How much does a website cost in Australia? (2026)
Short answer: across the 7 Australian builders I could find publishing a price on their own website, a small-business build runs $250 to $7,500 one-off, and the most common single figure is a flat $995, which both Havealook and Cheap Websites charge. On top of that, Australian shared hosting runs $18.50 to $79.20 a month at standing rates and a .com.au renewal is $22.95 to $88.00 a year. The SEO work that most quotes leave out is $499 a month at the cheapest published rate. A done-for-you subscription built SEO-ready is $0 upfront and $297 a month including GST. Every one of those figures is linked and dated below, with real numbers from real Australian builds and the hidden costs nobody puts in the quote.
- The 7 Australian builders that publish a price charge $250 to $7,500 to build, with a flat $995 the most common single figure. Hosting and SEO are on top.
- The build is rarely the most expensive part. Ongoing SEO and content (or the lack of it) decides whether the site pays back.
- Most quotes leave out: copywriting, schema, conversion tracking, call tracking, ongoing edits and the SEO work itself.
- A subscription model can absorb the build cost into a single monthly fee, which works well for cash-flow-sensitive SMBs.
What Australian builders actually publish.
Nearly every article answering this question gives you a range and names nobody. I did the same thing on this page until 22 September 2026, and it was the weakest page I own because of it.
So here are the prices instead. Every row is a figure the business beside it publishes on its own website. Open the link and check any of them, which takes about 5 seconds and is the entire point.
| Builder | Published price | GST | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lime Virtual StudioRead 3 August 2026 | $250 to $1,500 | Not stated | A published 3-tier price ladder, cheapest entry point I found. |
| HavealookRead 3 August 2026 | $995 | Not stated | Flat published build price, Australian made angle. |
| Cheap WebsitesRead 3 August 2026 | $995 | Not stated | Exact-match domain, same flat price point. |
| Katipo WebRead 3 August 2026 | From $1,295 | Not stated | Price carried in the page title, so it is the lead argument. A floor, not a price. |
| Design MojoRead 3 August 2026 | $500 to $5,000 | Not stated | 4-tier ladder from a single-page site to a large build. |
| Tradie Web GuysRead 3 August 2026 | $5,600 | Not stated | Trade specialist, published rather than quoted on enquiry. |
| WebApexRead 3 August 2026 | $7,500 | Not stated | Their published figure for trades and construction work. |
My $297 a month includes GST. Most Australian providers publish plus GST or do not say. Where a provider states its position I have normalised to include GST, and where a provider says nothing I have left the number exactly as published rather than guessing.
What each band actually buys.
A price on its own tells you very little, so here is what sits behind each one. The middle column says what the band is anchored to, because a band I derived from published prices and a band I guessed are different things and you deserve to know which you are reading.
| Band | Anchored to | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| $250 to $995 | Lime Virtual Studio's published floor, through the flat $995 that both Havealook and Cheap Websites publish | A working site on a template, built for you rather than by you. The words are usually yours to write. |
| $1,295 to $5,000 | Katipo Web's published from-price and the published ceiling of Design Mojo's 4-tier ladder | Custom design, more pages, and copywriting somewhere in the mix. This is where most small business quotes land. |
| $5,600 to $7,500 | the 2 trade specialists that publish a flat price, Tradie Web Guys and WebApex | A specialist who has built your exact kind of site many times, with the copy and the launch setup inside the price. |
| Above $7,500 | nothing. This is the top of the verified set and I have no published Australian price above it | Quotes above this exist and I am not pretending otherwise. I just cannot show you one published on a provider's own website, so I will not print a number. |
Your 12-month total, from those same prices.
The table above is the market. This works out what your particular job comes to, using the same published figures plus the recurring costs, and it shows the arithmetic rather than asking you to trust the answer. It asks for no email address and stores nothing.
The 7 things that move a quote
Change any answer and the figures update as you go. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your estimate
Estimate: $1,577 to $7,283 across the first 12 months. Upfront $995 to $6,000, then $49 to $107 a month. That range straddles my total.
Upfront cost plus 12 months of the ongoing cost.
The high end adds every line at its maximum at once, which is close to no real quote. It also double counts: the published all-in prices of $5,600 (Tradie Web Guys) and $7,500 (WebApex) already contain copy and launch setup that this model adds as separate lines. Read the top of a wide range as a ceiling, and the width itself as a sign your scope is not settled yet.
