Why the cost of your website might increase during the build?

This doesn’t happen often. But it does happen.

When you hire us to build your website, the cost of the project may change from what we initially agreed.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

I hear you, and we hate doing it, but occasionally we simply HAVE to.

Truth be told, most projects go as expected and 90% of the time, the price we quote at the start of the project, is the final price.

But that still leaves 10% of our clients who end up paying more.

In this post, I want to explain why this might happen and how you can prevent it.

The cost of a website

We do our best to be as transparent as possible with our prices, and we even display our fees clearly on our website to avoid confusion.

To give you an idea of how much we charge, most of the websites we build cost between £3495–£5497 but some websites cost upwards of 10K–15K.

It depends entirely on what you need and how much time it will take.

Information gathering

Before we start working on the project, we do our best to gather as much information as possible so we can fully understand your requirements before we give you a quote.

We’ll ask you about:

• The website features you want
• Your design preferences
• What pages you want on the site
• How much advice will you need
• How many people will be working on the project
• What you want to accomplish with your new website
• And much more

The reason we spend time asking these questions at the start of the website project is because each answer you give can dramatically change the amount of work involved.

The more we know, the more accurate the proposal.

Now that you understand a little more about how we price website projects let’s discuss the elephant in the room.

If we spend so much time working out a specific price for your individual needs, why should this change?

Below, I’ve broken down the main reasons why this might happen.

1. Extra features & services

This one is to be expected. Adding extra features or services to the original package will understandably, increase the price.

Obviously, things will alter slightly throughout the build, and you may change your mind and want to tweak some bits. That’s ok. We always try to be as flexible as we can be.

However, we will have to charge for some things. Let’s say you start the web design process wanting a standard website to advertise your freelance services. But later down the line, you decide you also want an online shopping page to sell some physical products. This will need to be charged separately as it’s something we didn’t include in the original package and it takes more time.

Or let’s say you want us to set up a booking calendar for you so you can take online appointments, we may need additional tools for this, and it will take more time for us to configure. If this is the case, we’ll have to charge more.

The same also goes for:

• Additional pages you want to design
• Landing pages installing
• Email integration
• Changes to page layouts
• Extra support, e.g. online coaching from us

Essentially, anything that you didn’t agree at the start of the project could increase the final price.

2. Changing the schedule

Before we build your website, we try to establish how long the process might take. Most of our projects take between 12-16 weeks from start to finish, but this isn’t set in stone.

Every project is different and based on your requirements, it might be sooner than this, or it may take longer. Either way, we’ll give you a good indication of the time scale at the start of the process.

Once we’ve got started on the project, we’ll work with you to set a launch date for your new website. We’ll book it in the calendar, and we’ll schedule our other projects around yours. This way we can ensure we have a good amount of time to complete your website and get everything finished ready for launch day.

However, if we do agree on a launch date and you decide to change it, it may alter the final price.

Let’s just say, you want to bring the launch date forward and go live sooner than we initially agreed. This generally means we’ll have to re-arrange our calendar and block out some extra time to complete your website. If this is the case, we’ll generally have to charge more.

Alternatively, if we set a date to go live and then we have to move the date back due to delays on your end, this can sometimes change the final price of the project. In our experience, when a project is delayed we’ve found that this leads to more amendments later down the line and more work on our part.

3. Design Changes after approval

Before we build your website, we try to take every precaution to get your website exactly how you want it.

After our initial research and discovery phase, we’ll move on to the design stage. This means we’ll design all of your core pages on photoshop before we build them.

Once we’re happy with the designs, we’ll send them to you so you can see them too. You can then tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you want to change, delete or add.

We’ll make another round of changes based on your suggestions. Once you’re happy and you approve the designs, we move on and get those pages built.

This design stage is your opportunity to tell us if you want to make any changes so that we can make them before we code anything at all.

If you change your mind AFTER we’ve started building your site, we may have to charge extra as this will take more time to rebuild some elements.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make some changes. Understandably, there will be some tweaks you might want to make, and if they’re small, that’s usually ok.

However, it’s always best to make sure you’re happy before we build anything to avoid any extra fees later down the line.

How to make sure the price STAYS the same price

If you are on a budget and you want to make sure the final price is what we agreed at the start of the process, then take the time to plan your project as much as possible before hiring us.

Download our website buyers guide and go through it step by step, making notes along the way.

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This will ensure you are fully aware of what you might need to consider before we have our initial consultation.

We created the website buyers guide to protect you when hiring a web design agency. It will also help you get a better idea of how much budget you should allow and what features you might need.

Summary

Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of why the price might change throughout the website build.

No, we don’t charge for every little thing. There are some larger agencies especially, who charge for extremely small amendments. We are pretty fair and understanding. But, we may have to charge if it takes us a lot more time.