How much does a website cost?
Establishing a business is hard enough without having to struggle with the many challenges and decisions that will come along with setting up your own website. You will need to choose professional website design company to design, develop and host your website. To make these choices you have to consider your requirements and your available budget.
We have created this itemized guide to website design cost in 2019. With this page, we will attempt to answer the big question ‘How much does a website cost?’ The simplest and the most direct answer that most business owners hate to hear: ‘It completely depends on your requirements and choices’. So instead of giving you that answer, let’s dig a bit deeper. We’ll learn see why answer to ‘How much does a website cost’ question is always ‘it depends’.
Your website design cost will depend on following answers:
- How many pages do you need?
- Whether you’ll have an active blog?
- How many products do you aim to sell?
- How many variations of your products are available? For example, a clothing store could have same style and design for a piece of clothing with different size and colors.
- What payment options do you aspire to provide? For example, will you accept credit card on the website, or use third party checkout providers like PayPal?
- How much traffic do you anticipate and want to be handled by your hosting providers?
- Will you provide your own content?
- What should your contact page do?
- How heavy is your landing page?
- Will you curate your product descriptions?
- Will you acquire stock images or will you use original images?
- Did you purchase and secure a domain name and address?
- Will you establish a responsive website that is accessible on all platforms, devices, screen sizes and browsers?
- Do you need to have separate websites for web and mobile?
- Who is taking care of your website SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
- Do you have skills to design your logos and graphics or hire someone to handle it for you?
- Will you pay for website management using a per month plan or a per year plan?
- Are you planning to hire a digital marketer to boost your website’s visibility?
- Will you have a Virtual private server or a Dedicated server to host your website?
- Who is designing a website, a reputed website design company or a freelance website designer?
- Will your website be template based website or custom website?
Once you have answers above question, you are ready to get website design quote from multiple agencies.
You will have huge development plans and your pricing will be quantified accordingly. Your estimates and the actual web development costs will largely vary with the progress of your website design process. So your website might end up costing anywhere in the range of $2,500 – $100,000 or more.
You will have to have a Homepage, a Contact page, an FAQs section, a Terms of Service section, an About Us section, a page containing your Shipping Policy and a Security and Policy page which complies with the standards of the industry you are in. Also, you’ll need the pages which contain your products. These days, it is impossible to not have social media sharing capability, widgets and icons.
Basic Price List
Cost to Keep Website Up and Running – paid directly to domain, server and SSL certificate providers: $300 and up per year
Most domain names will cost you about $15-20 per year that you will pay directly to domain provider.
An SSL certification will cost you $150 per year or higher depending on type of certificate that you will pay directly to certificate provider.
Website hosting cost depends on expected traffic and type of hosting. Most basic website hosting will cost you about $150 per year and prices usually goes up as you have more traffic or data on your server.
Website Development Cost: $2000-$10,000 for brochure type website. $15,000 and up for custom website.
- License to WordPress template can cost you around $70.
- A customized style or template theme will cost around $50-70/hour.
- E-commerce functionality will set you back $3000-5000.
- Payment processor will cost you around 2-3% to process credit cards securely on the website.
- Custom Database creation and integration will cost you $10,000 or more.
- Beta testing your platform will set you behind $40-60/hour.
- Buying high-quality stock images will cost around $10-50/image.
- A highly skilled graphics designer will charge around $50/hour.
- Custom coding for your website will cost around $50-75/hour.
- Project management for large scale project will cost around $60-70/hour.
- A professional logo designer will demand around $500 or more to create a unique and appropriate logo for your business’s web aspirations.
Website Content Cost: $0 if you provide your own content. $1000 or more if you hire professionals.
You need unique written content for your website. After all content is the only thing that differentiate you from your competitor’s website to search engines and customers. So having powerful, search engine optimized content is the must for any website.
If you are a writer and able to provide content yourself, there is no cost. If you need to hire a professional content writer who can write unique SEO optimized content, cost will be around 30 to 40 cents a word, depending on your field and amount of content. Lets say if you have 5 page website with average 500 words per page. You are looking at approximately 2500 words. At 40 cents a word, you are looking at $1000.
You need images and videos that go with written content. Are you providing your own multimedia content? In that case, there should be no additional cost. Are you planning to purchase stock photography or videos? Then cost will depend on the vendors.
If you need to have logo or any other graphic designed, cost will be approximately $40-50/hour depending on complexity of your requirements.
