Resources
How much does a tattoo shop website cost, and why
Two quotes for a tattoo shop website can differ by a factor of ten and both be honest. What separates them is not the design.
The price of a website is mostly the price of the pages, the structure, and the plumbing behind it. Visual design is a small part of the total, which is why a “cheap beautiful site” is usually an expensive one in disguise.
What drives the number
- Page count and type. Five pages is trivial. Forty pages across styles, subjects, artists, guides, and location is a different project, and it is the part that earns traffic.
- Whether the structure is designed. A pile of pages is cheap; a taxonomy where each page has a job and links into the others is not.
- The booking path. A deposit taken from a phone, without a phone call, is real engineering around real edge cases: moving it, refunding it, tying it to an artist.
- Redirects from the old site. Every legacy URL that earned a backlink needs mapping. Skip it and you throw away authority you already paid for once.
- Schema, sitemap, robots, canonicals. Invisible, unglamorous, and the difference between being understood and being guessed at.
- Performance and accessibility. Both are passes, not defaults. Both affect whether people stay and whether some of them can use the site at all.
Why the cheap option often costs more
A template site gets you online this month. Then you want an artist page per artist and the template fights you. You want subject pages and the theme has no sensible place to put them. You want a deposit and the plugin conflicts with the booking plugin. Every fix is a workaround, and workarounds compound. Five years later you are paying for a rebuild anyway, having spent the interim on patches.
That is not an argument that every shop needs a large project. It is an argument for asking one question before you buy anything: can this structure grow into the pages I will need?
When a rebuild is the honest answer
If the current site is on a template that cannot support artist-level pages, structured data, a redirect map, or a real booking path, then stewardship is money poured into a hole. We will say so and scope a rebuild rather than bill you monthly to fight the platform.
What a rebuild should include
- Content architecture designed around the work you actually sell
- 25-45 pages depending on scope: styles, subjects, artists, guides, location
- The full schema stack, sitemap, robots, and a redirect map from every old URL
- Performance and accessibility measured on a real phone
- A booking path that takes a deposit without a phone call
- Privacy, terms, and an accessibility statement
- Handover with every login, or ongoing stewardship
The question to ask instead of “how much”
Ask what the site is for. If it is a brochure so people can find your address, a template is fine and you should not spend much. If it is supposed to produce bookings in a competitive market, then the pages and the structure are the product, and pricing it like a brochure is how shops end up buying the same thing twice.
Can we start with a smaller site and add pages later?
Yes, and it is often the right call - provided the structure is built to grow. Adding pages to a designed taxonomy is straightforward. Adding them to a template that has no place for them is the expensive path.
Is an ongoing fee necessary after launch?
Only if you want the site maintained. A shop’s hours, artists, and work change constantly, and a site that drifts out of date costs bookings. Stewardship exists because nobody on the floor has time to update a CMS.
Can we start with a smaller site and add pages later?
Yes, and it is often the right call - provided the structure is built to grow. Adding pages to a designed taxonomy is straightforward. Adding them to a template that has no place for them is the expensive path.
Is an ongoing fee necessary after launch?
Only if you want the site maintained. A shop’s hours, artists, and work change constantly, and a site that drifts out of date costs bookings. Stewardship exists because nobody on the floor has time to update a CMS.
Want the version built for your shop?
Tell us about the shop and the part that is leaking. We will recommend a scope - and starting smaller is allowed.