Core Web Vitals in plain English for marketing teams
LCP, INP and CLS without the jargon: what each measures and which fixes are worth asking for first.
If you have asked three agencies to quote the same website, you have probably seen the same thing we have: one number that feels suspiciously low, one that feels reasonable, and one that makes you wonder whether they read the brief at all.
Usually nothing shady is going on. They are quoting different projects. The brief described a website; each agency filled in the hundred unstated decisions differently, and those decisions are where the money is.
Where the money actually goes
On a typical build, design and front-end development are rarely the biggest line. The cost concentrates in four places that briefs tend to gloss over.
- Number of unique templates. Twelve pages that share three layouts is a small project. Twelve pages that each need their own design is four times the work.
- Content. Who writes it, who sources the photography, and who migrates the two hundred old blog posts. This is the single most common cause of a quote being wrong.
- Integrations. A contact form is trivial. A CRM sync, a booking system and a live inventory feed are three separate pieces of engineering with their own failure modes.
- What happens to the old site. Redirect mapping, preserving rankings, and untangling whatever the last developer left behind.
The questions worth asking
Before comparing numbers, make the quotes comparable. Five questions do most of the work.
1. How many unique page designs does this include?
Ask for a count, not a page list. If the answer is vague, the quote is a guess and you will meet the difference later as a change request.
2. Who is writing the content?
If the quote assumes you deliver final copy and you were assuming they would write it, you are looking at a number that is missing weeks of work.
3. What happens to our existing URLs?
A redesign without a redirect map is how businesses lose organic traffic overnight. If redirects are not mentioned, that is a real omission, not a detail.
The cheapest quote is often the one that excluded the most. That is not dishonest — but it does mean you are comparing a deliverable to an assumption.
4. Who maintains it afterwards?
A build optimised for a developer to maintain and a build optimised for your marketing team to maintain are different projects with different costs. Say which one you need.
5. What is explicitly out of scope?
The exclusions list tells you more than the inclusions list. A proposal with no exclusions has not been thought through.
What a realistic range looks like
Published price ranges are mostly marketing, because the variables above swing the number so hard. What we can say is how the shape of a project maps to effort.
- A focused marketing site — six to ten templates, copy provided, no integrations — is typically six to eight weeks of work.
- Add e-commerce, and you are adding catalogue structure, checkout, payments, shipping logic and testing. Expect ten to sixteen weeks.
- Add custom functionality — portals, calculators, system integrations — and the website becomes a software project. It should be scoped like one.
How to compare proposals fairly
Put the three proposals side by side and line up the deliverables, not the totals. Mark anything that appears in one and not the others. In our experience that exercise explains most of the price gap within about twenty minutes, and it usually changes which quote looks best.
Then ask each agency the same follow-up: what would you cut first if the budget were twenty per cent lower? The answer tells you what they think matters — and whether they are thinking about your outcome or their invoice.