The £10k Website Breakdown: Where Does the Money Go?

A website budget breakdown is the thing most quotes never give you. You get a total figure, maybe a rough scope of pages, and not much else. If you’ve had a quote land at £10,000 or more and wondered what’s inside that number, this is the answer. Not marketing language about “value,” but a proper line-by-line look at where the money goes on a custom WordPress build.

I’ve written before about why website prices vary so widely across the market. This post goes narrower. It’s not about DIY versus custom, it’s about what happens inside a £10k+ project specifically, once you’ve already decided you need proper development.

Before anything gets built: scoping and discovery

The first stage of any serious project isn’t design or code. It’s finding out what your business needs, which sounds obvious until you realise most cheap builds skip it entirely.

This stage covers gathering your branding, colours, existing examples, and content requirements, then working out what the site has to do for your business. A booking system needs different foundations to a simple brochure site. A CRM integration changes the entire technical approach. Getting this wrong at the start means expensive rework later.

Rough allocation: 5-10% of the budget. It’s a small slice, but skipping it is the single biggest reason cheap websites end up needing a rebuild within two years.

Design: more than making it look nice

Design on a project like this typically happens in rounds. An initial concept goes to the client, feedback comes back, the designer makes changes, and there’s usually a second review before formal sign-off. That sign-off matters more than it sounds. It’s what stops a project drifting as new ideas creep in mid-build.

For kupu projects, a dedicated design partner handles the design rather than doing it in-house. That keeps the visual work at a genuinely professional standard, rather than a developer’s best guess at what looks good.

Rough allocation: 15-20%. This covers the concept work, the revision rounds, and the sign-off process that protects the rest of the timeline.

Development: where most of the £10k goes

This is the biggest single chunk of the budget. It’s also the part that varies most, depending on what you’re building. A five-page brochure site with a contact form is one kind of job. A site with a member login area, a booking system that talks to your calendar, or an API pulling live data from another platform is a different job entirely.

Development is where the technical decisions happen that you’ll never see in the finished site. How the developer structures the database, which approach will still work in three years, which plugins will cause problems down the line: all of it gets decided here. None of that is visible on launch day. All of it determines whether the site still works properly in year three.

Rough allocation: 40-50%. On a technically complex build, this can run higher.

What pushes development costs up

• CRM or third-party integrations – connecting to HubSpot, a booking calendar, or a stock system adds engineering time
• Custom functionality – anything that isn’t a standard page template needs building from scratch
• Membership or login areas – user accounts, permissions, and secure data handling all add complexity
• API connections – pulling or pushing data to another system is rarely a quick job, even when it sounds simple

Testing, bug fixes, and getting it right before launch

Skipping proper QA doesn’t save time, it just moves the bugs from before launch to after launch.

Once development finishes, the site goes through quality assurance. Either an independent tester or a second pair of eyes that wasn’t involved in the build checks it over. The developer fixes any bugs found at this stage. Then your content gets added properly, rather than leaving placeholder text in place, and you get a full walkthrough of the finished site before anything goes live.

Skip this stage and the bugs don’t disappear, they just show up after launch instead, when they’re far more disruptive to fix.

Rough allocation: 10-15%.

Launch day isn’t just flicking a switch

A proper launch involves a final backup. The developer prepares the DNS changes and monitors them as they propagate, then verifies that every critical journey on the site works: forms submitting, images loading, navigation functioning on mobile. Then there’s a client walkthrough. The developer hands over credentials and monitors the site for the first week, to catch anything that only shows up under real traffic.

This is a small percentage of the overall cost. But it’s the difference between a launch that goes quietly and one that causes a panicked phone call three days later.

What’s usually missing from the quote entirely

This is the part that catches people out the most: most website quotes don’t include ongoing support at all. And it’s rarely optional in any meaningful sense. WordPress needs updates, security needs monitoring, and things occasionally break. A properly maintained site typically costs somewhere between £50 and £200 a month, depending on complexity. That’s a separate line item from the build cost, not something the build cost already includes.

If a quote seems unusually low compared to others you’ve received, this is often where the gap sits. The build might look similar on paper. What happens after launch usually isn’t.

A worked example

Take a fairly typical £12,000 kupu-scale project with one CRM integration and a straightforward custom booking feature:

• Scoping and discovery: roughly £900
• Design (concept, revisions, sign-off): roughly £2,100
• Development (build, integration, booking feature): roughly £5,700
• QA, bug fixes, content population: roughly £1,500
• Launch and first-week monitoring: roughly £600
• Project management and client reviews throughout: roughly £1,200

None of that includes ongoing maintenance, which sits outside the build cost as a monthly figure once the site is live.

The question worth asking a developer

A developer who can walk you through where the money goes, stage by stage, has thought properly about the process.

Rather than just asking for a total number, ask for the breakdown. A developer who can walk you through where the money goes, stage by stage, has thought properly about the process. That’s different to a developer just guessing at a number. If a developer can’t break a quote down at all, that’s usually a sign the process behind it isn’t especially structured either.

A typical project like this runs 8-10 weeks from kickoff to launch. If someone’s quoting a fraction of that timeline for the same scope, it’s worth asking what they’re skipping to get there.

If you’ve had a quote and you’re not sure what’s inside it, that’s worth a conversation before you sign anything. I’ll walk you through it honestly, no pressure, whether that quote’s mine or someone else’s.