Search “how much does a website cost in Perth” and you’ll get a page of agency blog posts that mostly land on the same comfortable range, which is, conveniently, whatever that agency charges. The number is never really the point of those posts. Getting you to enquire is.
I’m not above that. I build websites and I have rates, and you’ll see them further down. But those posts skip the only part that actually helps you: what changes between the tiers, which costs sit outside the quote, and why two quotes for the same brief can be thousands apart.
Fair warning, some of my numbers are higher than what you’ll see advertised around Perth. I’ve explained why rather than asking you to take it on faith.
Here’s the version I’d give a friend over a beer.
The three tiers, and what each one buys
$1,000 to $2,500: a template, lightly customised.
Wix, Squarespace, or a purchased WordPress theme with your logo and colours dropped in. Two or three days of someone’s time.
This is not a rip-off, and for some businesses it’s the right call. If all you need is somewhere for people to confirm you exist and find your number, a tidy template beats a badly built custom site.
Know what comes with it though.
It will be slow. Templates ship with everything switched on so they demo well: sliders, animation libraries, icon packs, fonts you will never use. The page loads all of it whether your site uses it or not. Add a page builder on top and you are serving several times the markup the page actually needs. That is a mobile problem first, and mobile is where most of your traffic is.
It will look like a template. The layout is designed to be acceptable for a plumber, a physio and a law firm at once, which means it is arranged around none of them. Nothing on the page is sequenced by how your particular customer decides, because it cannot be.
It is unlikely to be maintained. This is the part that actually costs money. A template site is usually handed over and forgotten, and eighteen months later it is running outdated plugins, a theme whose developer has stopped updating it, and a PHP version nobody has touched. By that point the site has gone from dated to a security liability, and the cleanup costs more than the original build.
If you go this route, go in knowing you are buying a business card rather than a lead generation tool, and budget for someone to look after it.
$5,000 to $10,000: someone thought about it first.
Most Perth small business work lands here. Custom design, a content structure built around your services, and someone asking how enquiries actually arrive before they open a design tool.
The difference from the tier below isn’t prettiness. It’s sequencing. In the cheap tier, design happens first and your business is fitted into it. Here, the questions happen first.
Usually WordPress with proper custom fields, or a static build if content rarely changes. Which of those is right depends less on budget than on who’s editing it, which I’ve written about in WordPress isn’t the problem.
$12,000 to $40,000+: functionality, not pages.
CRM or booking integrations, a filterable product catalogue, multiple user roles, an API someone has to talk to. Or genuine brand design rather than a competent layout.
This is also where modern frameworks start earning their keep. A static build in Astro or Next, served from a CDN, loads in well under a second on a phone on mobile data, because there is no database query and no plugin stack between the visitor and the page. That is not a vanity metric. Faster pages convert better, and on a site where enquiries are the point, the difference between two seconds and half a second is measurable revenue rather than a number in a report.
The trade is that content changes go through a developer, or through a headless CMS that costs more to set up. Worth it when the site is doing real commercial work, overkill for five pages that change twice a year.
Most small businesses don’t need this tier, and the ones that do already know, because they’ve hit a specific wall a brochure site can’t get over.
Five costs that sit outside a cheap quote
The “from $1,750” number isn’t dishonest. It just rarely survives contact with a real project. Here’s what tends to arrive later.
Content, usually $800 to $2,500. Almost every quote assumes you’re supplying copy and photos. Most businesses have neither, discover this in week three, and then either write something rushed at 11pm or stall the build for two months. In my experience this is the single most common reason projects run late, ahead of anything technical.
Hosting and domains, $20 to $80 a month. Sometimes bundled for year one, then billed separately. Ask what year two costs and whether you can take the site elsewhere.
Maintenance, $150 to $400 a month. WordPress core, plugins, and themes all update on their own schedules and occasionally break each other. A site left alone for eighteen months becomes a security problem, not merely an old-looking one. Either budget for this or budget for the cleanup, which costs more. I’ve made the full case for maintenance separately.
