Cost of Designing a Website – Know What All You Need To Invest

Introduction

Wondering how much the cost of designing a website is?

Do you think it takes heavy website design costs to have one designed for your small to high scale business?

Are you looking for actual website rates?

Do you know “looking for website design costs” is similar to “asking for the cost of the new house”?

Do you think houses have fixed prices? (non duh!)

Just like you get the quotations for the house based on factors like a number of bedrooms, nearby facilities, location, construction years and others, website costs are also subjected to a lot of divided factors like:

• Type of website - Educative, eCommerce, blogs, magazines, portfolio websites, directory/contact pages, and on & on…)
• Number of landing pages - one-page website, or 100-pages website or more)
• Designs & Themes
• Features, plugins, extensions
• Custom functionality
• Integration capabilities
• Technology Stack
• Hosting & Domain charges
• Marketing Services 
• And many other things…

It may be difficult to pull out a rigid numeric figure for website design prices, so here in the following guide, we will be calculating the prices for website designing on an average, based on website types, the process involved in website development & designing lifecycle, the additional factors that add to the total cost of designing a website. Let’s find answers to your query of “how much does a website costs?”:

Cost of Website Designing - Debunking Actual Figures

According to professionals, the website prices in general ranges between $1000 (Small business websites) to $95,000 (complex websites with customized features & functionality).

• The prices for the website design of small scale business range between $1000 to $10,000.
• For custom feature-rich websites, tailored to business needs, here prices for website design can go as high as $30,000.
• The cost of designing a website of complex functionality can go as high as $95,000.
• If you consider having a website designed along with maintenance services to upkeep the website from lapsing, the cost of designing a website with maintenance requirements will be between $12,000 to $1,20,000. Here you will have an option of getting the routine maintenance services either monthly or yearly, If you will go with monthly, it will cost you up to $5000 and if you will take yearly, it can cost up to $35,000.  

However, this is just a glance at how much the website design costs in general, but in reality, there are several interconnected factors or conditions that compile the final website prices, let’s walk parallel to the factors that define the website rates explicitly.

Website Design Costs Based on their Types

Here are the main types of websites, based on which the cost of website designing is evaluated:

1. A personal website as a portfolio or a  Blog

These kinds of websites are the most basic & general and have individuals’ personal information as a portfolio, or blogs for information sharing. 

• A personal website is a static website that contains pages with content in the realm of their personalized details, offerings, and not anything pertaining to a company, institutes, or organization. A freelancer offering his services via a website or someone journalizing their personal viewpoints or thoughts over a website can be a form of a personal website.
• A blog is a static informational website or an online journal that just hosts only articles or content pieces on regular intervals - in the reverse chronological order - where the latest published article appears on the top.

2. Corporate Websites

These websites are the commercial websites prepared to showcase the business’s portfolio, its goals, offerings, and communications via customized features & functionality - to raise business client’s interaction and transaction.

• A corporate website is an official website of any particular brand that reflects its real business identity, offerings, a whole story that its stakeholders, customers, or other beneficiaries would want to know about.
• It is a custom website that has a mobile responsive layout, information, or elements in correlation to the needs of extreme business customers, has more visual elements with less but stronger messaging focused texts - all fenced around brand’s ethos, goals, and real offerings.

3. Brochureware

Brochure websites are run by small businesses that aim at just disseminating the basic information like about their business, and their contact details and some latest news related to their business. Such websites are made with an aim to portray basic information with minimal functionality and features to get the leads & sales.

• A brochure website is a simplified web design layout that’s made to just inform any brand’s presence on the world wide web.
• It is a combination of websites and brochures. It is just like installing your brochures into the digitized format. 
• It is made to just inform users about certain things about business like a business catalog.
• With leading demand for websites having tough functionality and the ability to respond to the needs of customers like virtual agents, these websites are in quite less popularity.

4. Educational

These websites are made with a purpose to dispose of the educational resources or learnings via either online classroom programs or blogs or documents to learners virtually.

• Educative Websites are the modern way to supplement classroom teaching for enhancing the learnings of widespread learners.
• Such websites can be made to target the different educational sectors, and are equipped with teaching resources, tools that could support the students to professionals centered learnings.
• Such e-learning or edutech websites can be customized with rich & extended functionality & features according to the end-learners and the educational brand’s requirement.

