How Much Does Web Design Cost in Melbourne? (2026 Prices)

The price bands you will see in Melbourne

Under A$2,000 is usually template territory: a freelancer or offshore team customising a Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress theme. It can be fine for a one-page presence, but you rarely get performance work, SEO structure, or anything beyond swapping text and images. The exception is a deliberately small custom build. We start simple one-to-three page sites from A$1,000, coded rather than templated, with mobile layout, basic SEO and a contact form included.

A$3,000 to A$6,000 is where a properly built marketing site for a service business should land: custom design, five to ten pages, mobile-first build, technical SEO foundations, forms wired to your inbox or CRM, and analytics set up. This is the band most of our website projects sit in.

A$6,000 to A$15,000 covers platforms rather than brochures: e-commerce, booking systems, bilingual sites, client portals, or sites with integrations into your operations. Above A$15,000 you are usually paying for agency process, account management, and layers of revision rounds rather than more software.

What actually drives the number

Page count matters less than people expect. What moves the cost is the number of distinct page templates, custom functionality (booking, payments, member areas), integrations, and whether the content already exists or has to be written.

Design process is the other big variable. A large agency will bill for discovery workshops, mood boards, three concept directions, and multiple revision rounds. A small senior team shows you one strong direction early and iterates on the real build, which is cheaper and usually produces a better site.

Bilingual builds add real work, not just translation: separate content, separate metadata, hreflang structure, and a second enquiry flow. Budget roughly 30 to 50 percent on top of a single-language site, not double.

Ongoing costs nobody mentions in the quote

Hosting for a modern static or edge-rendered site should be A$0 to A$30 a month. If someone quotes A$100+ a month for hosting a brochure site, ask what you are paying for. Domains are A$15 to A$40 a year. Managed WordPress hosting, plugins, and security updates can quietly add A$50 to A$200 a month, which is one reason we avoid WordPress for most business sites.

Maintenance retainers are optional for a well-built site. Ask for a site you can edit yourself for copy changes, and pay for development time only when you need new functionality.

Questions that expose an inflated quote

Ask what stack the site is built on and why. Ask for a Core Web Vitals score on a recent project. Ask whether the price includes technical SEO (canonical tags, structured data, sitemap, metadata per page) or whether that is an upsell. Ask who owns the code and the hosting account at the end.

A fair Melbourne quote for a business website answers all four without hesitation and lands in the A$3,000 to A$6,000 band for a marketing site. We publish our ranges on the web design and development page, scope to the smallest version that meets the commercial goal, and give a fixed price before work starts.