What a website actually costs in Brantford.
Real numbers, the four things that move them, and the five questions that make three wildly different quotes explain themselves.
Nobody publishes prices, so everybody guesses. Here are real numbers for what a website costs in Brantford and the surrounding area, what moves the figure up and down, and how to tell which band you are actually in.
We publish ours because the alternative is the thing every owner complains about: three quotes, a tenfold spread between them, and no explanation of why. A spread like that is not a market. It is four different products with the same name.
The four things people mean by "a website"
| What you are buying | Typical range | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| A do-it-yourself builder | $0 to $600 a year | Testing an idea, or a business that gets no customers from search |
| A template set up for you | $1,500 to $3,500 | A new business that needs to exist online this month |
| A custom small business site | $5,000 to $15,000 | An established local business where the site is a real lead source |
| A custom site with ecommerce or complex functionality | $15,000 to $60,000+ | Selling online, booking systems, member areas, multiple locations |
Our own builds start at $5,000, and most of the Brantford and Brant County work we do lands between $5,000 and $15,000. We are telling you the other bands exist because for some businesses they are the right answer and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What actually moves the price
Four things, roughly in order of how much they move it.
Page count. A five-page site and a thirty-page site are not the same job, and the difference is not just five times the writing. Thirty pages need a structure, internal linking, and a decision about what each one is for. Most of the local sites we build sit between eight and twenty pages once the service and area pages are counted properly.
Who writes the copy. This is the biggest hidden variable and the one quotes are quietest about. A cheap quote almost always assumes you will deliver finished copy. Most owners never do, the project stalls for three months, and either the site launches with placeholder text or the designer writes something generic at the last minute. We write it, and it is in the price, because the alternative is a site that does not say anything.
Whether money changes hands on the site. Ecommerce roughly doubles the work. Payments, tax, shipping rules, inventory, abandoned carts and the testing all of that needs.
Integrations. Booking systems, CRMs, quoting tools, inventory feeds. Each one is a small project wearing a checkbox.
Why the cheap quote is usually more expensive
A $1,800 template site is not a worse version of a $9,000 custom site. It is a different product with a different cost structure, and most of its cost arrives later.
The common pattern we see when a business comes to us for a rebuild: the original site was built on a page builder with a stack of plugins. Every plugin is a subscription. Every subscription renews. Two years in, the annual cost of keeping it running has quietly passed what a custom build would have cost, the site loads in six seconds on a phone, and the plugins can no longer all be updated at once without breaking the layout.
The other pattern is simpler. The site was cheap because nobody thought about what it was for, so it has never produced a single enquiry, and the real cost is three years of a business that was invisible.
That is not an argument for spending more. It is an argument for being clear about what you are buying. If your customers come from word of mouth and the site exists so people can check you are real, a template is a perfectly rational choice and you should not let anybody talk you out of it.
What a $5,000 to $15,000 build should include
If you are paying in this range anywhere in Brant County, these should not be extras.
- A structure planned around what people actually search for, not a copy of your competitor's menu
- Copy written for you, by a person, and revised with you
- A custom design rather than a theme with your logo dropped in
- Mobile performance that holds up on a real phone on real data, not just on an office wifi connection
- Technical SEO as standard: clean URLs, schema, a sitemap, redirects from your old pages
- Forms that work, that you receive, and that tell you which page produced the enquiry
- Analytics set up so you can see what is happening
- Training, and the ability to update your own content afterwards
- Every account in your name, which is worth checking against who actually owns your website
If a quote in this range excludes the copy, that is the single most important thing to know before you sign it.
What ongoing costs look like
The build is not the end of the spending, and anybody who implies it is has not been honest with you.
A custom static site like the ones we build costs very little to run: a domain at roughly $20 a year and hosting that is often free or close to it at small scale. A WordPress site needs hosting at $200 to $600 a year, plus plugin licences, plus somebody to apply updates. A Shopify store is $500 to $1,000 a year for the platform before apps.
Then there is whether you want anyone doing anything with the site after launch. Content, SEO and ads are separate decisions with separate budgets, and you should be able to say no to all of them and still have a site that works.
What we would spend if it were our money
Three situations we get asked about constantly, and the honest answer in each.
A one-van trade with a full schedule. Spend almost nothing on the site and everything on the Google Business Profile. Get the profile complete, get thirty reviews, and put up a three-page site so people can check you are real. The site is not your bottleneck. Your calendar is.
An established local business where the phone has gone quiet. This is the $5,000 to $15,000 case and the one where a real build pays for itself fastest, because the gap between an invisible site and a working one is measured in jobs rather than in rankings. Put the money into structure and copy before design.
A business about to spend on ads. Fix the site first, always. Paying for clicks that land on a slow page with no obvious next step is the most expensive mistake available in this market, and no amount of campaign tuning repairs it. We have turned down ad work for exactly this reason.
How to compare three quotes properly
Ask every one of them the same five questions and the spread usually explains itself.
- Who writes the copy, and is it in this price?
- How many pages, and what happens if we need more?
- Will I own the domain, the hosting account and the code when this is finished?
- What does it cost to run per year after launch?
- Can I see three sites you built that are still live, and can I contact one of those owners?
The last one sorts the field faster than anything else. Anyone who has done this work well has clients who will say so.
Our quote process puts a fixed number in writing before anything starts, broken into phases, and you only pay when each phase ships. If you want one for your own project, tell us what you need and you will have a number and a timeline rather than a discovery call that turns into a sales sequence.
A template set up properly by somebody competent runs $1,500 to $3,500 and is a perfectly rational choice if your customers come from word of mouth and the site exists so people can check you are real. Below that you are buying a do-it-yourself builder with help.
Because they are quoting different products under the same name. The biggest hidden variable is who writes the copy. A cheap quote almost always assumes you will deliver finished text, which most owners never do, and the project stalls or launches with filler.
The build is a fixed one-time price, quoted in writing before anything starts, paid in phases as each one ships. Anything ongoing, such as SEO or ads management, is a separate decision with its own budget that you can decline without affecting the site.
A custom static site like ours is roughly $20 a year for the domain plus hosting that is usually free at small scale. WordPress runs $200 to $600 a year plus plugin licences and someone to apply updates. Shopify is $500 to $1,000 before apps.
Only if the extra money bought something you needed. Design complexity costs less than people assume. What drives real cost is the number of distinct things the site has to do, how many pages it carries, and whether money changes hands on it.