Most small-business owners in Canada ask the price of a website first and describe the website second. The number they get back depends almost entirely on the second part, so two quotes for "a site for my company" can differ by a factor of ten and both be honest.

We price websites for service businesses in Ottawa and across Canada, and we built a website cost estimate quiz around the six questions we need answered before we can give a figure in writing. This post walks through those questions and what each one does to the cost, so you can estimate your own project before you talk to anyone.

1. What is the job?

A new site, a redesign of a site you have, a rescue of a site that is broken, hacked or locked away from you, an online store, or a site that takes bookings. These are five different projects.

  • A first site has nothing to protect. It starts faster.
  • A redesign or a rescue starts with an inventory of the old site: every address that has search history or links pointing at it needs a redirect to its new page.
  • A store or a booking site adds integrations that have to be built and tested: payments, taxes, shipping, a calendar tied to staff schedules, reminders.

2. Who is the site for?

A local service business, a shop, a professional practice, a non-profit and a personal project need different pages. A plumber in Kanata needs service pages, area pages, a phone button and a short form. A law practice needs one page per practice area and an intake form that screens the request. The page list drives the cost more than the design does.

3. What must the site do?

Write down the jobs, one per line:

  • be found on Google and in AI answers for your services and your city;
  • bring enquiries by phone, form, WhatsApp or a quiz;
  • take bookings or payments;
  • work in English and French;
  • answer common customer questions with an assistant.

Each line is a set of pages or an integration. English and French is a good example: a bilingual site is two sites to write and check, plus the hreflang tags and URL structure that keep the two languages apart in search. In Ottawa, with Gatineau across the river, many service businesses need both.

4. What does it run on today?

This question decides how much work goes into protecting what you already have. If the current site gets visitors from Google, export the list of pages from Search Console before anyone touches it. Here is a short script we use on that export (Performance report, Pages tab, Export as CSV):

import csv, sys # usage: python pages_to_keep.py Pages.csv with open(sys.argv[1], newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f: rows = list(csv.DictReader(f)) keep = [r for r in rows if int(r["Clicks"]) > 0 or int(r["Impressions"]) >= 100] keep.sort(key=lambda r: int(r["Clicks"]), reverse=True) for r in keep: print(r["Clicks"].rjust(6), r["Impressions"].rjust(8), r["Top pages"]) print(f"{len(keep)} of {len(rows)} addresses need a redirect or must keep their URL")

The last line of output is a good proxy for the migration part of the estimate. A site with 12 such pages and a site with 900 are different jobs.

5. Copy and photos

Copy takes longer than code. A site built from text you already have is cheaper than one where the studio writes every service page. Real photos of your work, your team and your premises do more for enquiries than any layout, and if you do not have them, a shoot becomes a line in the estimate.

6. Budget band and timing

Giving a budget band feels like a negotiating mistake. In practice it decides which scope the studio proposes: the same goals can be met with a one-page site and a quiz, or with forty service and area pages. Say the band and ask what fits inside it.

Ongoing costs to ask about

The build is one number. Ask separately about:

  • Hosting and platform fees. Builder plans such as Wix or Squarespace run CA$50 to CA$100 a month for as long as the site lives. A static site on a CDN costs close to nothing to host for a typical small business.
  • Updates. A WordPress site needs core, theme and plugin updates, and each update can break something.
  • Search, ads and content after launch. These should be quoted separately so you can stop any of them without losing the site.
  • Tax. In Ontario, HST at 13% goes on top of a quoted price.

What our published prices are

So you have real numbers to compare against: rebuilding an existing old WordPress, Joomla or website-builder site as a fast static site you own costs CA$500 + HST for a one-page site and CA$1,000 + HST for a multi-page site, paid once, on our website rescue offer. A 30-minute marketing strategy session costs €100. New sites, stores and booking sites are quoted per scope; our pricing page explains how that quote is put together.

A short checklist before you ask for quotes

  • The job: new, redesign, rescue, store or bookings.
  • The page list, one line per service and per area.
  • The languages.
  • How a request reaches you: call, form, quiz, booking.
  • The Search Console export of the current site, if there is one.
  • Who owns the domain, the hosting and the analytics today.
  • Your budget band and the date you want to launch.

With that list in hand, any studio can give you a written figure, and you can compare quotes line by line. If you want ours, the two-minute quiz asks exactly these questions and a person from the studio replies with a written estimate.