Looking to build a website for your business is how you wound up here, you are more than likely looking to get a good idea of how much your website will cost and what kind of options you have in developing the brand and features you want and need in your website.
By this point you probably have asked for a few quotes from a few different web designers and development agencies or even looked at what it would take to do yourself with the wide range of tools available on the internet.
When you are estimating the cost and features of the web site and how it is designed, you need to decide on an overall type, especially if you are going to do it yourself. Changing features midstream of the development can cause yourself no end of troubles as you spend a significantly more time trying to determine what feature broke which feature.
The type and size of the website will be a major factor in the determination process of the costs involved in bringing your vision to life.
The common types of websites that you can consider in your decision making process. There are several further factors that can add and detract from the costs these are the basics.
One of the most common websites styles on the internet is the brochure-style website, a primary style used by:
The brochure style website will display all the basics about your business or service. Often it will display links to your social media platforms and your hours of business. The Brochure website is often less than 10 to 15 pages, so its has a smaller footprint document wise and therefore costs less to design than a larger website or a site with a data management component to it.
This is often a viable choice for anyone who does not have a lot of money for web design and production.
A good starting point for estimating your website costs is anywhere from $400 to $1000 (circa 2023) for the website design and development.
The price is dependant on the features you want and how many pages you will require to properly promote your business or organization.
Another common website type is the e-commerce store or site, this type enables your organization to sell products and or services online and collect that payment online. For many small start ups and niche type businesses this the perfect environment and type for their dollar.
The small or even midsized e-commerce store fronts will have anywhere from a dozen or so products all the way up to a hundred products, the products can be displayed in several formats but the product card linking to product detail is the most popular and effective at turning views into sales.
A small e-commerce store will often have a small blog that will help garner attention for the site overall and allow customers to gain valuable insight into your product and or services.
The cost of the site will be very dependant on the product/service count you wish to have, along with what features you wish to use.
You will also need a secure payment method to ensure your and your customer's safety while the transactions occur. Sometimes more than one option is necessary to gain higher conversion of browsing shoppers to actual sales.
An average small to midsized E-commerce site can cost anywhere between $1,000 to $5,000 to produce.
You will also have recurring costs for the payment processing portal plugins. This is usually around the $400 range. Resulting in anywhere from a $1,400 to $5,400 initial cost with the recurring plugin subscription cost.
Some businesses and or organizations have a large product catalogue and wish to move their entire store online so they can sell their product to customers everywhere. A large e-commerce store will have several of the following features.
A large e-commerce website will cost you a significant more often running into the 10s of thousands. If you were to try and duplicate something massive like Amazon you would be looking at hundreds of thousands in development costs.
Be prepared to spend anywhere from $5,000+ for your site.
A Large custom website is websites where have content heavy aspects to them, gaming, high resolution photography and others like this are content heavy websites. They often have custom features that make them difficult to code effectively for the responsive medium expected by the device rich environment of the modern internet. The complexity of the features make it more difficut requiring more time to effectively build. This aspect makes them more expensive than a brochure or even some small e-commerce stores.
Lots of other Large custom websites are for custom purposes such as banking or even social media, they are often designed to display a lot of content such as an online news organization.
These are custom built for robustness and designed to be scalable to handle anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of visitors and users on a daily basis.
With a large custom website it is expected that you will be quoted on a per job basis depending on your business or organization's needs and requirements.
You should budget between $10,000 to $75,000 for a large custom website, with ongoing costs to further develop features as you discover a need or requirement for them.
| Website Type | Development Fees | Hosting/Domain Fees | Annual recurring Fees | Total Inital Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brochure Website | $400 to $1000 | $60.00+ | $150.00 website updates | $610.00 - $1,2100.00 |
| Small to Medium E-commerce store | $1000 to $5000 | $180.00+ | $680+ | $1,860.00 to $5,860.00 |
| Large E-commerce store | $5,000 to $50,000+ | $600.00+ | $715+ | $6,315.00 to $56,315.00 |
| Large custom website | $10,000 to $75,000+ | $1,200+ | $3,000+ | $14,200 to $79,200.00+ |
Please note that these are approximates and depends entirely on where and who you are dealing with, you should always shop around and consider your options carefully as there are numerous considerations that should be taken into consideration.