Anyone who answers "how much does a corporate website cost?" with a single number either has not seen your scope, or plans to invoice you for it later. The price is set by the decisions you make on the 7 items below. Go through this list before requesting quotes — it also explains why the quotes you receive can differ by a factor of five.
1. Scope and page count
A 5-page brochure site and a 40-page multilingual site with a blog and careers section are not the same job. What drives cost is less the page count than the template count: 40 pages built from 6 templates is manageable work; 15 pages where all 15 are custom layouts is priced accordingly. List your pages, then group the ones that share a structure.
2. How original the design needs to be
Adapting a ready-made theme, dressing a theme in your identity, and designing from scratch are three different price classes. A theme gets you live fast, but puts you in the same mould as your competitors. Original design costs more because you are not buying pixels — you are buying decisions: who you address, what you say, and in which order.
3. Content production
The most commonly skipped item. Who writes the copy, where do the photographs come from, who shoots the video? Most projects that assume "the client will send content" spend launch week staring at empty pages. Put content production in scope from day one: copywriting, photography and video production should appear as separate lines in the quote.
4. The technical foundation
Off-the-shelf platforms, site builders and custom development with a modern framework answer different needs. As scale, integrations and speed requirements grow, custom development pays for itself; on a 5-page brochure site it is dead weight. Choose the foundation by need, not by prestige.
5. A second language
A second language is not a translate button. Every page needs rewriting — not translating — in the second language, the URL structure needs to be built per locale, and search engines need to be told correctly which page exists in which language. A working rule of thumb: a second language redoes about a third of the content and testing work.
6. SEO and measurement setup
A site is invisible on Google the day it launches. If technical SEO (sitemap, structured data, performance), analytics and Search Console registration are not part of the launch, the first months are a blind flight. Put this item in the build budget, not the marketing budget — adding it later always costs more.
7. Maintenance and support
Delivery is not the end: security updates, backups, small content changes, incident response. A monthly maintenance agreement, hourly support, or a handover to your own team — all three are valid, but the contract must say which one you bought. If it does not, you will find out during the first outage.
Settle these 7 items and you have a brief — and suddenly quotes become comparable. If you want to pin your scope down together, request a quote — the first call walks through exactly this list.