Website for marketing agencies: the awkward case, and what it costs

en 2026-09-19 6 min read

A marketing agency website is a step 03 build: EUR 1.500-3.500 for 4 to 7 pages, a CMS, service pages and a contact or booking flow, over 3 to 6 weeks. If you sell one service and have no work you are allowed to publish yet, step 02 at EUR 900-1.500 is the honest answer, and we will say so rather than sell you pages you cannot fill.

The hard part of this brief is not the budget. It is the audience. An agency site gets read by people who commission, write and test websites for a living, and every device on the page is a device they already know the name of. That changes where the money should go.

What sits behind the number

On a step 03 agency site the build splits across four things: the service pages, the CMS so you can publish without calling us, the case study structure, and the route from reading to talking. Design hours are real, but they are not where a site like this is won or lost.

The case study structure is the line item that matters

An agency is judged on its work, so the site needs a repeatable way to show it: a content type with fields for the brief, the constraint, what was made, and the result you are allowed to name. Build that once and every future case study is a form you fill in. Lay each one out by hand instead and publishing new work stays a developer job, which is the position you least want to be in when a good project finally clears client approval.

Restraint is a budget decision, not only a taste one

A visitor who works in marketing is running the same evaluation on your site that they run on a client site. A hero that states who you help and what you do can be argued with. A hero of moving gradients cannot, because there is nothing in it to agree or disagree with. Plain type, a real photograph of real work, one clear claim and a form that works is also the version that loads fast, behaves on a phone, and can be edited by you next quarter without a rebuild.

Restraint also moves the cost down. The pages that need custom engineering are the ones doing something: a filterable work index, a pricing view, a calculator. A quiet page is inexpensive to build. A busy page is not, and a busy page aimed at marketers works against you twice, once in the invoice and once in the reading.

Which step an agency site belongs to

A fixed quote always follows scoping; the ranges above are the shape of the answer, not the answer. The same steps apply to every project we take, and the full list is on packages.

What pushes an agency site to step 04

Four things move an agency site out of step 03 and into step 04 at EUR 3.500-7.500:

• A client login with live campaign reporting behind it.
• A dashboard pulling numbers out of ad platform or analytics APIs.
• Selling something directly, such as a template, an audit or a course, with payments and checkout.
• A CRM your team works inside, rather than a form that sends you an email.

If none of those four is on your list, do not pay step 04 prices for a step 03 site. Agencies talk themselves into the client login because it sounds like a product. It is a product, and it deserves its own price rather than being smuggled into a website budget: step 04 in a new build, or the client login add-on at EUR 1.500-4.000 on a live site, confirmed by the quote.

After launch

Care runs EUR 100-300 per month and covers updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It is not a redesign and it is not new features; when you want either, we scope them separately so you can see what you are buying.

SEO foundation is a one-off piece of work at EUR 450-750: Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links, and a 3 to 6 month plan you can act on without us. SEO growth is the monthly version at EUR 500-800, where technical and on-page work, service, location and content pages, internal links and authority, and reporting continue month after month. Buying the monthly work before the one-off work is the wrong order.

Process and timeline

Scoping comes first and produces the fixed quote. Then structure and copy, then design and build, then launch. A step 03 agency site runs 3 to 6 weeks, a step 02 mini-site 2 to 3 weeks, a step 01 landing page 1 to 2 weeks.

One warning about the schedule. The case studies are the part that waits on you. Late input moves the planning, the site cannot launch on placeholder work, and writing up your own projects is the task that gets pushed behind billable work. Decide which projects go in before the build starts, and collect the client permissions while we are building.

If you already have a designer and want engineering only, we work that way too, and it is described on design and engineering.

When to spend less

• Everything you have shipped is under NDA. Without publishable work, a 7 page site is 7 pages of adjectives. Take step 02 at EUR 900-1.500 and revisit when you have two or three cases you can name.
• Your pipeline is referral and outbound only. Then the site is something you send a link to, not something people find. A step 01 landing page at EUR 600-900 with a form and analytics does that job.
• You are still changing what you sell. Positioning churn is expensive to rebuild around. Wait, and put the difference into the offer.
• Your current site works and only looks tired. Care at EUR 100-300 per month plus SEO foundation at EUR 450-750 can do more for you than a rebuild, and the budget stays available for when the positioning is settled.

Questions buyers ask

Should our site look like the work we sell to clients?

It should look like work you would defend in a room. The trap is treating your own site as the showreel for every technique in the studio, which reads as unspent energy rather than judgement. Put the range inside the case studies, where each choice belongs to a client problem, and keep the frame around them quiet.

We have an in-house designer. Can you build only?

Yes. If your designer delivers the screens, we scope the engineering against those files and the price moves accordingly. We will flag anything in the design that is expensive to build before you sign, not halfway through.

Do we own the site?

You own the code, the repository and the database. Hosting is agreed per project, and we can host it. That is one of the decisions made during scoping rather than a rule we impose.

Do we need a blog?

Only if someone is going to write in it. An empty blog with one post from last year is a worse signal than no blog, and you are the ones selling content services. If nobody has the time, put the CMS behind the case studies instead and publish work rather than opinions.

What do you build on?

Next.js, with hosting agreed per project and a CMS chosen around who will actually edit the site. There is more detail on Next.js development.

Send us the services you sell and the work you can publish, and you will get back a step, a timeline and a fixed quote after scoping: start here.