How much a website costs in Australia for a small business

Ask five people and you will get quotes of $800, $3,000, $9,000 and $40,000 for what sounds like the same job. That is not five people lying to you. It is five completely different products with the same name.

Two quotes for a six page site can differ by a factor of four and both be honest. It is almost always one of these six.

1. 1.Who writes the words. Copy is the single most underestimated line. A build where the client promises to send through the text and never does is the most common reason a project stalls for three months. If the quote does not say who writes it, ask.
2. 2.Unique layouts, not page count. Twenty pages using four layouts is a small job. Six pages each designed from scratch is a big one. Count templates, not pages.
3. 3.Photography. Real photos of your team, your work and your premises beat stock every time and cost real money. Half a day with a photographer is a line item, and for a trade or a clinic it is usually the best value line on the whole quote.
4. 4.What has to connect to what. A contact form emailing you is trivial. Live booking against a real calendar, payments, a customer portal, or pushing enquiries into a CRM are each separate pieces of work.
5. 5.Ecommerce, if it is genuinely ecommerce. Fifteen products with flat rate postage is a small store. Variants, sizes, live freight quotes and stock synced with what you sell over the counter is a different budget entirely.
6. 6.Whether anyone sets it up to be found and measured. Site structure, page titles, a Google Business Profile done properly, and conversion tracking installed at launch. Retrofitting this later costs more than doing it once.

There is a seventh, and it is who is holding the mouse. Australian contract web developers are commonly quoted at somewhere between $50 and $250 an hour depending on seniority and city, which is a market range rather than a published rate. A four-times difference in the hourly rate explains a four-times difference in the quote without anybody being dishonest about it.

This is the section other website cost guides skip, and it can change the real cost of a build by a third. The ATO's ruling TR 2016/3 sets out how website spending is treated, and it splits into two piles.

• Deductible now: periodic hosting, registration and licensing fees, domain registration where the term is not more than about a year, ongoing maintenance, and minor enhancements to a site you already have.
• Capital: building a new site, major modifications, adding online sales, and custom development. Capital spending on in-house software is written off over an effective life of five years rather than deducted in one hit.

Small business write-off concessions can change that arithmetic, but they are legislated year by year and the thresholds move. The $20,000 instant asset write-off, for example, applied to assets first used or installed ready for use up to 30 June 2026, for businesses under $10 million in aggregated turnover. Do not assume the same rule is in force for the year you are spending in. Ask your accountant what applies to this financial year before you sign the quote, because the answer sometimes decides whether you build now or in July.

• The domain is registered to you. Your ABN, your name, your registrar account. This is the single most expensive thing to get back later.
• The hosting account is in your name. Give the builder access. Do not let the account be theirs.
• You get the admin login and the files. If it is WordPress, that means the admin account and the ability to export. If it is custom, that means the code.
• Tracking is installed at launch. Analytics and conversion tracking on the enquiry, not on the page view. Without it you can never tell which marketing worked.
• Someone measured it on a phone. Not on the designer's iMac on office wi-fi. On a phone, on mobile data, which is where your customers are.

Every one of those is free to ask for at the start of a project and expensive to fix at the end of one. If a builder resists any of them, that is the answer to a different question you were about to ask.

For the sake of not being coy: our website builds start at $3,500 plus GST as a one-off, which is $3,850 including GST, and every quote is fixed against a written scope before anything starts. Two to four weeks for most business sites. The domain, the hosting and the code are registered in your name from day one, which is the standard the section above says to hold everyone to, including us.

Do not pay it if your current site is working. If enquiries are arriving and the phone rings, a rebuild is a cosmetic purchase and there are better places to put $3,500. Do not pay it if what you actually need is one page for one campaign. And do not pay anybody a build price until you have checked whether the real problem is that nobody answers the enquiries you already get.

That last one is not rhetorical. It is the most common thing we find, and it is the cheapest to fix. Missed call text-back costs a fraction of a website and often recovers more work than a redesign would.