⚡ Quick answer: Website format isn’t determined by budget or taste — it’s determined by how long your customer needs to make a decision. One service with a fast decision means a landing page, from around $300. Several directions and a long approval cycle means a corporate site, from around $1,500. Selling physical products means a store, from around $700 depending on catalogue size. Getting the format wrong costs more than the site itself: rebuilding the structure a year later is almost always a new project, not an edit.
People usually come to us asking for “something like our competitor has.” The question we ask back tends to reset the conversation: what is the visitor supposed to do on the site — leave an enquiry, compare terms, or add something to a cart? The format follows from that answer on its own.
| Format | Starting price | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page | from $300 | One service or product, ad traffic with a clear offer, fast decisions |
| Corporate site | from $1,500 | Multiple directions, B2B, long approval cycle, trust matters |
| Online store | from $700 | Selling products, inventory, online payment and shipping |
| Portfolio / personal site | from $300 | Specialists and studios where the work itself closes the deal |
These are floor prices, and they move a lot depending on scope. We broke down what makes up each figure separately: what a landing page costs, what a corporate site costs, and what an online store costs.
A landing page works like a corridor with no side doors. Someone arrives from an ad, walks one pre-planned path, and runs into a form. No menu, no “about us” section, no way to wander off — and that’s precisely the point.
It makes sense when you have one specific offer and paid traffic behind it. A course, a service, a consultation booking, a single product. A standard landing page converts at around 2%, which is a sensible baseline to work from.
Where it breaks: the moment you have more than one service. Cramming three different directions into one page produces a blurred offer that works for none of them. That’s the most common reason a business rebuilds its landing page into a full site a year later — and pays twice.
The signal that you specifically need a corporate site is simple: weeks pass between the first visit and the deal, and more than one person decides. The client comes back several times, reads case studies, shows the site to a partner or manager, compares you against competitors.
In that scenario every page does a job. The service page answers “what exactly do you do,” case studies answer “have you done this before,” the team page answers “who am I dealing with,” and the blog handles the questions that come up before anyone contacts you.
It’s also the only format where investing seriously in SEO makes sense. A landing page ranks for one or two queries; a corporate site with a dozen service pages collects traffic across dozens — which is why work on rankings pays off fastest here.
A store differs from every other format in that the site is only the visible part. Underneath sit the catalogue, stock levels, payments, shipping, order processing and returns.
Price is driven mainly by product count. Up to 100 items sits at the lower end; 100 to 1,000 moves into the middle; over a thousand climbs steeply. The difference isn’t design — it’s that a large catalogue needs filters that actually work and synchronisation with your inventory system, because nobody maintains a thousand items by hand.
One more cost that rarely comes up: a store needs technical support at a different level than a brochure site. Every plugin update can touch payments or shipping calculations, and an hour of downtime here costs real money rather than mild inconvenience.
A photographer, designer, architect or small studio often needs neither a landing page nor a corporate site. They need a gallery that loads fast and contact details.
The second consideration is that portfolios age quickly. A gallery whose most recent project is dated two years ago works against you — visitors conclude the work dried up. So for this format it’s critical that adding a new project takes ten minutes and no developer.
The main technical trap is image weight. A portfolio with a dozen unoptimised 5 MB photographs loads so slowly that half the visitors close the tab before seeing the first project. This is the case where site speed affects results more than design does.
There’s a shorter route than comparing tables. Answer three questions and the format resolves itself almost unambiguously.
How many offers do you have? One — landing page. Several directions — corporate. Many items with prices and stock — store.
How long does the decision take? Minutes — a landing page closes it. Weeks of comparison and internal approval — you need a site people can return to, with something to read.
Where will traffic come from? Paid ads behind a specific offer sit well on a landing page. Relying on search requires a multi-page structure, because ranking for dozens of queries with one page isn’t possible.
If your answers contradict each other, that’s normal — and that’s exactly where a conversation beats a template.
Owners underestimate timelines almost every time, and what blows them isn’t development — it’s content.
| Format | Realistic timeline | Usual bottleneck |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page | 1-2 weeks | Copy and photos from the client |
| Portfolio | 1-2 weeks | Selecting and processing work |
| Corporate site | 4-8 weeks | Filling service pages, approving structure |
| Online store | 6-12 weeks | Catalogue, product cards, payment and shipping integrations |
In our experience roughly every second project overruns its original timeline because of content. Development sits finished while service descriptions or product cards are still unwritten, because nobody inside the company owns that task personally. If you admit at the start that there’s nobody to write it and budget for copywriting, timelines usually hold.
It does, more than people expect. A landing page or portfolio lives perfectly well on a website builder — there’s no complex logic, and speed to launch matters more than flexibility. A corporate site with a blog and a dozen service pages is better on WordPress, because you’ll be adding content yourself regularly.
A store is its own case: here the platform decides what you’ll be able to integrate a year from now. We compared the options in detail in WordPress, Tilda or Wix, and the main conclusion applies to format choice too — decide based on what you’ll need in year two, not what’s convenient now.
A phased approach works, but not the way people usually mean it. The mistake is building a landing page and then trying to “grow” it into a site. The right version is to design the full corporate structure upfront and launch only part of it.
It looks like this: agree an architecture of eight sections, build three key pages first — home, one service, contacts — and go live. The rest gets added over the following months into a structure that already exists, with no rework of navigation or design. The budget still spreads over time, but you don’t pay twice for the same work.
This is the scenario we at Netloria suggest to clients whose budget is limited but whose plans are clearly bigger than one page. Over two years the difference in total cost is substantial.
The logic of “let’s start with a landing page because it’s cheaper, then expand” sounds prudent and fails regularly. A landing page isn’t a smaller corporate site — it’s a different structure with different logic. You can’t extend it: you end up rebuilding the structure, rethinking navigation, migrating content and almost always redoing the design for new page types. The business pays for a landing page and then, a year later, the full cost of a corporate site, instead of building the right format first and putting the difference into advertising. We see this several times a year at Netloria, and the frustrating part is that at the start it was almost always predictable from one question about the next twelve months.
The reverse mistake happens too: an eight-section corporate site for a business with one service and three clients a month. Half the pages stay empty, the site looks abandoned, and that damages trust more than a single honest page would.
It’s not a rare situation: the site exists, has run for two years, and clearly doesn’t do the job. A landing page with four more services bolted on via anchor links. Or a store built for a thousand items running thirty, with half the functionality idle.
The first thing not to do is delete the old site and put a new one on the same domain unprepared. Pages that spent years accumulating search rankings disappear, 404s appear in their place, and traffic drops for months. The correct order is different: list every URL that brings traffic, and decide in advance where each one goes on the new site via a 301 redirect.
Second — don’t migrate old content as-is. If you’re rebuilding the structure anyway, this is the cheapest moment to rewrite service pages that were written in a hurry at launch. You won’t come back to it later.
If you haven’t settled on a format yet — tell us what you sell and how clients find you now. We’re a web studio based in Ukraine, and we’ll match the structure to the actual job rather than sell you the most expensive option on the list.
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One-Page Website (Landing Page)
