Web Design in India: What a Website Costs, Platform by Platform

A business website built in India costs between about INR 25,000 and INR 6,00,000, and the spread has little to do with design taste. It is platform, page count, how much content you supply and who does the work. As my own working read of current Indian pricing rather than a published survey: a five to ten page WordPress site from a competent freelancer runs INR 25,000 to 75,000. The same site from a studio, with original design and a proper handover, runs INR 1,00,000 to 3,50,000. A straightforward Shopify store starts near INR 40,000 and reaches INR 1,20,000 with real theme work. Shopify with custom sections, integrations and a migration behind it lands between INR 1,50,000 and 6,00,000. A custom build on a modern framework starts around INR 5,00,000 and is priced by the sprint after that. Add 18 percent GST.

Read the quote as six separate purchases

Most Indian web design quotes arrive as one number against one phrase. Break it into these lines and the differences between three vendors usually explain themselves.

• Design and build. Original layouts drawn for your business, or a licensed theme configured well. Both are legitimate, and only one costs design time. Then turning that into working pages, forms and templates.
• Content. Who writes the words and sources the images. The most common reason a site stalls for three months.
• Integrations. Payment gateway, shipping, CRM, WhatsApp enquiry, invoicing, ERP. Each is work and each can break later.
• Technical setup. Hosting, SSL, email, analytics, Search Console, backups, a staging copy.
• Testing. Real devices, a real payment, a form submission arriving in a real inbox.
• Training. An hour showing staff how to change a price, plus the credentials.

A quote that prices the first line only is cheaper because it is smaller, and the other five get bought later at worse rates.

WordPress costs in India, and what moves the number

WordPress carries most Indian business sites, which is why it has the widest spread. Four things move a quote: a licensed theme against original design, page count against template count, language versions, and whether maintenance is included. A premium theme configured carefully is a sound decision for a ten page company site and removes a third of the cost. A Hindi or regional version is a writing cost rather than a plugin decision, and machine translated pages read exactly like machine translated pages.

• A single landing page: INR 8,000 to 25,000.
• A brochure site on a configured theme: INR 25,000 to 75,000.
• A designed site with original layouts and a blog built to publish properly: INR 1,00,000 to 3,50,000.
• A WooCommerce store with inventory and payments: from INR 1,25,000 upwards.
• Monthly maintenance, updates, backups and security: INR 3,000 to 15,000.

Shopify costs in India, and the subscriptions nobody quotes

Shopify behaves differently because the platform does more of the work. The build cost falls and the running cost rises. A store on a well configured theme with products loaded and payments live runs INR 40,000 to 1,20,000. Custom sections, a designed home page and a bundling or subscription app configured properly run INR 1,50,000 to 3,50,000. A migration from a marketplace or an older store, with URL mapping and order history, runs INR 2,50,000 to 6,00,000. Product photography is a separate line and is usually underestimated.

Then the part missing from most Indian Shopify quotes. Shopify bills its own plan fee monthly, and apps bill monthly too. A store running a review app, a bundling app, a WhatsApp app and a loyalty app carries a real software bill before a single order arrives. Ask your developer for the app list with the monthly cost of each one beside it, before the build starts.

When a custom build is the right call

A custom build on a framework such as Next.js, or a headless setup, suits a narrow set of cases: a product that is really an application, a catalogue in the hundreds of thousands, a publisher with heavy traffic, or a site that must feed a mobile app from the same content. From INR 5,00,000 upwards, priced by the sprint. Outside those cases it buys flexibility you will not use and a dependency on the one team that knows the codebase. The test: write down what your business needs the site to do that WordPress or Shopify cannot. If you cannot finish that sentence, you do not need it.

Four kinds of supplier, and the one check that sorts them

Supplier	Good at	Watch for
Individual freelancer	Small sites, fast turnarounds, honest prices	One person, so their holidays are your risk
Studio of three to fifteen	Design led work, ongoing relationships	Capacity. Ask what else launches that month
Full service digital agency	Site, content and campaigns in one place	The build may be placed outside. Ask who codes
Offshore delivery unit	Volume, process, documentation	Managers sitting between you and the builders

The price gap between these four is mostly overheads and who attends your meetings. One check cuts through it: ask for three sites they built, then open each on your own phone on mobile data and try to complete the main action. A supplier whose last three sites are fast and clear on a phone is a good supplier at any size.

Seven lines to settle before the first instalment

• The domain is registered in your business name, on your email, and you hold the registrar login.
• Hosting is in your account, or named, with the transfer process written down.
• Design files and the full codebase are yours on final payment.
• Page count, template count and revision rounds, as numbers.
• Who supplies text and images, with a date against each.
• A launch date, and what happens to it when your content arrives late.
• A defect window, commonly thirty days, during which fixes are not billable.

Build decisions also decide how findable the site is, and the ones hardest to reverse are made in week one. The five build time decisions and the handover checklist cover that side, and it is worth reading before you approve a technical approach rather than after.

The running costs that belong in the first year budget

The second year is where unprepared buyers get a surprise. Plan for a domain renewal of roughly INR 700 to 1,500 a year, hosting from about INR 3,000 a year on shared plans up to INR 30,000 for managed WordPress, the Shopify plan fee if you are on Shopify, app subscriptions, and maintenance of INR 3,000 to 25,000 a month. GST at 18 percent applies, and TDS applies to professional fees paid to an Indian developer, which is a one time conversation with your accountant. Budget one more line almost nobody quotes: content refresh. Prices, a team page and a product list go stale in about a year, and that is the main reason a site that worked at launch stops working by its second anniversary.

Website build budgets in India: what buyers ask before approving one

Why do Indian web design quotes differ by ten times for the same brief?

Because it is not the same brief. One quote is a configured theme with your text pasted in, another is original design, written copy, three integrations and a tested handover. Ask every vendor to price the same six lines from the top of this page and the spread usually collapses to something sensible.

Is WordPress or Shopify cheaper for an Indian business?

WordPress is cheaper to build and costs more attention to keep updated and safe. Shopify costs more every month and removes most of that work. Selling products and wanting to spend your time on the products, Shopify usually wins. A site that is mainly pages explaining a service, WordPress usually wins.

What is a fair advance to pay a web designer in India?

Thirty to fifty percent at the start is normal. Tie the rest to visible milestones such as design approval and staging handover, and keep the last instalment until the site works on your own phone.

What should a small Indian company get for INR 50,000?

A clean six to eight page site on a well chosen theme, your branding applied, a contact form that reaches your inbox, a Google Business Profile connected, analytics installed and an hour of training. That is a genuinely useful site. It will not include original design, written copy or custom functionality.

Who should own the hosting and the domain?

You, in every case. The most common expensive repair in this market is a business that cannot change a price on its own website because the registrar account belongs to an agency it stopped paying two years ago. Register it yourself, in fifteen minutes, before the project starts.

What an assistant tells a founder who asks which builder to hire

There is a newer reason to care how clearly a site explains itself. Buyers now put questions such as which Shopify developer to use, or who builds good WordPress sites for manufacturers, to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and get a handful of named suggestions back drawn from pages, listings and reviews. A site built mainly from images, with the real information locked inside a PDF, gives that process nothing to work with. The same becomes true of your own business the day the new site goes live: the words on your pages are now read by something that recommends. AI Knows Us measures which businesses get named in those answers and what was read to produce them, and the check runs at aiknowsus.com in less time than a kickoff call takes.