Web design agency: what a build costs by scope, and what you own when it ships

A web design agency quotes on scope, not on pages, and in the US the bands are wide and fairly predictable. A themed small business site of five to ten pages runs 3,000 to 10,000 dollars. A custom designed marketing site of ten to thirty pages with a proper content model runs 15,000 to 60,000. A Shopify store, depending on how much of the checkout and catalogue logic is bespoke, runs 20,000 to 150,000. An enterprise or headless rebuild starts around 150,000 and is governed by integrations rather than design. Design only engagements, where somebody else builds, run 5,000 to 25,000, and hourly work sits at 100 to 250. Treat those bands as our estimate of American build prices rather than an index, and watch what sets a quote inside them, because it is almost never the visual design.

Build cost by scope

Scope	Typical US fee	Realistic timeline
Theme or template, light customisation	3,000 to 10,000 dollars	3 to 6 weeks
Custom design, 10 to 30 pages, CMS built properly	15,000 to 60,000 dollars	8 to 16 weeks
Ecommerce on Shopify or similar	20,000 to 150,000 dollars	10 to 24 weeks
Headless or enterprise platform	150,000 dollars and up	5 to 12 months
Design only, handed to your developers	5,000 to 25,000 dollars	4 to 8 weeks
Care plan after launch	150 to 2,000 dollars a month	Ongoing

The six things that move the number

• How many distinct templates, not how many pages. Forty pages built from six templates is a smaller job than twelve pages each designed individually. Count templates when you compare quotes.
• Integrations. A CRM, a booking system, an ERP, a payment gateway, a membership wall. Each one is a defined piece of engineering and should be priced as its own line.
• Who writes the content. Copy is the most common reason a build slips, and agencies either price writing in or wait for you. Decide which before the schedule is agreed.
• Accessibility. Building to WCAG 2.1 level AA from the start adds modestly to design and front end time. Retrofitting it onto a finished site is far more expensive, and US businesses have faced a steady stream of web accessibility complaints, so it belongs in the original scope.
• Migration. Moving a thousand existing URLs with their redirects and media is a project in itself, separate from the design.
• Performance targets. If you want specific load and interaction numbers written into the contract, say so early, because it changes decisions about imagery, fonts and third party scripts.

The platform decides more of the price than the design does

• WordPress. The widest supplier pool and the easiest to hand to the next agency, with the caveat that a site built on a page builder with forty plugins is cheap to launch and expensive to maintain. Ask what it will depend on.
• Shopify. The default for direct to consumer retail. The platform handles checkout, tax and payments, so budget goes into theme work, apps and catalogue structure. Deeper reading in our page on what a Shopify design engagement buys.
• Webflow and similar. Fast to build, visually strong, and editable by a marketer without a developer. Check how your content model will scale past a few hundred items.
• Headless. A separate front end and content back end. Right when you publish to several channels or have real traffic engineering needs, and an expensive way to build a brochure site.
• Adobe Commerce and other enterprise stacks. Chosen for catalogue complexity, B2B pricing rules and ERP integration, and priced accordingly.

The redesign risk nobody puts in the proposal

The most expensive thing a web design agency can do to you is launch a beautiful site that loses the traffic the old one earned. It happens through URL changes without redirects, content cut for visual tidiness, headings flattened into images, and a staging site left open to crawlers. Four requirements in the scope prevent nearly all of it: a crawl of the current site with every URL and its traffic recorded before design starts, a redirect map from every old URL to its closest new equivalent, the pages that currently earn traffic kept at least as substantial as they are now, and a post launch check in the first week against the recorded baseline. Ask who is accountable for that check. If the answer is nobody, add it to the contract.

Design only, build only, or both

Buying both from one firm removes the argument about whether a build matches the design, which is the single most common source of friction in website projects. Buying them separately works when you have an internal developer, or when the design firm you want does not build and the quality of the thinking is worth the extra coordination. If you split them, the design handover has to include a component inventory, states for every interactive element, mobile layouts for every template, and the real content in the files rather than placeholder text. A design handed over as flat images of desktop pages is a guess the developer has to finish.

What you own when it ships

• The domain and the DNS, registered in your company's name.
• The hosting account, or a clear statement of what you are renting and what it costs to leave.
• The source files: the design project file, the theme or codebase in a repository you control, and the database.
• Licences for every paid theme, plugin, app and font, in your name, with the renewal dates listed.
• Intellectual property in the design and the custom code, assigned on final payment rather than licensed.
• A documented handover: how to deploy, where the environments are, and what breaks if a particular service is cancelled.

The test of a handover is simple. Could a new supplier take the folder and the credentials and work on the site next week without calling the agency that built it?

When a web design agency is the wrong purchase

If the site is structurally fine and the problem is that nothing on it answers a buyer's question, you need content and not a rebuild, and a rebuild will delay the fix by four months. If the budget is under about 3,000 dollars, a good theme configured carefully by a freelancer will serve you better than an agency stretched to a price it cannot staff. If you are pre launch and still testing the proposition, a single page and a form is the right amount of website. And if you need weekly changes to an existing site rather than a new one, a care plan or a retained developer costs a fraction of a project.

Questions that decide a website project before it starts

How long does a web design project take?

Six weeks for a themed site, eight to sixteen for a custom marketing site, and ten to twenty four for ecommerce. The schedule is set by two things outside the agency's control: how quickly you approve designs and how quickly the content arrives. Agencies lose more weeks to client review than to development, so name your approver and give them a deadline.

Should we pay a fixed fee or by the hour?

Fixed fee for a defined build, because you are buying a launched website rather than time, and the agency carries the estimating risk. Hourly or sprint based for continuous improvement after launch, or for a project where the requirements genuinely cannot be pinned down yet. A fixed fee with a vague scope is the worst of both, so the scope document matters more than the pricing model.

What is a care plan and do we need one?

It covers platform and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching and a set allowance of small changes, usually 150 to 2,000 dollars a month depending on the stack and the response time. A site with integrations and a commerce function needs one. A small static site can be maintained by a competent freelancer a few hours a quarter.

Can the same agency do our SEO?

Many do both competently, and having one team responsible for the build and the search work removes the common standoff where each blames the other for lost traffic. Judge the two capabilities separately though. Ask to see a site they rebuilt and the traffic before and after, with the dates visible.

Where your new site gets described by something that never visits it

A well built site is read by two kinds of visitor now. One is a person, and the agency has designed carefully for them. The other is an assistant answering a buyer who asked a question about your category, and that answer is assembled largely from what other sites say about you rather than from your own pages. It is a strange consequence of a redesign that a company can improve everything a visitor sees and change nothing about what ChatGPT or Gemini says when somebody asks for a supplier like them. Worth checking before the project rather than after, because some of the fix belongs in the build: clear entity information, real content kept rather than cut, and the pages that third parties cite left where they are. AI Knows Us shows what the assistants currently say about a business and which sources they drew on, which makes that a scoping conversation rather than a surprise.