Most Australian small businesses pay between $3,000 and $12,000 for a website they can actually sell from. That is the band we keep landing in after reading what Australian agencies publish on their own price pages today, 12 September 2026.
The full range is much wider. You can spend $299 and be live this week. You can spend $150,000 and wait six months. Both are real prices from real Australian companies. The number you should pay depends on how many pages you need, who writes the words, and whether anyone is on the hook when it breaks.
This guide uses prices that are published, not guessed. Where a figure comes from an agency, we name the agency. Where it comes from a hosting company or the ATO, we link to the page. Every dollar figure below is AUD.
The short answer: website cost by type of site
Here is the price table. “Typical” is the middle of what Australian providers publish, not an average of everything on the internet.
| Type of site | Low | Typical | High | Where the figures come from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (you build it) | $180 per year | $300 to $900 per year | $2,000+ per year | GoDaddy Australia lists its builder at $14.95 to $22.69 per month on an annual plan; Shopify Australia starts at $42 per month on annual billing |
| Template site built for you (1 to 3 pages) | $299 setup | $999 to $1,900 | $3,200 | Social Space $299 setup plus $39 per month; Blend Designs $999; Christom $1,820; Code and Visual $3,200 |
| Small business site (5 to 10 pages) | $2,500 | $4,000 to $9,000 | $15,000 | Blend Designs $2,500; Christom $2,915 to $3,940; Code and Visual $8,500; Spark Interact quotes $5,000 to $15,000 |
| Custom WordPress build (10 to 20 pages) | $8,000 | $12,000 to $20,000 | $30,000+ | Code and Visual $17,500; Spark Interact and Wolf IQ both publish $5,000 to $25,000+ for agency builds |
| Ecommerce store | $4,500 | $10,000 to $20,000 | $40,000+ | Blend Designs $4,500; GoDaddy Australia $8,500 to $20,000+; Spark Interact $10,000 to $25,000+; Grove Foundry $10,000 to $40,000+ |
| Large custom build or web app | $25,000 | $30,000 to $80,000 | $150,000+ | Butterfly $50,000 to $100,000 for complex builds and $100,000+ for enterprise; Spark Interact $30,000 to $150,000+ |
Two things stand out. First, the gap inside each row is huge. A “small business website” can honestly cost $2,500 or $15,000 and both sellers will use the same words to describe it. Second, the DIY row is priced per year and the rest are priced once. That difference matters more than most price guides admit, and we come back to it below.
Where these numbers come from
We ran a live Google search for “website design cost australia” in Australia on 12 September 2026 and read the pages that came back in the top 20. We then opened the price pages of Australian web design companies that publish real figures, plus the pricing pages of hosting and platform providers that sell in Australian dollars.
Google’s own AI answer on that search today told buyers a professional small business website costs $3,000 to $10,000, and that larger sites and online stores run $10,000 to $50,000 or more. It pulled those numbers from a handful of Australian agency blogs. That is roughly what we found too, which is worth knowing: if your customer or your boss has “researched” this, those are the numbers already in their head.
One more thing our keyword pull showed. Searches for website cost questions in Australia peak hard in March and go quiet in June and July. For “website design cost australia” the March 2026 figure was about eight times the June 2026 figure. If you are an agency, that is your busy quoting month. If you are a buyer, June and July are when studios have gaps in the calendar.
What Australian web design companies actually publish
Most agencies hide their prices. These ones do not. All figures below were on their own websites on 12 September 2026.
| Company | Based in | Published prices | GST |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Space | Australia | $299 setup plus $39 per month; $549 setup plus $59 per month; premium tier $79 per month. Domain, SSL and hosting included | Prices include GST |
| Have a Look | Australia | Packages from $995, described as including the build, hosting and GST | Prices include GST |
| Blend Designs | Doveton, Victoria | $999 one page; $2,500 up to ten pages; $4,500 online store | Not stated on the page |
| Christom | Collingwood, Victoria and Noosa, Queensland | $1,820 single page; $2,915 five pages; $3,940 eight to ten pages | Prices exclude GST |
| Code and Visual | Sydney | $3,200 for one to three pages; $8,500 for five to ten pages; $17,500 for ten to twenty pages | Prices exclude GST |
| Uprise Digital (yes, this is us) | Melbourne, working Australia wide | $4,500 to $12,000+ for a custom website; $6,000 to $17,000+ for a web application | Quoted per project |
We are listed last on purpose. We are not claiming to be the best value on this table. We are showing you our numbers because a cost guide that hides its own prices is not much of a cost guide.
Read the table by page count and you can see the market clearly. A one page site sits somewhere between $999 and $3,200. A five to ten page business site sits between $2,500 and $8,500. Above that you are paying for custom work, not more pages.