That range straddles my total.
At the low end a quote comes in $1,987 under my $3,564 total. At the high end it sits $3,719 above it. Where you actually land depends on who quotes and what they include.
Show the working
- Base build, 6-12 pages$995 to $6,000
- Upfront total$995 to $6,000
- Shared Australian hosting, per month$19 to $34
- Changes for a 6-12 page site, spread monthly, per month$30 to $73
- Ongoing, per month$49 to $107
The headline number is the upfront total plus 12 months of the ongoing total. Of the lines above, hosting and any ongoing SEO retainer are published prices. The rest are stated assumptions, each one listed with its reasoning further down this page.
My side of the comparison: no upfront cost, then 12 payments of $297 including GST that pay for the website in full, which is $3,564 in total.
This is an estimate, not a quote. The base bands and the recurring costs are anchored to prices Australian providers publish openly, read on 3 August 2026. The 6 adders are my stated assumptions, because no provider publishes a price for them, and each one is listed with its reasoning further down this page. No email is asked for, and the answer does not change if you give one.
Every band it runs on, including the ones I assumed rather than sourced, is listed with its basis on the calculator's own page, along with what the model gets wrong and which direction the error runs.
A brochure, a lead-gen site, an e-commerce store. Different beasts.
Brochure site (5-8 pages, no transactions)
The simplest kind. Home, services, about, contact, maybe a blog framework. This is what the flat $995 buys at Havealook and at Cheap Websites, and it sits inside Design Mojo's published $500 to $5,000 ladder. Katipo Web starts at $1,295. Nobody in that set publishes a separate price for copywriting, so what it adds is not a number I can show you.
These are easy to build cheap and easy to build badly. The difference shows up 3 months later when you check Google Search Console and the site is ranking for nothing.
Lead-gen site (service business, 10-20 pages, real SEO)
What most Australian tradies, NDIS providers, lawyers, accountants and similar service businesses actually need. A proper service-page-per-offering architecture, real suburb-level local SEO, schema markup, call tracking and form tracking. The 2 trade specialists that publish a flat price put it at $5,600 (Tradie Web Guys) and $7,500 (WebApex). For the ongoing SEO that makes it rank, published Australian retainers start at $499 a month and the highest I could verify is from $6,600. Quotes above $7,500 for the build itself certainly exist, and I am not printing a number for them because no provider I checked publishes one.
This is where most agencies make their money and most small businesses get burnt: they pay the upfront, hit pause on the retainer 3 months in because nothing has happened yet, and then wonder why the site never produced leads. SEO has a 60-120 day lag before the work shows up in rankings. You either commit to the runway or you skip the build.
Ecommerce store (Shopify or WooCommerce)
Different game entirely, and I have not sourced a published Australian build price for one. None of the 7 builders above prices a store separately, so rather than reach for a range I will say plainly that this page cannot answer it. What is published is the upkeep: the 3 Australian providers that price store maintenance separately charge $149 to $660 a month. Shopify's own plan fees and transaction fees sit on top of that, plus product photography, plus shipping integrations, plus advertising. If you are reading a website-cost article because you want to sell products, budget at least double what a brochure site costs and prepare for ongoing ad spend on top.
What most quotes leave out.
A 5-page brochure-site quote from a freelancer typically covers design and build, sometimes copywriting. Here is what is usually NOT included, and what each one really costs annually in Australia:
- Hosting: $18.50 to $79.20 a month on shared Australian hosting (VentraIP, Digital Pacific), and from $69.95 a month for genuinely managed hosting (Conetix), all read on 18 August 2026. This line carried "$120-$600/year on a managed AU host" until 6 October 2026, which was below where managed hosting starts.
- Domain renewal: VentraIP publishes $22.95 a year to renew a .com.au and Melbourne IT $88.00 for the same thing. Trivial but easy to forget.
- SSL certificate: usually free via the host. My estimate where a host still charges is $50-$200/year.
- Security and backups: my estimate is $200-$800/year if you are on WordPress and want a managed solution rather than rolling your own.
- Copywriting: my estimate is $400-$3,000 if you have not budgeted for it, because the published all-in prices bundle it rather than price it. A site without working copy does not convert no matter how nice it looks.
