Website Development Costs: An Irish Owner’s Guide

Three quotes for the same website can come back thousands of euro apart, and the cheapest one is often the quote that brings in no enquiries. Website development costs in Ireland depend mostly on how many pages are needed, how much content someone else has to write, and whether the site must take bookings or payments. Start with the euro figures, then decide what a fair quote should contain before comparing totals.

How much does a business website cost?#

Maeve runs a small landscaping and garden maintenance business in Gorey, County Wexford. She wants a five-page site that brings in enquiries, with a CMS (Software that lets staff edit web pages without code.) she can update herself, basic SEO (Work that helps a website appear in search results.) and hosting (The service that stores a website and sends it to visitors.) in Ireland. Three designers quoted her for that brief: €2,600, €3,900 and €5,900. These are example figures within the typical Irish market estimate below, not real quotes.

The gap is rarely the page count. It is what each designer counted as included, from writing the words to setting up tracking. These are the bands Irish small and medium businesses usually pay.

Typical Irish market estimate, October 2026, excluding VAT.

One published figure gives a useful sense check. The Law Society of Ireland practice guide on solicitors’ websites gives a design cost range of €1,000 to €4,000 and a project duration of 30 to 60 days. Solicitors’ sites often carry compliance requirements, so that is a reference range from one sector rather than a rule for every business.

What should be in a fair quote#

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A five-page site can be quoted at €2,500 or €6,000 and both figures can be honest, so the useful question is what sits inside each one. Maeve’s three quotes looked almost identical on design and very different on content, which is why she began asking for a written line for every item. A fair quote covers each of these.

• The page plan: which pages exist, what each one must do and who approves it.
• Copywriting: the words for every page, with an agreed number of drafts.
• Design and build: desktop and mobile layouts, a set number of revision rounds, the platform and the editable CMS set-up.
• Forms and tracking: enquiry forms, analytics and a cookie banner.
• Basic SEO: page titles, descriptions, headings and a sitemap.
• Handover and training: the domain, hosting account and site files in the owner’s own name, plus a short training session.

A realistic breakdown for that five-page site looks like this.

Typical Irish market estimate, October 2026, excluding VAT.

Tip: Ask every designer to quote in the same line-item format, so totals are compared only after the inclusions are clear.

What usually increases the cost most#

Once the inclusions are clear, the next question is what makes one quote bigger than another. A few items do most of the work. Anything that must talk to another system, such as a CRM (Software that holds customer details, calls and sales notes.) or a payment provider, adds build time.

• Custom design and custom graphics rather than a clean template.
• Content the designer has to write, research or photograph.
• Ecommerce: product set-up, payments, shipping rates, VAT and returns.
• Bookings, quote calculators, logins and system connections.
• More pages than agreed, or extra rounds of changes.
• Moving content from an old site, or moving from a builder to WordPress.
• Privacy and accessibility work: cookie banner, privacy policy and fixes.

Bord Bia makes the same point in its guide to website project fundamentals: web development costs vary with the specification of the site and the development company.

Maeve ran into this directly. Her €2,600 quote assumed she would write all five pages, supply her own photos and accept the layout as it came. The €5,900 quote included copywriting, a booking form and tracking, so the two figures were never describing the same job.

WordPress website cost in Ireland#

WordPress appears in most Irish quotes, and it changes the cost picture in one clear way: the software itself is free, but someone must build the site and keep it updated. Compared with low-cost DIY builders, the difference is mostly about control and time.

• A DIY builder plan is a monthly subscription of roughly €15 to €45 as a typical Irish market estimate, and the owner builds every page.
• WordPress costs more up front, in the same €2,500 to €6,000 band as the five-page site above, or more with custom features.
• Builders limit layout changes and page speed, and moving platform later is extra work.
• WordPress puts the site files in the owner’s name, but it needs updates and security care, which is a real cost in year two.
• Moving from a builder to WordPress later is a typical Irish market estimate of €800 to €2,500.

Maeve compared the two routes and chose WordPress, mainly because she wanted to own the site and change her own prices and service pages.

Cost of redesigning a website#

A redesign usually costs less than starting again, because the words, photographs and search history already exist. Even so, the figures move a lot. As a typical Irish market estimate, a visual refresh costs €2,000 to €3,500, while a full rebuild that keeps the content and the existing page addresses costs €4,000 to €8,000.

Maeve’s old one-page site has little worth keeping, so she is folding it into the new five-page build rather than paying for a separate redesign.

Watch out: A new design can sink search rankings that already work if old page addresses, titles and content are not carried across carefully.

Website maintenance cost#

Spending does not stop at launch. Hosting, the domain name and the SSL certificate (Security that encrypts data between a site and its visitors.) all come up for renewal, and someone has to keep the site updated.

Typical Irish market estimates for a small business site after launch:

• Hosting: €10 to €40 a month.
• Domain name renewal: €10 to €20 a year.
• SSL certificate: often included with hosting, otherwise €0 to €100 a year.
• Maintenance and security updates: €300 to €1,200 a year.
• Content updates: €50 to €150 an hour.

Maeve asked for the first-year running total before she compared quotes, because those bills come out of the same budget as the build. For a fuller guide to choosing a route and looking after a site, see this Baikou guide to web design routes and maintenance.

Note: Domain and hosting renewals often fall months after launch, when the project is off everyone’s mind, so put both dates in the business calendar.

How to compare website quotes like for like#

With the numbers understood, the last step is the paperwork. Two quotes for the same five pages can differ by thousands of euro because one is a scope and the other is a guess. Put these questions to every designer and ask for the answers in writing.

• How many pages, and how many rounds of design changes are included?
• Who writes the words, and how many drafts are covered?
• Are basic SEO, analytics and a cookie banner included, and will those accounts be in the owner’s name?
• Which platform, and can the site be exported or moved later?
• What is the deposit, the payment schedule and the total?
• What support is included in the first month after launch?
• How will success be measured, for example the conversion rate (The share of visitors who take the action you want.) on each page?

The guide for small businesses from the Local Enterprise Office South Cork adds three hosting questions that matter most when the provider is changing: who will host the site, where the servers will be located, and what hosting and renewal will cost.

Maeve put the same list to all three designers. Two left the hosting questions unanswered, so she went back to both before she compared totals.

When a business needs outside help#

Some parts of a website project are worth paying for even on a tight budget. Writing a brief that ties each page to a business goal, moving content from an old site, connecting payments or a booking system, and checking speed, forms, redirects and tracking at launch are all jobs that go wrong quietly. Ongoing updates and security patches are the same. A web design service that scopes, migrates, launches and maintains a site can take that work off an owner’s desk.

Maeve wrote her own page text and paid for the technical launch checks, which kept the project close to the middle quote.

How Baikou set up its own website#

Baikou’s own site follows the same checklist. It runs on WordPress, and the site and its Google Search Console data are managed directly by the agency rather than through an outside supplier.

The site went live on 1 October 2026. Search Console data for it is pulled in every day, and positions for five commercial searches are recorded every week and shown openly as a live experiment on the home page.

For a business like Maeve’s, the lesson is the same: own the accounts, and judge the new site by the enquiries it brings rather than by how it looks.

Next steps before signing a quote#

Get every quote in the same line-item format, ask the hosting questions, and treat the total as the last thing to compare rather than the first. Decide now who will write the words and who will update the site in year two, because those two answers move the price more than the platform does. Then check that the domain, hosting and analytics accounts will sit in the owner’s own name. Baikou helps Irish businesses with website design, build and maintenance, as set out on the Baikou home page.

FAQ#