The third revision round. Most quotes include one or two. The third is where “cheap” quietly stops being cheap, and it’s where a fixed price starts turning into an hourly conversation.
Ownership, potentially all of it. Some cheap builds are rentals. Stop paying and the site disappears, because you never had the files. That’s a legitimate model when it’s disclosed up front and a genuinely nasty surprise when it isn’t.
Add those up and the real first year cost of a $1,750 template is usually closer to $5,000 once content, hosting and maintenance are in. That might still be the right decision. It is just a different decision than the headline number suggests, and it lands within reach of a custom build that would not need replacing.
Why the same brief gets quotes $3,000 apart
Two developers can look at an identical five-page brief and land thousands apart, both being honest.
Where the design comes from. A bought theme is a few hundred dollars and a day of adjustment. A custom design is a week of work before anyone writes code.
What’s underneath. A page builder like Elementor is quick to build in, heavy to load, and awkward for anyone but the original developer to maintain. Building with proper custom fields takes longer up front and hands over cleanly. Clients almost never ask about this, and it affects the next five years more than anything else on the quote.
Whether speed is a deliverable. Compressing images and getting a site loading fast on a phone is real work that takes real hours. Some quotes include it. Most say nothing either way, which usually means no. If you want to know why that matters, start here.
Who is actually building it. Worth asking directly, because the answer is not always the person quoting. Plenty of agencies and freelancers subcontract the build offshore, which is not automatically a problem and is how a lot of cheap quotes get to be cheap. It becomes a problem when nobody tells you, when the person who wrote the code is unreachable six months later, and when the handover documentation does not exist because there was never a handover.
Ask who writes the code, where they are, and who you contact when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday. A straight answer is fine whatever it is. A vague one tells you something.
Five questions worth more than comparing feature lists
Who owns the site if we part ways? You want the files, the domain, and the hosting account in your name. If the answer is complicated, find out now rather than during a dispute.
What happens in year three? Who applies updates, what it costs, and what happens if the person who built it has moved on.
Can I edit it myself, and what exactly can I edit? “Yes, it’s WordPress” isn’t an answer. Ask them to show you the editing screen for a page you’d realistically change, like your services or your prices.
Is content included? If not, who’s writing it, and by when. Get that date in writing, because it’s the one that slips.
How does it perform on a phone? Ask for a live example from their actual portfolio, then run it through PageSpeed Insights yourself while you’re sitting there.
A developer who welcomes those questions is one who’s thought about the answers. One who gets defensive has told you something useful.
What I’d actually tell you
If you’re a sole trader who needs to exist online and take calls, don’t buy a template. Get a custom one page site built static, in something like Astro, for around $3,000. One page, written properly, loading in under a second, with nothing to update and nothing to break. It costs a little more than a template up front and nothing at all to run, and it will still be fast in three years when the template site is on its second rebuild. Put whatever is left into being findable, because a beautiful site nobody visits loses to a plain one that ranks.
If the website is meant to bring in work, you are looking at a custom WordPress build in the $5,000 to $10,000 band. Custom design, proper fields so your team can edit without breaking anything, and a structure arranged around how enquiries actually arrive. Most of what you are paying for there is thinking rather than pixels.
Above that, $12,000 and up, you are paying for functionality rather than pages: booking systems, CRM and payment integrations, product catalogues with real filtering, user accounts, anything that has to talk to software you already run. If someone quotes that for a five page brochure site with none of it, ask exactly what the extra buys. There may be a good answer involving genuine brand work. There may not be.
And whatever you spend, put something aside for the years after launch. The most expensive websites I’ve seen in Perth weren’t the ones with the big build budgets. They were the ones built cheaply, left untouched for four years, and then rebuilt from scratch because nothing could be salvaged. That’s paying twice, with a gap in the middle where the site was quietly costing you enquiries.
If you’re weighing up whether your current site needs replacing or just fixing, that’s a separate question with a straight answer.