What you pay every year after launch
The build price is the part people compare. The running cost is the part that surprises them. These are real advertised Australian prices, not estimates.
| Ongoing cost | What it actually costs | Source |
|---|---|---|
| .com.au or .au domain | $9.95 for the first year on promotion, $22.95 per year at the standard rate | VentraIP pricing page |
| .com domain | $24.95 per year | VentraIP pricing page |
| Shared hosting | $5.50 per month on promotion, $11.00 per month standard. GoDaddy Australia lists $6.95 to $29.95 per month | VentraIP and GoDaddy Australia |
| WordPress hosting | $9.25 per month on promotion, $18.50 per month standard | VentraIP pricing page |
| Ecommerce platform | Shopify Basic $42 per month on annual billing or $56 monthly; Grow $114 or $149; Advanced $431 or $575; Plus from $3,700 | Shopify Australia pricing page |
| Card fees on an online store | 1.75% plus 30c per online sale on Shopify Basic, 1.6% plus 30c on Grow, 1.4% plus 30c on Advanced | Shopify Australia pricing page |
| SSL certificate | Usually free and included with hosting now. Paid certificates run about $4 to $125 per year | Bundled by VentraIP and GoDaddy; paid range from Spark Interact |
| Premium theme and plugins | Theme about $59 to $89 per year; five or so paid plugins about $300 to $500 per year | Grove Foundry pricing guide |
| Maintenance plan | $90 to $2,000 per month depending on the size of the site | GoDaddy Australia |
| Business email | $3.50 to $22.90 per mailbox per month | GoDaddy Australia |
Add it up for a normal service business on WordPress. Domain $23, hosting $222, theme and plugins $400, a light maintenance plan at $150 a month. That is roughly $2,445 a year to keep a site that cost you $6,000 to build. Budget for it before you sign, not in month four when the invoice lands.
A useful rule of thumb from the Australian guides we read: plan on spending 10 to 15 per cent of your build cost every year keeping the site healthy.
What drives the price up
Page count, but less than you think
Going from five pages to ten pages does not double the price. The design system, the header, the footer and the mobile work are done once. Extra pages usually cost $300 to $800 each in Australia. If a quote charges you a full rate for every page, ask why.
Custom design versus a theme
A theme site means someone bought a template and put your logo and colours into it. A custom design means someone drew your pages from scratch based on what you sell. The second one takes three to six times the design hours. That is where most of the price gap between a $2,500 site and a $9,000 site lives.
Who writes the words and takes the photos
This is the most underpriced line in almost every quote. Copywriting in Australia runs roughly $150 to $250 an hour, or $500 to $1,500 per page. A half day photography shoot is around $1,500. If a $4,000 quote includes “content”, check whether that means writing your content or pasting in content you write.
Integrations
Every system you connect adds cost. A booking system, a CRM, a job management tool, a payment gateway, an inventory feed. Australian guides put integrations at roughly $2,000 to $10,000 each depending on how messy the other system is. One integration can cost more than the rest of the site.
Ecommerce product setup
Loading products is slow, manual work. Photos, variants, prices, stock, shipping rules, tax settings. This is why the same agency will build you a ten page brochure site for $4,000 and a ten product store for $9,000.
Speed, tracking and accessibility done properly
Doing these at build time is cheap. Retrofitting them later is not. Accessibility in particular is much cheaper to build in than to bolt on.
What you should get for the money
Rough guide to what each band should buy you in Australia in 2026.
- Under $1,500. A template, your logo and colours, three to five pages, a contact form and an SSL certificate. You write the words. Fine for proving a business exists. Not built to rank or convert.
- $2,500 to $5,000. Five to ten pages, a design that looks like your business rather than the template’s, mobile done properly, a working enquiry form, basic on page SEO, Google Analytics connected. You still write most of the words.
- $5,000 to $12,000. Custom design, written copy for the main pages, proper page speed work, conversion tracking set up, service pages built to rank, a blog you can actually use, and training so you can edit it yourself. This is the band most Australian service businesses should be in.
- $12,000 to $30,000. Everything above plus real discovery, custom functionality, integrations to the systems you already run, and a content plan that covers twenty or more pages.
- $30,000 and up. Custom application work, multi location or multi language, complex ecommerce, or a platform your staff use daily. At this level you should be getting a written scope document before anyone opens a design tool.
Where cheap sites cost you later
The site cannot rank
Cheap builds skip structure. One page per service becomes one page listing all services. Page titles are all “Home”. There are no internal links. None of that shows up at handover and all of it caps how much search traffic the site can ever earn. Fixing it later means a rebuild, not a tweak.
The site is slow
Bloated page builders, uncompressed images and fifteen plugins doing what three should do. Slow sites lose people before they read anything. If you want to understand what that costs you in leads, our guide to website conversion rate walks through the maths.
Nothing is tracked
This is the most common one we find. No conversion tracking, so nobody can tell you how many enquiries the site produced. You end up guessing about your own business. Getting GA4 conversion tracking set up properly at build time takes a few hours. Doing it a year later means a year of blind spending.
The pages do not ask for anything
A pretty site with no clear next step is an expensive brochure. The 11 landing page elements that actually lift conversions are worth checking your quote against before you sign.
You do not own it
Some cheap monthly packages are rent, not purchase. Stop paying and the site goes away. That can be a fair deal if you know it going in. It is a nasty surprise if you do not. Ask one question: if I leave in two years, what do I take with me?
