Most website quotes are written to be agreed to rather than read. The line items are real words for real work, but several of them describe things that stopped being optional a decade ago, and one or two describe nothing at all.
TL;DR. You do not need to know what anything should cost to read one well. You need to know which lines are table stakes, which are genuine scope, and which are there to lengthen the list. Here are the ones that come up most, and the question to ask about each.
“Responsive design”
This means the site works on a phone. It has been the default way of building for well over a decade, and no professional would deliver anything else.
It is not a feature and it is not an extra. A quote charging separately for it is charging you for gravity. Seeing it as its own priced line is a reasonable reason to read the rest of that quote more slowly.
The question worth asking instead: how fast is it on a real phone on mobile data? That is the thing that varies between suppliers, and it does not usually appear on quotes at all.
“SEO optimisation”
This is the single most important line to interrogate, because it covers a range running from essential to worthless.
At the useful end it means technical groundwork: a sensible address structure, titles and descriptions written per page, a sitemap, structured data, fast pages, correct headings, images that carry alt text. This is part of building a site properly and should be inside the build rather than sold beside it.
At the other end it means someone will type your town into a keyword tool and send you a PDF.
The question worth asking: what exactly will you do, and what will you report back? A supplier who commits to specific work and monthly measurement is offering something. One who talks about positions is not, because nobody can promise you a rank: not them, not us, not an agency with 300 staff. Ranking is Google’s decision. What can be committed to is the work and the evidence of it.
“Up to five pages”
A real constraint, and worth pricing. The trouble is that nobody agrees what counts as a page.
Ask directly. Is a blog post a page? Is a landing page for one service a page? Is the contact page with a form one page or two, given the thank-you screen? Is a legal page inside the count or outside it? Privacy, terms and cookies are obligatory and, counted against a five-page allowance, leave you two pages for your actual business.
Suppliers answer that differently and both answers are defensible. What matters is knowing which you are dealing with before the site is built, rather than at the point you ask for a sixth page. Ask it of us too: our lower plan is up to five pages and the ones above it have no limit, and the boundary belongs in writing either way.
The question worth asking: what does page 6 cost, and what does it cost in month 8 rather than during the build?
“CMS integration”
A content management system means you can change the words yourself. Whether that is worth anything depends entirely on a question the quote will not ask: who is going to do it?
For a business of 10 people with nobody whose job includes the website, a CMS is often a login nobody uses, sitting on software that needs updating, widening the attack surface of the site in exchange for a capability exercised twice a year. That is a genuine cost and it is being sold as a benefit.
The honest version of this line is a conversation about which parts you actually want to edit. Opening hours, prices and staff, yes. Page layout, almost never. Layout editing is where self-managed sites go to look broken.
The question worth asking: what breaks if I change something, and what is deliberately not editable?
“Hosting and maintenance”
Two words doing very different amounts of work. Hosting is close to free at this size. Maintenance is where the value is, and it is the vaguest word on most quotes.
Get it itemised. Certificate renewal, backups and a stated restore process, uptime monitoring, platform and dependency updates, broken-link checks, and whether content changes are included or billed. If content changes are billed, ask the rate and the minimum: half an hour minimum on a two-minute change is how a reasonable rate becomes an unreasonable bill.
The question worth asking: what have you actually done for me in a month where nothing broke? There is a real answer to that, and a supplier doing the work will give it.
What is usually missing
The absences matter more than the line items, because you find them later.
- Who writes the words. Most quotes assume you supply them. If yours is silent, it assumes it.
- Photography. Same silence, same assumption.
- What happens to your existing addresses. If the old site’s pages have been indexed for years, they need redirecting. Left out, you lose the search traffic you already had: the most expensive omission on this list and the one least often written down.
- Third-party costs. Booking software, email platforms, payment processing. Somebody else’s monthly bill arriving after you agreed yours.
- Ownership. Who holds the domain, and do you get the files if you leave.
- A date. Not “6–8 weeks”, but a start date and a launch date.
A worked example
A florist asks us to look at a quote for a new site. It runs to nine lines, and four of them are responsive design, SSL certificate, cross-browser testing and SEO optimisation.
The first three are table stakes. None of them should carry its own price in 2026, and seeing all three itemised tells you the list has been padded to look substantial. The fourth is the one worth a question, so we ask it. The answer comes back as keyword research and meta descriptions: an afternoon of work, once. Worth having, and not worth a recurring line.
The more expensive problem is what the nine lines do not mention. The florist’s current site has ranked for wedding flowers in her town for years, across a dozen pages with their own addresses, and nothing in the quote says what happens to those addresses when the new site replaces it. Handled, it is an hour of redirects. Unhandled, she loses the search traffic she already had, and no line item warned her.
That single omission is worth more than the four padded lines put together.
What a quote worth accepting looks like
It separates the build from the ongoing work, and says which is which. It names what is inside the page count and what is outside it. It describes maintenance as tasks rather than as a word. It says who writes the copy. It commits to dates. It makes no claim about a search position.
And it should be readable in one sitting by someone who does not build websites. A quote that needs interpreting is usually doing something with the ambiguity.
If you would like a second opinion on one you have been sent, forward it to us. We will tell you what it covers, what it leaves out, and what we would ask before signing it, including where our own pricing is dearer than the alternative, which happens and is worth knowing. There is a longer piece on the two-purchase split behind all of this in what you are actually getting, and our own dates and process are on how it works.
