Website Cost Factors

Website cost factors that need to be considered when providing a cost estimation are detailed on this page.

KWD IT often gets asked how much it will cost to build a website. As outlined on the WordPress Theme Development page, this can be a very difficult question to answer. Clients often tell us how many pages they want, but without knowing what’s going into the pages. As a result, it’s difficult to gauge the amount of work involved.

However, here at KWD IT, we try and get things started with an estimation. Once the finer details are discussed, we can then progress onto a more accurate quotation.

Main Website Cost Factors

Providing answers to the following questions, is a good start towards KWD IT being able to provide an estimation.

E-Commerce Website Cost Factors

If you plan to sell products or services through your website, this will raise some further questions.

Other Website Cost Factors

Website performance, website accessibility and imagery optimised for all display types, are other factors that considerably effect costs. It’s important to discuss your expectations regarding these areas of the project, before work commences. Performance and accessibility in particular have both moved from being nice to have to being measurable and, in some cases, legally required. Both are covered in more detail further down this page.

Required Features Website Cost Factors

There are a lot of different features that you can have in your website and here are some of the main options.

Header

A typical website header might include: a logo; details of what the website offers; and contact details. An ecommerce website is likely to include links to the basket and account page. Depending on the number of products being sold, a product search might be required. If the website also has a physical store that customers visit, the address and opening times of the store might be something that you’d like to include. Websites with large amounts of content should consider a search feature. If you’re fairly active on social media, it’s worth getting your social media links into the header. Finally, partner logos/accreditations and a subscribe form are two more things to consider.

Footer

A typical website footer might include; some links to other pages on your website and some contact details. It’s also common to include copyright information and a company/VAT number. An ecommerce website will often include payment icons, to indicate which payment methods can be used. Similar to the header, if the website also has a physical store that customers visit, the address and opening times of the store might be something that you’d like to include. Social media links and possibly social feeds are other popular features. Finally, partner logos/accreditations; a subscribe and/or enquiry form; Google Translate; news feed; and map, are yet more things to consider.

Typography

A typical website will have styles set up for your headings, paragraphs, lists and links. You might want a variation for your blog posts or product pages etc. Particularly large sites, might extend this even further. This is normally something that would be recommended during the design stage, but it can effect costs.

Copywriting

No one will know your business better than yourself, so ultimately, it’s best if you provide your own content. However, should you want KWD IT to provide the content for your website, this will play a factor in costs. If you are writing your own content, our guide to understanding SEO content explains what to aim for.

Page Elements

Some examples of the most popular elements that clients request in their pages, are: Sliders; Post Feeds; Testimonial Sliders; Testimonial Blocks; Maps; Forms; Image Grids; Popups; Accordions; Tabs; and Tables.

Ecommerce

When you’ve got an ecommerce website, sometimes you’ll want some features that aren’t included by default. There are lots of options available, with a few of the most common listed below.

Legal

Disclaimer and Website Terms and Conditions, are pages that KWD IT can quickly add to your website. However, on the 25th May 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) updated their guidelines. Extra costs will be incurred if you would like a Cookie Policy page and a Privacy Policy page, which meets these guidelines. The Cookie Policy page is required to allow users to modify or withdraw their consent. The actions carried out on your website, with regard to Cookie consent, are also recorded via a 3rd party service. Depending on the size of your website, this may incur costs.

There is a further consideration if you advertise through Google or use Google Analytics. Since March 2024, Google has required Consent Mode to be implemented for websites serving users in the UK and the European Economic Area. This is the mechanism that tells Google’s tags what a visitor has and hasn’t agreed to, and it needs to be wired up correctly between your cookie banner and your tags. Without it, your analytics and advertising data becomes incomplete, which in turn affects how well any advertising campaign can perform. This is technical work rather than a plugin setting, and it is a genuine cost factor for anyone intending to advertise.

Accessibility

Website accessibility means making sure your website can be used by people with disabilities, including those using screen readers, keyboard navigation or magnification. The international standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and the level most commonly worked to is WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

This has become considerably more important recently. The European Accessibility Act applied from 28th June 2025, and it covers businesses selling to consumers in the European Union regardless of where that business is based. A UK company selling into the EU can therefore fall within its scope. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 already places a duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments, though it is less prescriptive about how.

In practical terms this affects colour contrast, keyboard navigation, form labelling, image alt text, heading structure and video captions, among other things. Building accessibility in from the start costs considerably less than retrofitting it later, which is the main reason it’s worth discussing before work begins rather than afterwards. Whether your business falls within the scope of the European Accessibility Act is ultimately a question for your own legal advisor, but it is worth establishing early because it changes what the build needs to include.

Website Performance

How quickly your website loads and responds is measured by Google through Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics based on what real visitors actually experience. These include Interaction to Next Paint, which replaced First Input Delay in 2024 and measures how quickly a page responds when someone clicks or taps.

Performance is affected by hosting quality, image optimisation, the number of plugins in use and how the theme itself is built. A website assembled from a heavy page builder with a dozen plugins will almost always perform worse than one built purposely, which is why KWD IT builds custom themes. If performance is a priority for you, it is worth saying so at the estimation stage, because it influences decisions made throughout the build.

Search Engine Optimisation

Overall, as part of your website development, KWD IT will carry out what we consider initial search engine optimisation. This includes submission to Google Search Console, setup of Google Analytics 4 and basic configuration of the SEO Title and Meta Description on your Home page.

If you have an existing website, with lots of links already listed in Google, it’s advised that 301 Redirects are setup. These will map the pages on your old website to the equivalent pages on your new website. The cost for setting up 301 Redirects will depend on the size of your website. Skipping this is one of the most expensive mistakes made during a website rebuild, because it discards the search rankings the old site had earned.

Your website will be built with SEO in mind, including descriptive alt text on images throughout the website, a sensible heading structure and clean URLs. We can also add structured data, which tells search engines explicitly what each page represents. This is increasingly how content gets understood and cited by AI generated search results rather than simply listed, and it is worth considering as part of the build.

If you require further SEO work, to help get the individual pages throughout your website ranking high in Google, additional costs will be incurred. Our WordPress Search Engine Marketing packages cover this on an ongoing basis.

Ongoing Website Costs

The cost of building a website is only part of the picture, and it’s worth budgeting for the running costs from the outset rather than being surprised by them later. The main ongoing costs are:

If you’d like an estimation for your own project, please get in touch and we can talk through the points on this page.