How to brief a web design agency
A good brief cuts your price and your timeline, because the agency stops guessing. Write half a page covering these.
- What the site must do. Not “look modern”. Something like “get 20 quote requests a month from Perth homeowners”.
- Who is buying. One or two sentences on the customer, including how they usually find you now.
- Your page list. Write out every page you think you need. Home, about, each service, service areas, contact. This is the single biggest driver of the quote.
- Who is writing. Say plainly whether you are supplying copy and photos or buying them.
- What must connect. Your booking tool, your CRM, your job software, your payment gateway.
- Three sites you like and why. The “why” matters more than the sites.
- Your budget band and your deadline. Giving a band is not weak. It stops you getting three quotes you cannot compare.
If you are in a trade, our list of must have website features for Australian tradies is a good starting page list. Solar installers can use the solar company website design guide the same way.
What a quote must include
Before you pay a deposit, make sure the quote says all of this in writing.
- The exact number of pages, listed by name.
- Whether copywriting is included, and for how many pages.
- Whether photography or stock images are included, and how many.
- How many rounds of design changes you get before extra fees start.
- The platform, and whether you get full admin access to it.
- Who owns the design files, the code and the domain after launch.
- Hosting: who provides it, what it costs per year, and what happens if you move.
- What is set up for tracking, named specifically.
- What happens after launch, including the free fix period and what a maintenance plan costs.
- Whether prices include or exclude GST. Three of the six agencies we checked today state this clearly. Do not assume.
- The payment schedule and what triggers each payment.
If a quote is one line and one number, ask for it itemised. Any agency worth hiring will send it without complaint.
Can you write a website off on tax?
Sometimes, and the detail matters. This is general information, not tax advice, so check it with your accountant.
The ATO generally treats a website you pay someone to build as in-house software. Its in-house software page defines that as computer software you acquire, develop, or have someone else develop for your business use rather than for sale.
For a small business using the simplified depreciation rules, the instant asset write-off limit is $20,000 for assets first used or installed ready for use on or after 1 July 2023. The ATO page was last updated on 28 August 2026 and its worked examples use businesses with aggregated turnover under $10 million.
So in plain terms. If your finished website cost less than $20,000 and it is installed and ready to use, a small business using those rules may be able to claim it in the year the cost was incurred. If it cost $20,000 or more, it goes into the small business pool instead and is claimed over time. If you do not use the simplified rules, in-house software held since 1 July 2015 is written off over a five year effective life.
Two extra points worth knowing. Software still in development and not ready for use has its own rules, using a software development pool that claims nothing in year one, then 30 per cent, 30 per cent, 30 per cent and 10 per cent. And the ATO says periodic payments to use software in your business are deductible in the year you incur them, which is how monthly platform and hosting fees usually behave. Your accountant will tell you which of these applies to you.
FAQ
How much does a website cost in Australia for a small business?
For a five to ten page site built by an Australian agency, the published prices we checked on 12 September 2026 ran from $2,500 to $8,500. Most small businesses that want the site to bring in enquiries land between $4,000 and $9,000. Below $2,500 you are buying a template and writing the words yourself. Above $12,000 you are usually paying for custom functionality rather than more design.
Why do quotes for the same website vary so much?
Because “website” is not one product. Two quotes for a ten page site can differ by $10,000 and both be fair. One includes written copy, a custom design, conversion tracking and a booking integration. The other includes a template, your own words and a contact form. The fix is to make every quote list the same items, then compare line by line.
Is it cheaper to use Wix or Squarespace instead?
Cheaper to start, yes. A DIY builder costs a few hundred dollars a year plus your own time. The real cost is the hours you spend and the ceiling you hit. Builders are fine for a simple presence. They get frustrating once you need many service pages, proper site structure, or an integration with the software you run your business on. Worth noting that builder costs never stop, while a built site is mostly a one off plus running costs.
What are the ongoing costs after the website is built?
At minimum, a domain at about $23 a year and hosting from $5.50 to $30 a month. Add a premium theme and plugins at roughly $400 a year on WordPress, and a maintenance plan from $90 a month upward if you want someone watching it. An online store adds the platform fee, which starts at $42 a month on Shopify in Australia, plus card fees of 1.75 per cent and 30c per sale on the entry plan. A fair yearly budget for a normal service business site is $1,500 to $3,000.
How long should a website take to build?
A template site can be live in days. A five to ten page custom site usually takes four to eight weeks. Larger builds with integrations run three to six months. The most common cause of delay is not the agency. It is waiting on content from the client, which is why deciding early who writes the words is worth real money.
Does a more expensive website rank better on Google?
Not by itself. Price buys structure, speed and a clean build, and those remove the things that hold a site back. Ranking still depends on the pages you publish, the topics you cover, and the trust your business builds over time. A well built site makes SEO possible. It does not do SEO for you, and nobody can promise a position.
If you are weighing up quotes right now and want a second opinion on what is actually in them, our web design page sets out what we include and what we charge, and our website design agency page explains how we work with businesses around Australia. Happy to look over a quote you have received either way.