5. eCommerce/ Online Retail

These websites are made to support retailers in the selling of their multiple categories of products under one hood with a well-pixelated & descriptive gallery of products to be shopped, rich shopping cart features, checkout processes, payment gateway integrations and other functions based on every retail business’s personal needs. For example - Amazon, eBay, etc.

• eCommerce websites, online stores, or online retail outlets are the online portals that are made in an effort to facilitate the merchandise or services exchange over the web - via a transfer of intensive information and funds over the internet.
• These websites are made with a context to reach the offshore customers and support each brand in an offline setting to extend its business in the global markets without barriers to entry.
• Such online stores are prepared with stunning interface, rich functionality & features, integration with robust payment gateways, and other workflow management capabilities to help retailers sell anywhere, anytime.

6. Web portals

A portal that has a mix of forums, emails, search engines, and more - just like Yahoo & AOL.

• A web portal is a unified website that brings information or resources from diverse sources like search engines, forums, emails, all together in a unison.
• Every information source gets its dignified space on the website and gives users the freedom to configure which ones should be displayed. 

7. Social media or community building websites

The social media websites intend to connect the diverse users under one roof via communicative forums, feeds, chatting options, media sharing, and others. For example - Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest.

• Social media websites are websites that are extensively made for social networking to connect the users of wide areas under one roof - giving everyone an explicit space to connect and communicate with each other via personalized profiles and the ability to share the media, information, or documents.
• Community building websites are websites made to inform and engage the individuals or brands over the web, such websites can be in the form of bookmarking sites, classified sites, microblogging sites, community blogs, social reviews sites, media sharing, news sharing sites or more.

 Key Takeaways

• These are the general broad categories of websites, based on which further, the functionality, features, or technical aspects of the final website are decided.
• Once you are familiar with the type of website you need, it will be easy to chalk down the website rates based on the time required to make such websites, complexity, features/functionality to be added, technical stack to be involved, and so on.

Prices for Website Design Based on its Phases/Process

Website designing involves a lot of calculated technical stages that actually decides the cost of website designing. Here are the important stages of website designing on which costs of website designing collectively depends:

1. UI/UX Designing

It is the captivating user interface (UI) that steals the attention of users primarily. A well-architected, structured, and featured UI plays a crucial role in defining the website’s “make it” moment.

This step or process is an exhaustive one and includes 3 main stages of UI/UX designing - on which a portion of website design prices are based.

• Researching - Here the designing team gathers the requirements and does R&D on the website’s idea feasibility, its target audience, their preference and likings, the present competitive website in the same business field.

• Wireframing - Here the researched ideas get approved and are shaped into a raw structure to show the schematic placements of elements & to have an approval on the rough architecture of the website.

• Prototyping - The raw wireframe is shaped into a close to real website interface but with lifeless functionality, to understand how the actual designing will look on the devices.

UI/UX Costs - The UI designing process can take up to 1 to 2 weeks (however the timeline can increase based on the project’s complexity & exceptional requirements), and the process can cost between $700 to $4000.

2. Front-end Development

Front-end development is the actual development over the website, which your end-users can visualize and interact with. It is the process of giving functionality to the Designed UI.

For example - You had a UI developed with a widget or calculator, your user clicks the widget’s button and sees its animated movement, it is front-end development.

In this stage, the cost of website designing is dependent on:

• Complexity to design & deploy the animations throughout the UI.
• Website’s responsiveness or adaptiveness to various platforms & screens.

Front-end development cost - The process of front-end development can take up to nearly 6 weeks (however this timeline can upsize or downsize based on the complexity or requirements) and the cost related to website front-end development falls between $1,000 - $12,000.

3. Back-end Development

 

The website’s back-end is the core of any website. Back-end development includes the process of integrating the website’s visual interface with the 3rd party services, data processing tasks, and more.

Taking the previous widget example, you created a calculator with functionality to bring a certain outcome, the stage will help to fetch and present the actual outcome to the user when they press a button.

