Put Your Prices on the Website

Every business owner has a reason for keeping prices off the website. Every project is different. We do not want competitors seeing our rates. We would rather have the conversation. Each of those is reasonable, and none of them survives contact with how people actually buy.

Here is what happens when a visitor cannot find a price. They do not conclude that your work is bespoke and premium. They conclude one of two things: that it is expensive, or that asking will start a sales process they cannot easily get out of. Either way they close the tab and ask somebody who published a number. You were not compared and rejected. You were never in the comparison at all.

The businesses that publish prices are usually not the cheap ones. Publishing a number is what confident businesses do. It filters. The people who arrive after seeing the figure have already accepted it, which means the conversation starts at what you will build rather than what it will cost.

You do not have to publish one flat number to get the benefit. A floor works: projects start at a stated figure. So does a range tied to scope, or a day rate, or a table with three tiers and a plain description of who each one suits. Any of these does the filtering job. The only option that fails is silence.

The strongest version is a worked example. Not a price list, a real job. A two page website for a clinic, with online booking and a contact form, delivered in three weeks, for a specific figure. That single paragraph does more than a tier table, because it is concrete enough for a stranger to stand next to and decide whether they are in the right shop.

Watch what this does to your enquiries. There will be fewer of them, and every one will be worth answering. You stop spending Tuesday mornings writing careful quotes for people who were never going to spend that much, and you stop having the awkward call where a number lands badly forty minutes in. Fewer, better enquiries is not a smaller business. It is a calmer one with the same revenue and half the wasted effort.

The competitor objection does not hold up either. Your competitors already know roughly what you charge. They can ask a customer, or ring you posing as one, and if they are serious they did that months ago. The only person your hidden price successfully hides from is the customer trying to give you money.

The every project is different objection is true and still beatable. Different does not mean unbounded. You know the smallest sensible job you would agree to take. Publish that as the floor, then list the three or four things that move a project up from it: more pages, an online shop, a booking system, migrating years of existing content. Now a visitor can estimate for themselves, and they will usually estimate high, which works in your favour.

If you genuinely cannot publish a figure, publish the process instead. What happens after somebody sends the form, how long a quote takes, whether it costs anything, and who they will be speaking to. That removes most of the anxiety the missing price created, which was the real problem all along.

Your price is not the risky thing on your website. The silence where it should be is.