Three things move the number, and none of them is how the site looks. The first is size and features: more pages, a store, a booking system or customer accounts all add build time. The second is custom functionality: anything bespoke, an integration with your CRM or accounting, a calculator, a portal, costs more than a standard page because it has to be built and tested, not dropped in from a template.
The third is the one I will not let a client skip, because almost everyone ignores it: whether the site is engineered to be found by AI search. The overlap between top Google results and the sources AI engines cite has fallen from about 70% to under 20% (Brandlight, 2026), so a site built for Google alone is half-blind to where buyers now look. And the old Google traffic itself is leaking: about 58.5% of Google searches end without a click (SparkToro, 2024). Building a site to be cited costs little extra at the start and far more to retrofit later, which is exactly why a cheap template you have to rebuild in a year is the expensive choice. For how we build sites to be cited, not just found, see web design and development and how to get recommended by ChatGPT.