What budget should you plan for a professional website?
The question comes up on every project: “how much does it cost?”. The honest answer: it depends on your goals, not on a catalogue. Two ten-page sites can require very different work. Here are the variables that actually drive the budget, so you know what to ask for and what to compare before you even send your first email to an agency.
The dominant cost centre is not the same across project types.
What determines the budget of a marketing website?
Three factors, in this order: design, content and SEO.
Design: a custom design starts from a blank page. It goes through mockups, review cycles, then careful component-by-component implementation. That is at least two weeks of work on any non-trivial interface. A customised existing theme goes up in a few days, but it imposes structural and performance constraints you will carry for a long time.
Content: do you have clear copy, quality photography and a brand identity? Or do they need producing? Copywriting and photography are the most frequently underestimated items in a web budget. A marketing site with no content of its own stays invisible in Google, whatever the agency does on the technical side.
SEO: a clean technical base from day one — structured markup, speed, mobile-first, structured data — costs a fraction of what a retrofit costs. Building SEO into the design means not paying twice.
What drives the budget of an e-commerce store?
The number of products matters less than how complex they are to manage.
Variants (size, colour, material), multi-warehouse stock or per-customer pricing change everything. But the real driver is integrations: payment gateway, carrier, invoicing system, ERP. Every connection to an existing system is a project of its own, with its tests, its error cases and its maintenance.
A store with a stable catalogue, one payment method and no external integration stays a reasonable project. A B2B store with per-customer pricing, ERP synchronisation and automated invoicing is a full platform.
Another variable that gets forgotten: performance under load. A store that slows down during a sale loses revenue. Planning load tests during the design phase avoids nasty surprises.
What drives the budget of a web application or SaaS?
Here the number of pages means nothing. What counts:
- The number of user roles and their respective permissions
- The business rules: calculations, approval workflows, notifications
- Subscription handling and recurring payments (Stripe, CMI)
- Security requirements: data isolation, audit trail, GDPR compliance
- The expected scale: 10 concurrent users or 10,000?
An internal tool for an SME team and a multi-tenant platform selling subscriptions do not cost the same, even when the screens look alike. This is also the kind of project where starting with an MVP (minimum viable product) radically changes the upfront investment: you validate the market before building everything.
Comparison by project type
| Project type | Main complexity | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| Theme-based marketing site | Design + content integration | 1–2 weeks |
| Custom marketing site | Mockups, technical SEO | 3–5 weeks |
| Simple e-commerce | Catalogue, cart, payment | 4–6 weeks |
| E-commerce with integrations | ERP, carriers, APIs | 8–16 weeks |
| Web application / SaaS MVP | Roles, business logic, auth | 8–20 weeks |
Durations include review cycles and the testing phase.
What are the most expensive mistakes in a web project?
At NexaCode, clients who come to us to rebuild a site delivered elsewhere repeat the same mistakes:
1. Choosing on lowest price. A very low quote almost always hides work that was not done: no technical SEO, generic content, slow shared hosting. The cost of the rebuild systematically exceeds what a good first project would have cost.
2. Not preparing the content. The project drags because the copy and photos are not ready. The agency bills waiting time, and the site launches late with rushed content.
3. Asking for too many features in v1. An e-commerce that wants a wishlist, a loyalty programme and a mobile API from the start will deliver none of them properly. Better to get a smooth checkout first, then add features based on what real users ask for.
4. Neglecting maintenance. A website is not a piece of furniture. Without regular maintenance, a site degrades or breaks at the worst possible moment.
What makes NexaCode different from a classic agency?
Three concrete differences:
One contact from brief to deployment. No project manager relaying your requests to an offshore team. You talk directly to the person writing the code.
Clean code, not a theme. Our sites are built in Next.js, optimised from the first byte. No WordPress weighed down with plugins.
SEO built in from the design stage. URL structure, structured data, Core Web Vitals: all of it is considered before the first line of code. Our clients do not come back six months later to “add SEO”. Details on our custom web service.
Should you choose a Moroccan or a foreign agency?
For a project aimed at the Moroccan market — Morocco, the Maghreb, the diaspora — a local agency brings real advantages: familiarity with local payment habits (CMI, Cash Plus, Wafacash), local browsing behaviour, local regulation (CNDP), and availability in the same time zone.
For an international SaaS product or an export-focused store, what matters is that the team understands your end customers, wherever they are. For multi-market SaaS applications, we work in French and English from the design stage onwards.
How do you get a reliable estimate?
Be wary of published price lists: they price a typical project that is never exactly yours. The gap between the advertised quote and the final invoice always catches up mid-way — either because features were missing from the scope, or because feedback made the project drift.
A serious estimate starts with a conversation about your goals, your constraints (deadline, existing tools, integrations) and what you already have (available content, brand identity, current hosting).
Our service pages cover each project type in detail:
At NexaCode the first conversation is free, and your quote arrives within 24 business hours, itemised and with no commitment.
Frequently asked questions
Can we see delivered projects before committing? Yes. Our portfolio shows real projects with named clients. For confidential work, we arrange a private walkthrough.
Is the quote free and without commitment? Always. We never bill the pre-sales phase.
What happens if the scope changes mid-project? We work with written change orders: every change is documented, priced and approved before it goes in. No surprises at the end of the project.
How long does a typical project take? A custom marketing site takes 3 to 5 weeks from approved brief to launch. A complex web application can take 3 to 6 months. A detailed schedule is included in every quote.
Do you offer maintenance after delivery? Yes. Our monthly maintenance plans cover security updates, backups and small improvements. The details are set out in every quote.