- Schema markup: the JSON-LD that tells Google what your business is, where you are and what you sell. Often left out of a cheaper quote, and my estimate to add it properly is $500-$2,000.
- Conversion tracking: GA4 events, call tracking, form tracking. My estimate is $300-$1,500 to set up properly, plus a call-tracking subscription ($30-$80/month, also my estimate) if you need it.
- Ongoing edits: $120 to $176 an hour across the 6 Australian providers that publish a rate, GST normalised. This page carried "$80 to $250" until 22 September 2026, which was wrong at both ends: $250 had no published support anywhere and $80 was one provider's sale price.
- The SEO work itself: the build is just the starting line. The actual ranking work (content, internal linking, links from other sites, Google Business Profile maintenance) runs $499 to from $6,600 a month across the 10 Australian providers that publish a retainer. Worth knowing that every large agency I checked publishes nothing at all, so that range is what the ones willing to print a number charge, not the market.
Add the published figures up and a properly working Australian small-business lead-gen site lands somewhere between $7,500 for the build plus $499 a month, and $7,500 plus from $6,600 a month, which is roughly $13,500 to $87,000 in year one. That spread is enormous and it is honest: it is what happens when you stop averaging and show the actual published ends. Below the bottom of it you are either doing the work produce leads.
Free build, $297/month including GST, SEO baked in.
The free-websites.com.au model collapses every line item above into one monthly fee. I build you a full Australian-small-business website (typically 10-15 pages with proper service-page architecture and suburb-level SEO baked in at launch), host it, secure it, and handle any website changes you need through the client portal, turned around within 3 business days. Nothing is paid upfront; you pay $297/month including GST for 12 months, which pays for the website in full. There is a 90-day qualified-lead guarantee in writing.
In total that is $3,564 including GST.
This paragraph used to compare that against "an agency build at $8,000 plus $1,000 a month" and claim a $16,000 saving. Both of those figures were invented and the saving was therefore invented too, in my favour, which is the exact thing this page criticises everyone else for. Here is the comparison with real published numbers instead.
WebApex publishes both halves on its own website, so it is the cleanest like-for-like available: $7,500 for a trades and construction build, and SEO from $1,250 a month plus GST. That is $7,500 plus $1,375 including GST across 12 months, which comes to $24,000 in the first year against my $3,564.
Read that difference carefully, because it is not a like-for-like on what you get. $1,250 a month buys considerably more SEO work than $297 a month can, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What the comparison shows is the shape of the 2 models, not that one is 7 times better value.
The trade-off on my side: the build runs on my templated platform, I retain the build IP, and it only suits Australian service businesses under 15 staff. And it is not the cheapest option going. The calculator above will show you that a $995 build with its running costs can land under $3,564 across 12 months, which beats me on price. If the cheapest number is what you are after, that is the honest answer and you should take it.
3 actual Australian builds.
Common questions about website cost.
Why are website prices so wildly different in Australia?
Because "website" covers everything from a Squarespace template to a custom-coded ecommerce platform. Two quotes for the same brief can land at $995 and $7,500, and those are both real published Australian prices from the table above rather than an illustration. One is a flat-price volume builder, the other is a trade specialist whose price includes the copy and the launch setup.
Can I just build it myself on Wix or Squarespace?
Yes. Plan a weekend, expect to keep tweaking it for months, and accept that the SEO ceiling on a templated builder is real. For a side hustle this is fine. For a business relying on the site for leads, the time you spend wrestling with the editor is usually worth more than the agency fee you saved. See my Wix vs Squarespace guide for the platform breakdown.
What is the cheapest serious option?
For an Australian service business under 15 staff, the subscription model at $297 a month including GST, with no upfront and the site built SEO-ready, is worth a look. It is not the cheapest option and the calculator higher up this page will show you that: a $995 build with its running costs can come in under $3,564 across 12 months. What the subscription removes is the upfront and the question of who does the SEO. Outside that profile, a published flat-price build at $995 plus a self-managed ongoing SEO budget is the cheaper path, and I would rather tell you that here than have you find it out later.
How long until the site pays for itself?
Depends on average job value and how quickly you rank. For a $10K-per-job business (underpinning, full kitchen renos, major NDIS plan management), 1 job pays for a full year of subscription several times over. For a $200-per-job business (lawn mow, basic clean), you need to think in terms of repeat customer LTV, not job 1.
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