Every second enquiry I get opens with some version of the same question. âWhat does a website cost?â And every honest answer starts the same way: it depends on what youâre actually buying.
That sounds like a dodge. It isnât. The gap between a $500 website and a $10,000 website is not polish. Itâs whether the thing brings you work.
So let me break down what the money actually goes toward, and where the line sits between paying properly and getting fleeced.
The rough bands
In Australia, most trade and service business websites fall into one of four tiers.
Under $1,000. This is a template with your logo dropped in. Usually a Wix or Squarespace build, often done by someone doing it as a side gig. You get pages that exist. You do not get anything designed around turning a visitor into a booked job, and you almost never get anything done on the search side. For a brand new business that just needs to look legitimate while word of mouth carries you, this is a reasonable starting point. It is not a growth tool.
$1,500 to $4,000. The middle of the market, and the widest band by far. Quality swings enormously in here. At the good end you get a properly structured site, written copy, mobile that actually works, and basic local SEO setup. At the bad end you get the $500 template with a bigger invoice attached. The price alone tells you nothing in this range, which is why the questions further down matter.
$4,000 to $10,000. Custom design and build. Copy written specifically for your trade and your area. Location pages if you service multiple regions. Proper technical SEO, schema markup, page speed work. Usually some form of lead capture beyond a plain contact form. This is where a website stops being a brochure and starts being infrastructure.
$10,000 and up. Either youâre a larger operation with genuine complexity, like multiple locations, booking systems, customer portals, or youâre paying an agencyâs overhead. Both exist. Only one is worth it.
What actually drives the number
Four things, in order of how much they matter.
Copy. This is the single most underestimated cost. Writing pages that speak to a homeowner comparing three electricians takes time and it takes understanding the trade. Most cheap sites either use filler text or ask you to write it yourself, which is how you end up with a site that sat half-finished for eight months.
Page count and structure. A five page site is a different job to a site with seven service pages and four location pages. If you service Newcastle, Maitland, Lake Macquarie and the Central Coast, you need pages that can rank for each of those. Thatâs real work, and itâs the work that produces enquiries.
Whether search was considered at all. Technical SEO isnât a bolt-on. Site structure, internal linking, schema markup, page speed, and how the URLs are laid out all have to be decided while the thing is being built. Retrofitting it later costs more than doing it right the first time.
Whoâs actually doing the work. An agency with a sales team, account managers and an office has to cover that in the price. That overhead buys you process. It does not usually buy you a better website.
The questions that tell you more than the price
If youâre comparing quotes, these four questions separate the real builds from the dressed-up templates.
âWho writes the copy?â If the answer is you, add two months to the timeline and knock the value down accordingly.
âWhat happens if I want to change something in a year?â You want a straight answer. Some builds are locked to a platform or a proprietary system where every edit goes through them at an hourly rate. Others hand you something you own outright.
âHow will this page rank for [my trade] in [my town]?â A vague answer about âSEO best practicesâ means no plan. A real answer talks about specific pages targeting specific searches.
âCan I see something you built for a business like mine thatâs still live?â Not a portfolio image. A working URL you can open on your phone.
Where people genuinely waste money
Three patterns I see repeatedly.
Paying monthly forever for a site you never own. Some builders charge $99 to $250 a month indefinitely, and the moment you stop paying, the site disappears. Over three years thatâs more than a custom build, and you end up with nothing.
Paying for design that has no job. Animations, parallax scrolling, a video header that takes four seconds to load on mobile. If a section doesnât help someone decide to call you, itâs costing you rather than earning.
Buying a website in isolation. This is the big one. A site with no traffic is a shop with no street. If nothing is bringing people to it, whether thatâs search, ads, or an existing audience, the quality of the site is irrelevant.
The honest answer
For most trade and service businesses in Australia, a website that genuinely brings in work sits somewhere between $3,000 and $8,000, depending on how many services and areas you need covered.
Below that, youâre usually buying a template and hoping. Above it, youâre either buying real complexity or youâre covering someoneâs office rent.
The better question isnât what it costs. Itâs what it needs to bring in before itâs paid for itself. For most trades I work with, thatâs somewhere between two and five decent jobs. If a site canât clear that bar in its first year, the price was never the problem.