How much does a website cost?

How much can a website cost?

Nowadays, anyone can create a website, even for free! There are so many online services that offer just that – make your own website for free.

But how much does it cost to create a truly effective website that will grow your business and get your customers to buy from you, and not your competitors?

Well that, believe me, is already a completely different story!

Here we will look at the different price options for building websites, depending on the typology of the website itself and the choice of contractors for your assignment.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you will have a much better idea of whether the offer you received or will receive is worth your attention.

What does the price of a website depend on?

The cost of a website is not only determined by the time it takes to build it, but also by the experience and professionalism of the people or the person who built it.

The more complex your project is, and the more design and development work it will require, the higher the price you should be willing to pay.

The experience of the person who makes your site is also extremely important here. It is obvious that a web designer with many years of experience behind him will do both much more and much better quality work for you, compared to a person just entering the business.

An experienced web designer with tens or hundreds of websites under his/her belt will give you invaluable advice and save you from making many costly mistakes that you would have otherwise learned the hard way.

Therefore, do not be surprised if, for the same site in terms of volume, some designers ask you for roughly 1000 USD, and others – 3000 USD. Believe me, if the second designers have the necessary experience and knowledge, every single penny of the higher price will have been well worth it, because it will return to you multiplied!

Note: Today 380 new sites are created every minute on the Internet! That makes an average of over 6 new websites EVERY SECOND or more than half a million per day!

With such competition, it’s not enough to just have any website! Your site should be of a high professional level. Anything else is just not worth it.

It’s not worth it, because today amateur sites are only becoming the background against which truly professional and well-built sites stand out and prosper. You certainly don’t want to be just a background, do you?

If you really want your site to perform its functions and sell your goods or services, hire people with experience.

Nowadays, it is impossible to succeed on the Internet if your site is not built with the highest standards of quality and professionalism.

Prices ranges, depending on the type of website

Single page site, Landing page

Price range: between $200 and $1000.

This is a fairly modern type of website, containing only one page, but with separate blocks and its own internal navigation.

In fact, even these single-page sites can be quite long and complex, although they usually contain a small amount of text.

These types of sites have a simple goal: to encourage visitors to buy a product, sign up for an offer, fill out a form, call a number, or download a file. All content on the site is intended to encourage the visitor to complete this task.

Because these sites have a simple, clearly identified purpose, they usually minimize the amount of effort required to build them.

This type of site is also suitable if you want to have a minimal online presence of your company. Your customers access your site both from an offline source: business cards, flyers, document headers, or from online sources, such as social networks, business directories, email correspondence, etc.

These types of sites are usually on the lower end of the price range, but they require a lot of strategic thinking, and will therefore cost more if executed by experienced and competent people.

With these websites, also remember that to say a lot in a small volume (such as a single-page site) actually requires more experience than with larger sites.

So it is precisely for sites of this type that it is good to choose really experienced designers who will be able to achieve maximum effect even with the minimum volume of these sites.

Small business website

Price range: between $500 and $3,000.

This type of website is most common for small businesses. Sites usually contain a relatively small number of pages (between 10 and 20), typical being “Home”, “Team”, “Mission”, “Services”, “Products”, “News”, “Contact”, etc.

This type of website is focused on positioning the company in the Internet space and marketing its services or products. These types of sites are very often built as static, since the information in them is relatively constant, and updates are required at relatively long intervals.

The characteristic of this type of (static) website is that they give much more opportunities to integrate keyword-rich texts, and accordingly, unlike single-page sites, they have much more chances to be well optimized and therefore to rank well in Google searches.

Here again, the rule of thumb is that the more experienced your web designers are, the more chances you have of your site running efficiently and ranking well on Google.

However, you will have to be prepared to go in the price range even higher. The competition in this segment is serious.

Corporate website or portal

Price range: between $5,000 and $50,000.

Here we go to the “big boys”.

The corporate portal is actually a development and expansion of the concept of the company website, but now with a much larger volume of content and rich possibilities for both content development and extensive interaction with users.

Typical sections in this type of company portal are a user area, a resource center with information and downloadable materials, price lists, a system for locating sites, distributors, and partners, a frequently asked questions section, a rich set of interactive feedback forms, photo galleries, product catalogs, etc.

Such a type of web portal must be built as a dynamic site based on a powerful and proven content management system (CMS).

