What a website costs in Australia in 2026

What you're paying for

A quote for a website usually bundles a few different jobs together. It helps to pull them apart, because two quotes that look miles apart are often pricing different things.

Design. How the site looks and how the pages are laid out, on a phone and on a big screen.
Building it. Turning the design into a working site that loads quickly and doesn't break.
The words and photos. Writing or tidying the wording, and finding or shooting the images.
Setting it up for search. Page titles, descriptions, a page per service, and the details Google reads to work out what you do and where.
Getting it live. Hosting, connecting your domain, and making sure the contact form actually reaches you.

The rough brackets

These are broad ranges you'll come across when you ask around. Every job is different, so treat them as a starting point.

Do it yourselfA website builder such as Wix or Squarespace costs a monthly subscription. It's cheap in dollars and costly in evenings, and the result tends to look like a template because it is one.
A basic template siteFrom around a thousand dollars. A freelancer drops your details into a ready-made theme. Fine for getting something up, though it often isn't set up to be found.
A designed small business siteA few thousand dollars for a site of five to fifteen pages, designed around your business and built to be found on Google. This is the kind of site we build, from AUD 1,500.
Custom developmentTen thousand dollars and up, once you need things like an online store, a custom booking system or a link into your practice software.

What pushes the price up

The biggest lever is the number of pages. A trade with six services across a dozen suburbs needs more pages than a cafe with one menu, and each page needs its own words.

After that, it's the extras: online booking, payments, a members' area, moving hundreds of old blog posts across, or a second language. Professional photography is a separate cost too, though good photos of your own work are worth more than any stock image.

The running costs people forget

The build is a one-off. These keep coming:

Your domain name. A .com.au is renewed every year or every few years, usually for tens of dollars, not hundreds.
Hosting. The cost of keeping the site online. Some designers include the first year; ask what it costs after that.
Email. If you want an address on your own domain, services like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 charge per person, per month.
Changes. New prices, a new service, a staff member leaving. Find out whether you can make small edits yourself or what each change costs.
Add-ons. Booking systems, online forms and payment tools often carry their own monthly fee.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

Who owns the site, the words and the photos once it's finished?
Is the domain registered in my name or yours?
What does hosting cost after the first year?
If I want to leave, can I take the site with me?
Will it be set up to show up on Google for the suburbs I work in?
Is the price fixed, or could it grow as we go?

A good designer will answer all of these without any fuss. If the answers are vague, that tells you something.

A note on GST

Check whether a quote includes GST. A business that isn't registered for GST doesn't charge it, so its price is the whole price. A registered business should show GST on the invoice. No GST is charged while the studio is not registered for GST.

Where we sit

Our projects start from AUD 1,500. We give you a fixed price once we know what you need, before any work starts, and it includes a site that works on every screen size, the first year of hosting, and the setup for Google. Your content, your photographs and your domain stay yours; we host and look after the site as part of the package. Get a quote or get in touch.