How much does a website cost in New Zealand?

These are market ranges across New Zealand agencies and studios in 2026, excluding GST. It's what businesses are getting quoted, not what any one agency charges.

Type of site	Typical range	What you get
One-page or landing site	$1,500 - $3,500	Single page, contact form, the basic SEO set up. Fine for a new business testing an idea.
Small business website	$4,000 - $8,000	Five to eight pages, a CMS you can edit yourself, works properly on a phone, basic SEO, and some training.
Larger CMS website	$8,000 - $20,000	Ten to thirty pages, custom design, structured content, integrations, and more thorough SEO.
E-commerce store	$5,000 - $15,000	Shopify or custom, with product setup, payments, shipping rules and tax. Climbs quickly once integrations get involved.
Custom web application	$15,000 - $75,000+	Booking systems, portals, dashboards, anything with user accounts and real business logic behind it.

If a quote is sitting well under the bottom of its band, something has been left out, and it's usually the content work, the SEO setup or the training. Occasionally it means you're buying a theme with your logo dropped into it, which is fine as long as you know that's what it is.

Everyone asks about page count, and page count is rarely the thing. There are five others that move the number a lot more.

Template or custom. A theme set up for you is a few days of work, while a site designed around your business and built in code is a few weeks. Both are perfectly good things to buy, they're just not the same purchase, and the quote should say plainly which one you're getting.

Who writes the words. Copywriting gets left out of most quotes, and it's the single most common reason a project sits still for months. If the quote assumes you're handing over finished text for every page, that's real work and it's sitting with you.

Who takes the photos. Stock photography is cheap and it looks it. Half a day with a photographer will change how a site feels more than most of the design decisions will.

What it has to talk to. A contact form is nothing. Xero, a booking calendar, live stock levels, a payment gateway with unusual rules - each one of those is real engineering with its own ways of breaking, and each one has to be tested.

How much traffic it has to take. Most business sites never need to think about this at all. But if you're running campaigns that put a few thousand people on one page at once, the hosting and architecture decisions change, and so does the price.

The build is a one-off. The website isn't. It's worth budgeting for these from the start rather than finding them later.

Item	Typical NZ cost	Notes
Domain name	$60 - $130 / year	A .co.nz sits at the lower end. Register it in your own name, not your agency's.
Hosting	From $39 / month	Varies enormously, and cheap shared hosting is usually why a site is slow.
SSL certificate	$0	Should be included. If you're being billed for one, ask why.
Care plan or maintenance	$400 - $10,000 / year	Updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. The range is this wide because "maintenance" means very different things to different people.
Email hosting	$10 - $30 / user / month	Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and separate from your website hosting.
Content changes	$0 or hourly	$0 if you were given a CMS and shown how to use it. Hourly if you weren't.

That last row is worth more attention than it usually gets. A site you can't edit yourself sends you an invoice every time a price changes or someone new joins the team, and over three years that quietly adds up to more than the gap between two build quotes ever was.

A straightforward business website is one to three weeks of build time once your content is ready. Larger CMS builds take three to six weeks, and an online store is somewhere between two and four depending on how many products you have and how strange the shipping rules get.

Agencies will often quote six to twelve weeks for the same work, and most of that isn't building. It's sitting in a queue, waiting on approval rounds, and waiting on content from you. So ask how many working days the job actually takes, then ask what they need from you and when they need it, because that second answer is where projects lose their months.

Five questions, and honestly the answers matter more than the price does.

Do I own the website? The code, the domain and the hosting accounts should all be in your name and able to move. If leaving your agency means starting again from scratch, then you're renting rather than buying, and the price should reflect that.

Can I edit it myself? Ask to see the CMS before you sign rather than after, and watch someone change a price, add a page and swap a photo. "We'll handle changes for you" sounds like service but it's usually a bill.

Is the quote fixed? A fixed price against a written scope protects both sides, because it forces the awkward scope conversation to happen before the work starts instead of halfway through it. Hourly with no ceiling is how a $6,000 site turns into an $11,000 one.

What happens after launch? Who hosts it, who keeps it updated, who picks up the phone when it goes down at 11pm, and what all of that costs.

What happens to my Google rankings? If your current site gets traffic, every old page needs pointing at its new home. Get that wrong and a redesign can wipe out years of built-up search visibility in a fortnight, and you won't notice until the traffic falls a month later. So ask how they'll handle the redirects, and ask it in those words.