Website Pricing
Rough Estimates for Website Pricing
A lot of people contact me in the early stages of building a website. They want to know a “rough estimate” of what it will cost. By rough estimate, I mean they want a general idea. They don’t have a project spec detailing out what all is needed yet, and they don’t have a budget to give me as a guidance of how to approach design and development.
Trying to provide a ballpark price could be compared to calling a realtor and asking how much it will cost to buy a house. There are so many factors that will effect the price. The NUMBER 1 issue being your budget. Until you determine what you can afford to invest, any prices you get are pretty much irrelevant.
I get that you may just be starting out on designing and developing a new website and you are trying to gauge what it may cost. I can give you some hypothetical situations , but these are in no way a quote to build your website.
Click the tabs to get an idea of price ranges for different parts of a website.
Domain
Domain Pricing
A domain name is your address on the Internet. You need one. Many companies will try to upsell you a bunch of services, the only one I recommend is private registration. Private domain registration will protect you from A LOT of spam. Some domain registrars include this for free, some charge for it.
Rough estimate: $15/year
Hosting
Web Hosting Pricing
A web hosting company sells you space on their web server (a computer connected to the Internet) so your website is part of the Internet. You need web hosting service.
There are many kinds of hosting services. The low end is shared hosting, the high end are dedicated servers. Web hosting pricing ranges significantly based on the type of service you buy.
Very basic sites that will get little traffic can get away with low budget shared hosting for under $10/month(usually with a multi year commitment though to get that price)
Small business websites should consider better quality hosts that are faster, more secure and quality support. $25/month range
High traffic sites need to consider semi dedicated (VPS) or dedicated servers. $50- hundreds/month
Rough Estimate: $10 – hundreds/month
Design
Web Design Pricing
Web design pricing is where you start throwing rough estimates out the window.
One the low end, you can find a free template or theme. On the high end you can hire a web designer to create a unique design to match (or create) your brand identity.
Your budget will dictate how to approach your website design.
Rough Estimate: Free – $25,000+++
Development
Web Development Prices
Web development pricing also follows the same concept as web design pricing. Until you can communicate the features and functionality that are needed, it can’t be determined if
custom web programming is needed, or you can use open source software like
WordPress and customize it through plugins. The number of web pages that need to be created are also a significant factor in the final cost. Building a simple WordPress site, you may start in the $1,500 range for development, where a custom application could exceed that cost just in the planning stages.
Rough Estimate: $1,500 – $50,000++
Maintenance
Web Maintenance Prices
Website maintenance is a big part of owning a website, but often overlooked by web designers quoting jobs and clients thinking once a website is built, nothing needs to be done.
There are lots of areas to consider with maintenance:
- code updates for security, bug fixes and new features/technology
- content needs changed at lease occasionally.
- search engine optimization
- dealing with performance/speed issues
- keeping your web design “fresh”
Rough estimate: $100/yr+++
Get a Solid Quote
Web Development Quote
I hope this gave you a rough idea of costs involved in developing and maintaining a website.
Once you determine a budget of what you can afford, it’s time to write up details for your project to be able to get a solid quote to build your website.
You can request a website development quote here.
If you need help defining what all should be included in building your website, you can hire me as a web development consultant to decide:
- help registering a domain name
- what type of web hosting will be best for your needs
- if you need a custom design or it makes sense to customize a theme
- the best approach to develop the site
- determine how much maintenance will be needed
