How much does a website cost in Ticino?
“How much does a website cost?” is probably the question we are asked most often, and it is also the hardest to answer with a single figure over the phone. Not because we want to be vague, but because a three-page showcase site and an online shop with hundreds of products are two different projects, and their costs can differ by a factor of ten. The figure depends on what your business needs.
The first factor: what kind of site you need
A simple showcase site, with a few pages presenting the business, its services and contact details, usually costs between CHF 1,500 and 3,000. A more structured site, with more pages, content in several languages and more careful SEO work, rises to between CHF 3,500 and 14,000. An online shop, with a product catalogue, order management and payment integration, generally starts at CHF 10,000 and can exceed 30,000, depending on how complex the catalogue is and which integrations with stock or invoicing systems are needed.
Before choosing a price band, it is worth working out which of these three situations your business is in, and that usually becomes clear by talking about the problem the site needs to solve rather than about the technology.
The second factor: how much content you need
A quote also changes a lot depending on who writes the text and who supplies the images. A site with ready-made content supplied by the client costs less than one where service descriptions have to be written from scratch, translated into several languages and illustrated with professional photographs. The number of pages also has a direct effect: a 5-page site and a 20-page site require very different work on structure and navigation, even with the same design.
The third factor: domain and server, the costs that come back every year
On top of the build cost, there are two items that recur every year and are worth knowing about before you sign a quote. The domain, the site’s address (for example yourcompany.ch), usually costs between CHF 15 and 25 a year. The server, that is the hosting that keeps the site online, ranges from about CHF 100 a year for a simple showcase site to several hundred francs for an online shop with a lot of traffic or higher security requirements.
Some offers include the first year of hosting in the build price, others invoice it separately from the start: it is one of the first questions to ask whoever prepares your quote, because it changes the real comparison between two offers that look similar.
Why the same type of site can cost very different amounts
A site built with a CMS such as WordPress or WooCommerce, customised from an existing theme, costs less than a site or online shop developed to measure from scratch, because in the first case much of the structure is already there. A custom project takes more hours of development, but it gives more design freedom and more control over performance and features over time. We discussed this in more detail in the article Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop or a custom online shop: which should you choose?, where the choice is linked to the level of customisation required and the number of products to manage.
Why we analyse first and only then propose a price
At the first contact we avoid giving a figure, because a price given before understanding the problem is almost always wrong, either too high or too low. Before proposing a showcase site, an online shop or a different solution, we look at what the business actually sells, who its customers are, and what visitors to the site need to do: request a quote, buy directly, book an appointment. We covered this in the article why we analyse first and then make a proposal, which describes exactly this approach.
The outcome of this analysis is not always a new site: in some cases the right solution is to stay on WordPress with a few targeted changes, in others a full online shop is needed, and in others still it is enough to restructure what is already there, as described in the article WooCommerce redesign with Next.js. We build all these solutions in-house through our Websites service, so our proposal is never influenced by a need to sell the biggest project.
When the website is only part of the problem
The question “how much does a website cost” often hides a wider problem: unclear internal processes, data scattered across Excel sheets and different systems, or growth that has outstripped the company’s organisational structure. In these cases a new site, however well made, solves only part of the need.
That is why we also offer a smart business consulting service, designed to analyse how the whole business works, online presence included: we listen to the people who actually work in the processes, analyse the data and tools already in use, propose priority actions with timescales and costs, and stay alongside the business while the changes are put into practice, until the new way of working holds up on its own.
If you are not yet sure whether you need a showcase site, an online shop or a broader analysis of your business processes, contact us: we will look at your situation together and propose the most suitable solution, with a cost estimate based on your case.