Internet Marketing and SEO Cost:
Local SEO: If you need to bring your website ranking higher up in search engine results. For example, when user enters the service in your city ‘lawyer in Charlotte NC’ or ‘personal injury attorney near me’ in Google, your website shows up on first page in Google ranking. Price depends on the complexity and competition for specific keywords. This process is very complex for competitive keywords and continuous work is needed. Expect to pay around $1500-$4000 per month for competitive keywords in medium sized city. Expect to pay over $5000 per month for highly competitive keywords. Process should take around 3-6 months to start getting results.
National SEO: If your business is selling a product or service that is independent of the location, you want to rank on top for as many keywords as possible all over the country. Cost varies depending on number of keywords and competition for those keywords. Detailed analysis is needed prior to estimating cost for these services. Expect to pay several thousand dollars per month.
Website Maintenance Cost: Depends on website designer and type of your website
A Content Management System and database maintenance cost depends on your website design company and type of your website.
Minor maintenance and content update will cost you around $50-75/hour. A 24×7 support line will end up costing $40-60 per hour.
As you can see, the costs will add up to produce a non-marginal figure, whether you self-design your platform or hire someone to do it for you.
What is a website cost calculator?
Holistically speaking, each website that exists out there and everyone that will come into fruition in the future will have different final pricing results. On an average, planning and pre-development will form 5-10% of the total cost while development of your Database and setting up the System Configuration will form 50-55% of the total cost. Website designing will fall into the 20-25% costing range while Project Management will fall in the 5-10% category.
Another relevant factor would be the niche that your business website falls under. Will it be an Informational or Small Business Website or a large Corporate Website? Will your website be an Ecommerce Websiteor a Database Driven Website or will your portal merely be a Web Application?
To make the cost estimation process easy for you, we have this nifty Website Design Cost Calculator tool, which will take in your needs and calculate your estimated spending for you. You merely need to add your details and our website cost calculator will provide a ballpark figure for you which will aid your decision-making process. It goes without saying that this tool is free.
How much does an eCommerce website cost?
Things get a little pricier with eCommerce websites as your site requirements will drastically increase.
For starters, you will need a functional, open source Interaction Design to cater to all the different types of customers that come to and shop on your website. You will need to have options like ‘Add to cart’, ‘Proceed to checkout’ and such to make the customer shopping experience fulfilling.
Your website usability will make or break your business goals so website design and development along with pre-launch testing and post-launch analytics will cost a pretty penny.
Your eCommerce websites will need a few more features to the other necessary features like:
- product pages
- product updates
- shopping cart
- payment options
- shipping systems
- payment processing system
- payment gateways
- custom client database with logins
With every website, host servers are very essential. With e-commerce websites, your platform will need to be live all the time. It also needs to provide access to all the users on various devices across a litany of platforms. You can get an inexpensive shared server or an expensive dedicated server to host your domain.
The server that hosts your platform will largely determine the functionality of your website like how quickly your web pages load, how smooth the payment gateway transition is, how safe your portal is. It goes without saying that all this functionality will require a lot of regular maintenance. An e-commerce website will also need a highly secure payment gateway to ensure that your customers associate trust with your brand.
eCommerce website design cost grows as development requirements increase. It ROI is greater with eCommerce if done correctly.
With e-commerce websites, as the traffic increases, your website functionality costs will increase. Your web pages will need to be maintained and sustained by regular upgrades to provide faster loading speeds which will prevent your customers from going to your competitor’s website.
For a secure web-shopping experience, customers will look for SSL certification so you will have to invest in that as well. Investing in CMS while you are at it will also be greatly beneficial.
Another requirement for an e-commerce website is a customer support hotline. People are going to be buying products from your website and in doing so, they may face problems; many times online payments bounce or simply don’t get accepted. In instances like those, a customer representative who can listen to and clarify the woes of a distressed customer will increase your brand’s accessibility.
For regular business, people don’t hesitate to invest a lot of finances and time acquiring real estate, filing for insurance, meticulously maintaining inventory, sending out advertisements, hiring additional support staff, buying the latest equipment; why not do the same for a website, invest money and time, that is? A website will end up boosting your business in the future because people are on their devices and the internet all the time for buying things as well as entertaining themselves.
If you are planning to design a website, why not do it properly? This website will be an online version of your business and it will be open for everyone to see and use. A professionally custom designed, developed and maintained website will give your business the push it needs to succeed in the market of today. Check out our tips about building successful website for your business.