For the reliable operation of such a company portal, it is extremely important to foresee two things:

1. The person or people from the company who will be responsible for updating and developing the content on the website must be well trained and the maintenance of the website must be a major part of their job duties. An extremely common mistake is to make the website update just part of the everyday duties of “the boss’s secretary” or “the computer guy in the office”. Companies usually pay dearly for such mistakes.
2. It is absolutely mandatory for such type of company web portals to provide regular and professional technical maintenance. Whether this will be handled by a person from the company’s IT department or this activity will be entrusted to an external company is not important, but it is critically important that the company portal is not left without technical maintenance even for a moment.

E-commerce site (online store)

Price range: between $5,000 and $100,000 or more.

Of course, the issue of e-shops can be a topic not only for a whole separate article but rather for a whole separate website.

Here the “palette” is really very wide, starting from a small, WordPress/Woocommerce-based online store for a few dozen products, to a purpose-built e-commerce software managing the sales of hundreds of thousands of items.

In the first case, you could hope (with a good choice of contractor) to manage around or a little over $5000 to $7000, but if you plan for your company’s sales to be entirely online based, certainly the investment you should anticipate will be many times greater.

And here we do not even mention websites like Amazon or Aliexpress, in the development of which millions have been invested.

Why do prices vary so widely?

Of course, the first and obvious answer to this question is that the price depends on the specific volume and technical complexity of the site. However, this is only part of the answer!

The other, and more important, part of the answer to this question has to do with the knowledge and experience of those who will be building your website.

This entire site will not be enough to tell the hundreds of stories of customers who have come to us asking us to “take a look” at why their site, for which they diligently paid the asked price, is not performing well and not selling their products.

Although such a site is formally operational, it has little traffic, and its visitors do not place orders or even contact the owners.

Often for us, even a cursory glance is enough to make the “diagnosis”: although the site looks “normal” from the outside, it has violated some basic rules of web design, and gross mistakes have been made both in the organization of the content and in the approach to the user.

We will not comment here on why this happens, but only advise you to entrust the construction of your website to people and companies with proven and visible experience in building websites. A rich and easily verifiable portfolio of built sites is one of the criteria.

Another criterion is the nature and volume of texts and materials on the artist’s website. They are very “revealing”!

In this regard, it is difficult to give “recipes” and generalizations, but if you read impersonal and meaningless sentences like “Our solutions are the best” or “Here you will get the highest quality at the lowest price”, it is probably better to leave this website immediately and look for another provider.

Prices, depending on the type of contractor

DIY

Sure, you can always try to make your website yourself. You will neither be the first nor the last one to do that.

In fact, the Internet is full of such websites, and what they all have in common is that they form the background against which really good and professionally built sites stand out.

If you accept your site to be part of this background, try to make it by yourself. It will cost you nothing but your time.

However, we must remind you that it takes months to master even the basic techniques in web design, and many years to gain the necessary experience to build working and successful websites. Many years, indeed.

Freelance Web Designer

Here, with a little luck and a lot of research, you have the best chance of having your cost as low as possible, but still have a professionally built website.

Fees for web design freelancers are generally lower than those of web agencies, and the prices of the “most expensive” freelancers are usually similar to the lowest prices of web dev companies.

The good news here is that you will only be in contact with one person with your site, and the bad news is that, unlike businesses, freelancers can rarely be really held accountable.

Another characteristic of freelance web designers is that their status as “freelancers” is usually an intermediate stage before they gain enough experience and find a high-paying job at a prestigious firm.

So if you want to rely on your web designer for the long term, maybe a freelancer isn’t your best bet. You can read more about this in our article “Who and how to build my website?”

Web design company

Creating a high-quality and successful website requires a lot of skills, spanning areas such as graphic design, programming, technical support, web content creation, digital marketing, etc. Mastering this knowledge and skills is rarely within the power of a single person.

This is where the specialized web design companies or web agencies come to the rescue, as they encompass professionals in all of these quite different fields.

Yes, the cost of building your site will probably be a bit higher, but you will have at your disposal all the specialist skills and experience your project needs at every stage.

We would not like to make universal generalizations here, so we will give you only two tips:

1. Limit your research to narrowly specialized web design companies. Avoid companies that provide web design along with selling computers, developing software, or creating promotional materials. These activities are too different in nature and it is not possible for one company to perform them all equally well.
2. Look for companies with clearly and publicly announced service prices. Otherwise, you risk ending up in a price vortex from which it will be difficult for you to get out!