How much does a Website Cost?
The first Question that comes to your mind when you are considering to go Global and have your web presence is how to build a website and how much does it cost.
Website Development Cost is very subjective parameter and there is no clear-cut cost blueprint for it. To this day I have developed nearly a thousand websites but cannot give a generic answer to that question.
Type of a Website
As a founder/Owner of the company, you are the best judge of what you want to achieve by enhancing your web presence. With over 1.88 billion websites (as of 2021), it is clear that the world has moved past offline, and website creation is essential for growth.
Product / Service / E-Commerce
The website development cost may differ more than you imagine when it comes to how to build a website. For instance, a one-page website cost will be much lesser than an enterprise website with hundreds of pages. An e-commerce website may cost even more and this would come with inbuilt Shopping Cart and features like Payment Gateway and dynamic bots.
Domain Name Registration and Hosting:
The Address/URL of your website or the domain name is the unique internet address that can be used only by you. Other companies can take similar names but your .com (or .in, .org, etc) belongs to your company even if they are willing to pay trillions of dollars,they cannot take your name. To ensure rights to this domain name, the name has to be registered annually and factors as a website cost. This cost is generally accounted for the maintenance cost. This is where the Annual Maintenance cost is accounted for and sadly enough I can see my clients reluctant to pay it the subsequent years. This is the reason attributed to rise in number of inactive domains.
Website Registration cost may be uniform but it can be very high if you are keen to purchase the domain of your choice, you may have to buy it at a huge price of thousands of dollars.
Website hosting is another most important thing in website development. The quality of the website, the loading time, security, site crash support, expansion plans in the future depends on the quality of the host. This also needs to be renewed annually. It ranges from as low as $10 dollars per month to as high as $150/mo
Website Designing:
This is the most important part of website development, but here again this varies greatly on the basis of type and technology used to add features to a website. It can range anywhere from $250 to $20,000 depending on how you want your website to look and perform.
Content Management System:
Website is made all by coding in different scripts. Coding is a tedious work consuming huge amounts of time and efforts on the part of programmer. If we were to do all edits on the websites, even the small ones through codes it would cost a lot of time and needs lot of expertise. A small failure in edits can being down the whole website down. Content Management Systems (CMS) eases the process of editing the website as and when required in an easy to use interface.
CMS Costing also varies with so many platforms in market ranging from free to yearly and monthly subscription plans. Also they need premium plugins and themes or customization that costs as high as $1500
Content Designing:
Content is the King when it comes to Website Development.The amount of content that needs to be generated for the website is equivalent to the number of pages the website has. An effective website needs to place the right words into the users’ head compelling them to buy the product or service. You can have one page website content to limitless pages websites and consequently the amount of content varies.
You may choose to write your own content or hire a content Copywriters who charge somewhere between $50 to $500 for the website content. Content is king and good content pays off.
E-commerce Integration:
Including E-commerce on the website is a major factor that can include the overall website building cost. Integrating payment gateways on the website and shipping/tracking systems is a visible cost addition directly through e-commerce functionality. The major website cost contributor is the time it takes to build individual product pages and ensuring that these perform seamlessly and display the correct information.
There is also extensive testing of shopping carts, location-based technology and payment gateways that need to be done.
E-Commerce as such can be very costly affair as you’d be facing tough competition and user expectations are very high. You need to make the site appealing and user experience smooth so that you can generate sales.
E-Commerce integration can coat somewhere around $1000 – $20000
Database:
Most websites handle a hell load of data and need an effective mechanism to deal with it. The database management systems can be really costly but they can facilitate some really cool additions to the website.
The actual cost of database integration depends on the time and extent of the integration.
A rising concern with regards to databases is privacy and with so many data leaks, security is also a huge concern. The average cost of database integration is $15,000, although prices vary as per need.
Yearly Maintenance:
Websites need to be maintained and regularly updated to enable them to perform efficiently. Website maintenance will form an essential part of your website building cost especially since it is recurring.
The maintenance cost falls between $300 and $1000 unless there are major updates that will result in redesign and redevelopment.
Regular support and maintenance ensure that the software and hardware on the website are in place and that the website is updated with new business developments. This results in a better SEO ranking and higher visibility.
SEO
Content ties to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Good content needs to contain keywords that are relevant to the business to attract more visitors when you seek inputs on how to build a website.
SEO is an ongoing service and at EB, SEO includes content creation and optimization, keyword research, targeted reach and more.
An effective SEO increases the ranking and visibility of the website and can cost $200 to $1500 per month.
Varied Costing:
The number of web developers has increased significantly from freelancers, small companies to big corporate giants. The quotes given for the same web project can vary as much as $3,000 to $50,000 depending on the expertise of the company, the preferred platforms, the team size, and even their location.
Website development cost in the UK can be 4 times more than that in India with the same level of quality of work!
Fixed vs. Hourly Price: While some companies still give a fixed quote, most companies are shifting to an hour-based pricing model as it allows them to cover the grey areas. The fixed price model did not account that some websites that seemed simple may take up months. The hourly model accounts for the far too valuable manpower and their time.
Conclusion
To conclude a Quality Website Development can cost you somewhere around $500 to $3000 with yearly maintenance and renewal fee of around $500.