How do I choose a web developer in Lagos, Nigeria?

Last updated 2 October 2026. Written by Oyekola Obajuwon, founder of Growveloper, a growth studio in Lagos that builds the website, the marketing and the follow up for owner run businesses in Nigeria, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Choose on what the quote includes, not on the price or the page count. Five Lagos price lists for up to five pages run from ₦120,000 to ₦450,000. Before paying, get in writing whose name the domain is registered in, what year two costs, what you can edit yourself, and how payment follows what you can see.

That spread is nearly four times, for the same number of pages. We read the price lists Lagos web developers publish, put five of them side by side, and the difference turned out not to be the pages at all. It was everything printed in smaller type underneath them, and some things that were not printed anywhere.

How much does a website cost in Lagos in 2026?

For a small business site of up to five pages, the published prices we read run from ₦120,000 to ₦450,000. Here is what each price list says you get for the money.

The full lists are on QuickSite's pricing page, Etest Tech Hub's cost guide, Abule Graphics' price list, Archypage's pricing and Sizzle Digital's packages. Bigger builds climb fast. One Lagos firm, Nexoris Technologies, puts a basic WordPress business site at ₦200,000 to ₦500,000 and a custom coded marketing site at ₦1.5 million to ₦4 million in its 2026 cost guide.

Why do quotes for the same five pages differ so much?

Because the page count is the one thing on the list that does not decide the price. Look across the table again. Support after launch runs from one week to two months. One list includes a dashboard so you can change the site yourself, and the others do not mention one at that price. Three include the first year of domain and hosting, one charges ₦45,000 a year for it, and one leaves it out of the package.

None of that is a reason to pick the cheapest or the dearest. It is a reason to stop comparing the big number. A ₦120,000 quote with one month of support and a ₦350,000 quote with two months and the hosting priced in are not two prices for the same thing. They are two different things that both happen to have five pages.

If you are deciding between a freelancer and an agency rather than between two quotes, our piece on freelance web developers versus agencies sets out that choice, written for US owners but true in Lagos too.

What is the catch in a free first year of domain and hosting?

Two questions it lets nobody ask. We call it the free first year: the line on a quote that makes year one cheaper and hides the two facts that decide what the site costs you over its life.

Whose name is the domain in?

Three of the five lists include the domain, and none of the five says in whose name it will be registered. That matters more than it sounds. NiRA, the body that runs .ng domains, explains on its page about registering .ng domains that it does not register domains itself; accredited registrars do, and "a person who has registered at least one .ng domain is called a Registrant." If your developer registers your domain from their own account, the developer can be the registrant on paper, and your business name sits on an address you do not hold. Ask for the domain in your business's name, with an email you control, at a registrar where you have the login.

What does year two cost?

None of the three lists that include the first year prints the price of the second. The renewal prices that Lagos firms do publish vary widely. Etest Tech Hub lists a .com.ng domain at ₦1,500 to ₦3,000 a year, and Nexoris lists the same domain at ₦3,000 to ₦10,000, so two firms' published prices for one thing barely overlap.

Nexoris also publishes the bigger picture from its own work. Across 47 client projects, it says, the three year cost of owning a site has run two to three times the build price. And of the redesigns it took on in 2025, "roughly two thirds were sites originally built by another team, abandoned within 18 months because the running costs surprised the owner." That is one firm's account of its own clients, and it sells redesigns, so weigh it that way. But it describes exactly what the free first year hides.

Should I pay in naira or in dollars?

Pay in the currency your money comes in, and fix it for the whole project. Archypage, for one, states that all its quotes are fixed in naira. A price in dollars moves with the exchange rate between the quote and the last payment, and so does anything the site rents in dollars. Nexoris gives the example of a plugin priced at $99 a year that cost ₦120,000 to renew in 2024 and closer to ₦150,000 in 2026. Before you sign, ask which parts of the running cost are billed in dollars, and who pays the difference when the rate moves.

Our own prices are published in dollars: $2,000 to $10,000 and up for a website, set out in our piece on what a small business website costs. That puts us above most of the lists in this article. If what you need is a five page site you can edit yourself, several of them will build it for less, and the questions on this page work just as well on them.

How much should I pay a web developer upfront?

Half, on the Lagos price lists we read. QuickSite asks for a 50% deposit with the balance on completion, Archypage asks for 50% to start and 50% on delivery, and Abule Graphics asks for half on its five page package and ₦100,000 of ₦150,000 upfront on its one page site.

What matters more than the split is what the second payment is tied to. Tie it to something you can open on your own phone, not to the word "done". Our web development page describes how we work: "You see progress every week on a staging site. You review, give feedback, and approve before we move forward."

That weekly look is also how you hear when the plan changes, and plans do change. When the Baye Business Solutions site was rebuilt for a Lagos cloud services company of about 25 people, the plan was a PostgreSQL database. It was built on MongoDB Atlas instead, because PostgreSQL turned out, in the case study's words, "too complex for the timeline." Changes like that are normal. It is the kind of change an owner should hear about the week it happens, with the reason, rather than find out a year later from the next developer.

How do I check a web developer's past work before hiring?

On your phone, the way your customers will meet it. StatCounter's figures for Nigeria put mobile at 75.22% of web traffic in September 2026, with desktop at 24.36%. Ask for three sites the developer built that are live now, open them on your phone, and try to do what a customer would: find a price, call, send a message, pay.

If the site takes money, check how

A card form is only one way to pay. Paystack's documentation on payment channels lists USSD as "specifically for Nigerian customers" and Pay with Transfer as "currently available to businesses in Nigeria," switched on by request to Paystack. Ask the developer which ways to pay your customers will actually see at checkout.

Ask about the cookie banner

If the site will run analytics or advertising tags, ask how the developer handles consent. Nigeria's data protection regulator issued a directive in 2025, operational from 19 September 2025, and the law firm Adeola Oyinlade and Co's summary of it reads its Article 19 as requiring cookie banners shown without scrolling, with an explicit accept or reject for anything beyond the cookies the site needs to work. A developer who has not heard of it will not build it.

Is it different for a startup in Lagos?

Yes, in one way that changes everything. If the website is the product, a booking platform, a marketplace, a dashboard, you are hiring a product engineer, not a web designer, and none of the price lists above applies. Nexoris puts a custom platform at ₦2.5 million to ₦20 million and more.

Decide web or app before you hire. When RideOn Nigeria, a Lagos chauffeur and car rental service, moved its bookings off WhatsApp, it went web first on purpose: "faster deployment, cheaper maintenance, no app store approval cycles. For a pre-booking model, this works." Ask any developer pitching you a mobile app why your first version cannot be a web app, and listen to whether the answer is about your customers or about their portfolio.

If the startup only needs a site that explains the product, the questions below apply as they do to any business, with more weight on editing: if your message changes as you learn who buys, the home page has to change with it, and you should not need a developer to do that. Our piece on a website you can edit yourself has a test for that.

What should the quote say before I pay anything?

Five lines. If they are not on the quote, ask for them in writing before the deposit.

We build websites and the marketing around them for businesses in Lagos and abroad, and if you want a second pair of eyes on a quote you already have, there is a free call. We will tell you if the cheaper quote is the right one.

In Lagos the page count is the cheapest line on a website quote. The expensive lines are the ones nobody wrote down.