The short answer: A custom website for an architecture firm runs $3,500 to $12,000+ as a one-time build. A solo studio serving one market with a dozen projects worth showing sits near the bottom. A firm carrying both commercial and residential work, a deep project archive, and photography that has to look right on a phone sits near the top. There is no honest industry average to quote, because the price tracks how much portfolio and how many markets the site has to hold.
Architecture is a long sale. A homeowner planning an addition or a developer sizing up a tenant improvement sits with the decision for weeks, sometimes longer, and comes back to your site more than once. Referrals do it too. Someone hands your name across a table, and the first thing that happens is your site gets opened on a phone in a parking lot.
That changes what you are buying. The site is not a contact form with pictures around it. It is the document that gets read while the decision is being made, which is why the portfolio, not the page count, drives most of the quote.
The unit of value is the project page. One project, one page: photographs, a plan or a section if you have one, the brief in plain language, the constraint you solved, the location, and the project type. A grid of thumbnails that pops open a lightbox gives a prospect nothing to read and gives search engines nothing to index.
Then there is the split. Commercial and residential are two different markets wearing the same license. The developer and the homeowner want different proof, arrive on different searches, and ask different first questions. A firm doing both needs two tracks inside one site, each with its own inquiry path, instead of one blended page trying to talk to everybody.
And the inquiry itself matters. Most firms do not want a call-now button. They want a request that arrives with project type, location, rough scope, and timeline attached, so a Tuesday afternoon is not spent on someone who needed a drafter. Building that qualifying path is design work, and it is part of the price. More on how we approach the trade on the architecture websites and SEO page.
The published number is $3,500 to $12,000+ for a custom build, one time. Here is what moves a firm along it.
Near $3,500. A compact custom site: home, capabilities, about the practice, a curated set of project pages, and a contact path that qualifies. Fast on a phone, written properly, and yours. This fits a solo architect or a two-person studio in one market who would rather show ten projects well than forty badly.
Through the middle. The portfolio stops being a page and becomes a system. Project pages run on a template you can add to yourself. Filters by market and project type. Separate commercial and residential tracks with their own proof and their own forms. Project-type and service-area pages underneath, which is where search starts filling the gaps referrals leave: when a large project wraps and the calendar opens up, those pages are the part still working. We also wire first-party lead dashboards, which run on more than 20 of the sites we manage, so you can see which project type actually produced the inquiry instead of guessing. See analytics and CRO.
At $12,000 and up. Several markets or offices, a large archive brought over project by project, heavy photography handled so pages still load, and often a custom tool on top. Tools are quoted separately: calculators start at $600, most workhorse tools run $1,500 to $4,000, and Tool Care is $75/month per tool. For a practice, that usually looks like a scoping intake that routes a request by project type, or a rough fee-range tool that qualifies before the call. See custom tools.
All of it is month to month, and you own the site, the content, the domain, and the accounts. If you leave, it leaves with you.
Pushes it up:
Pulls it down:
The general drivers of website price, custom versus template and the rest, are covered in the website cost guide and in custom website versus template, so there is no reason to repeat them here. Two numbers people ask about in the same breath: monthly search work is a separate line item, covered in what SEO costs for an architecture firm, and schedules are covered in how long a build takes.
Before you collect quotes, run the two cheap diagnostics. Open your own site on your phone, on cell service rather than office wifi, and time how long the first project photo takes to appear. Then run the website report card for the technical picture and the what should you pay tool as a sanity check on any number you have been quoted.
Then count two things: how many projects you would actually put in front of a client, and whether you serve one market or two. Those two answers are most of the quote. Bring them to any conversation and you get a real number instead of a range.
If you want to see it before you spend anything, ask for a free mockup. We build the concept first, so you are looking at a real layout built around your work rather than approving a wireframe. We are Orlando based and have worked with local service businesses nationwide since 2008. What goes into the build is on the custom web design page, or call or text (407) 694-2055 and describe the practice.
No, and most firms should not. Start with the projects you would show a client today, each on its own page, then add the rest over time. Migration is per-project labor, so the archive is the one place where a decision made in a planning call changes the invoice directly.
If the project pages run on a template, adding one is your own time, not an invoice: photos, a short write-up, the location, the project type, and it publishes in the layout you already have. If you would rather send the folder and have it written and laid out for you, we quote that as its own small block of work first. Either way the archive fills in at whatever pace the office has.
Usually not. Build with what is labeled and ready, and design the project pages so images swap later without touching the layout. Waiting on a shoot can hold the whole site, and those are months the project-type and service-area pages are not out there earning inquiries while referrals are quiet.
Architecture websites and SEO · How much does SEO cost for an architecture firm? · How much does a website cost · Custom web design · How long does it take to build a website · What should you pay tool · The plain-English glossary
Free consultation, plain-English answer. If you don't need us, we'll say so.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.