written during the build turns into revision rounds, layout rework, and delay. Content is not a detail to fill in later; it is the thing being built.
2. Unique templates, not pages
Twenty pages built from four templates cost less than eight pages that are each bespoke. When you compare quotes, count templates, not URLs.
3. CMS and content modelling
A brochure site with no CMS is cheaper than a site where a team publishes weekly. A CMS adds schema design, editor documentation, preview, and validation. It pays for itself if people actually publish and it is wasted money if they do not — which is really a stack decision, not a budget line.
4. Integrations
Forms, CRM, booking, payments, analytics, email, multilingual content. Each one adds configuration, testing, and a failure mode somebody has to handle. This is where “just a small addition” quietly doubles a scope.
5. Where the design comes from
An approved Figma file, a brand system, and an AI-generated concept each start from a different place. A finished design shortens the build. A concept that looks finished but has no responsive states, no empty states, and no content rules does not — that gap is the whole point of taking a concept to production.
6. Animation and interaction
Scroll reveals, transitions, and custom interaction work are real engineering time, and they carry performance and accessibility costs that have to be tested rather than assumed.
What a starter scope usually includes
- A defined set of templates and pages, agreed before work starts
- Responsive implementation across common breakpoints
- On-page SEO basics: titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, sitemap, robots
- A working contact or lead form with spam protection
- Analytics installed and verified against real traffic
- Performance and accessibility checks before launch
- Handover: access, documentation, and a short walkthrough
Anything outside that list is not a developer being difficult. It is scope that needs to be named and priced so nobody is surprised in week five.
Where cheap builds get expensive
- No CMS, so every text change becomes a paid developer task.
- A template bought and heavily modified, so updates break it.
- No redirects from the old site, so existing rankings and backlinks disappear on launch day.
- Performance ignored, so paid traffic converts worse on mobile for the entire life of the site.
- No documentation or access handover, so leaving the original developer means a rebuild.
The pattern repeats: the invoice is lower and the total cost of ownership is higher. Ask what happens in month seven, not only what happens at launch.
How to compare two proposals fairly
- Ask for templates, not page counts.
- Ask who can edit which content after launch, and without whom.
- Ask what is excluded. The exclusions tell you more than the inclusions.
- Ask what happens to existing URLs, rankings, and analytics history.
- Ask who owns the code, the domain, the CMS account, and the hosting.
- Ask what a typical change costs after launch.
A proposal that answers those six clearly is usually the more honest one, even when its number is larger.
What to do before asking for a quote
You will get a sharper price from anyone if you arrive with four things: the list of pages you need, who the visitors are, what a successful visit looks like, and a budget range you are willing to say out loud. A budget range is not a negotiating weakness. It is what lets a developer propose the right scope instead of guessing at one.
If you are not ready for a quote yet, a free audit of the site you already have is usually the cheaper first step.