How much does a website cost for a small Australian business?

"How much for a website?" is one of the hardest questions to answer honestly, because the real answer is "it depends on what the site has to do." That's not a dodge. A five-page site for a single-location trade business and a thirty-page site with booking, suburb pages and a blog are different jobs, and pricing them the same would be wrong in one direction or the other.

A working range

For a small to mid-sized Australian business, a properly built website typically costs $700 to $3,000 to design and build, in AUD excluding GST, plus hosting and care from $35 a month. Those are the ranges on our websites and landing pages page. Your figure may differ depending on scope, and any developer worth using will give you a fixed price in writing before you pay a deposit.

Below that range you're usually looking at a template site with little or no SEO work, built and left. That's fine for a placeholder, not for something meant to generate enquiries. Above it you're typically paying for e-commerce, custom booking systems, multiple staff accounts, or a much larger number of pages.

What actually moves the price

• Number of pages. A home page, an about page and a contact form is a different job to a home page plus a page for every service and every suburb you cover. Service and suburb pages are what let you rank for "[service] [your suburb]" searches, so they're usually worth the extra pages rather than a cost to avoid.
• Copywriting. Writing it yourself is cheaper up front; having it written with you, aimed at the words your customers actually type into Google, is usually the difference between a site that reads nicely and one that ranks.
• Booking or quoting tools. A contact form is standard. A booking calendar, a quote form that calculates a price, or a customer login is a bigger build, often closer to a custom web app than a website.
• Technical SEO. Structured data, a sitemap, fast hosting and metadata on every page should be included, not an add-on. If a quote doesn't mention any of these, ask what's missing.
• Ongoing hosting and changes. A monthly care plan covering hosting, backups, security and small content changes is normal. Without one, you're either hosting it yourself or paying per change, which adds up faster than the plan does.

Questions worth asking before you pay a deposit

1. Is the price fixed, or an estimate? A written scope with a fixed price protects you from "that wasn't included" conversations later.
2. Do I see it before I pay? A working prototype of the design, built on your actual content, tells you far more than a mockup or a slide deck.
3. Do I own it? The code, the design and the domain should be yours on completion, whether or not you keep paying for hosting and support afterwards.
4. Is SEO included or extra? A site that isn't built to rank for local searches from day one is a much weaker investment, no matter how good it looks.
5. What happens after launch? Find out what a typical content change costs and how fast it gets done, before you need one urgently.

When a cheaper option is the right call

If you genuinely just need a single page with your hours, phone number and address while you decide what you actually want, a Google Business Profile and a simple landing page can cover that for very little. Our piece on website vs landing page vs Google Business Profile walks through that decision in more detail. The ranges above are for a proper small business website meant to generate and convert search traffic, not a holding page.

What working with us looks like

We start with a 30-minute conversation about the enquiries you want more of and the suburbs or services you need to show up for. From that we write a scope and a fixed price, then build a working version of the site before you pay anything. Once it's live, we host it, back it up and make the changes you ask for under a simple monthly care plan.

Tell us what the site needs to do and we'll give you a fixed price in writing.