The website’s back-end development holds a considerable cost of designing a website. Here are the key areas that are the basis for back-end cost allocation:

• Integration with third-party services like payment gateways, video streaming platforms, public databases, or more
• Complex queries
• Non-standard data processing 

Back-end development cost: The back-end development can take up to 8 weeks to complete and cost somewhere between $4000 to $12000. 

4. Admin Panel or Content Management System (CMS) Development

CMS is the site owner’s personalized space that gives them the liberty to edit, modify, and update the content over the website. And to even perform basic to advance business functions/activities over it.

A designing company has access to a lot of market’s popular CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, Shopify, Drupal - they design your CMS and add a lot of required functionality, features and security to it - based on your business requirement. 

CMS reduces the cost to build the website, it is effective and easy to deploy.

The best part is you can have it integrated with any of your current websites to improve & multiply their functionality.

CMS Costs - CMS development can take a timeline of 3-6 weeks, and it would cost you somewhere between $3000 to $9000.

Key Takeaway: Website designing involves a lot of interconnected components or phases, upon which the cost of the website is decided, however, the website prices can fluctuate on the basis of your exceptional & complex requirements.

A Final Compilation of Prices For Website Design based on its Technical Stages

Note - These figures are just mere average and can increase or decrease based on each project’s requirements)

Additional Factors on Which Website Design Prices Depends

However to ensure the functioning, safety, and continual performance of the website, here are other inescapable factors relative to the cost of designing a website:

1. The number of webpages to be added

The website rates can be impacted based on the product/service pages to be added. The more the pages, the more will be the cost.

You can have a one-page website, or have a one with 100 plus pages - the cost will likely increase.

2. Domain Name 

• How can you run without a brand name on your website? The unique name you see in the URL is your domain name.
• The domain name can cost you somewhere between $5-$15 yearly - however, if you want unique extensions apart from .com - like “.restaurant” or “.online”, you might have to bear cost between $200 to $300 per year.

3. Website Hosting services

• A service that keeps your website accessible on the internet. The hosting services have a lot of effect on your loading speed of the website, so it’s best to always choose a quality one.
• The hosting charges can range between $75 to $200 yearly.

4. Website Routine Maintenance 

• Here the additional & well-timed maintenance services are discharged regarding CMS version update and the website’s upkeeping tasks to ensure end-users have no hindrance while accessing the website.
• The website maintenance services can cost you somewhere between $500 to $12,000 yearly, depending on the level of services you choose.

5. SSL Certificate

• As per Google, it is mandatory to have an HTTPS SSL certificate to validate that your website is secure to navigate by users. SSL certificate is required to make a green padlock appear near to your URL address - must have seen in secured and high-secured websites.
• Obtaining an SSL certificate can cost between $10 to $1000 monthly - depending on the type of certificate you choose.

Key Takeaways: It is important to bear these additional costs, as without them your website would be non-existing and unsecured to the search engines and target users.

Important Marketing Costs in Conjunction with Website Design Costs

Congrats! You have just got your query resolved on “How much does a website costs?”

Now you can get a product that’s ready to deploy and share with your team, stakeholders, and end-users. You can personally share your website URL to your team and stakeholders, but how would you get it to your users. Thought-provoking right?

You need Website Marketing solutions right after you are done with your website designing. 

Here are the important online marketing services & their costs, that are crucial for you to splurge along with your professional website development costs.

Note - The marketing activities are important for the websites to have an effective reach within the target market & audience. These costs can fluctuate based on the exceptional requirements you may have.

Final Thoughts on Cost of Website Designing!

So this was a complete guide on your most searched query “how much does a website costs?”

We discussed how the website design costs are dependent on the various factors like:

• Type of website to be built (small business, eCommerce, Social media, etc)
• Phases/stages of building the website (UI design, Front-end & back-end development, CMS)
• Additional activities (hosting charges, domain name, maintenance)
• Website marketing services (SEO, SMO, CRO, PPC)

However, these website design prices are just an average calculation, to know what your specifications-based website prices would be, request a one-on-one conversation with professionals of our Website Designing Company with Digital Marketing services to get a clear and fair estimate.

Have a website requirement to share? Share with us, we’d love to explore it and bring it to reality with affordable pricing plans and exemplary look & feel.