How Much Does a Website Cost in 2023?

Table of Content

1. Introduction
2. Why is it Difficult to Estimate Website Development Costs?
3. Factors that Affect Website Costing
4. Ways to Develop a Website
   • DIY
   • Website Builder
   • Website Development Company
5. Tips to Cut Down Costs on Website Development
6. Develop your Website Now!

Introduction

“Getting a quality website is not an expense but rather an investment.”― Dr. Christopher Dayagdag. 

In today’s times, a website is a must for a business to enhance its global presence. To explore all the avenues, one should have a website for their business. Apart from this, the only website is not necessary nowadays, the functionality and user experience of it should be out of the box in order to catch customers’ eyes. 

To gain more attention from visitors, your website should be unique, fast, and clean. Because the online success of your business could be decided within the first 5 seconds. To not miss out on any opportunity for your business in a digital world, your website should be developed as well as well optimized. So, the website development cost differs according to a lot of factors. In this article, we’ve discussed everything related to the cost of website development in one place.

Why is it Difficult to Estimate Website Development Costs?

When any organization or an individual decides to develop a website, they came up with an estimated budget and according to that, they start designing their website through a web designer or a web development company. But the website development costs depend on many factors like a number of website pages, the technology used, functionality, usability, etc.

Thus, while planning and discussing the elements of the website, even the development team doesn’t know the actual price and even some factors that need to be implemented at the end of the project. So the cost of the website development could not be predicted.

If exemplified, At the time of baking a cake, You’ll have the same question, “What is the cost of baking a cake?”. But the answer depends on the myriad of ingredients included in it, Same goes for developing a website. 

But we’ve made this blog for you to estimate the budget for your website effortlessly. You’ll find the factors that involve in website development costs, down here.

Factors that Affect Website Costing

Many factors are involved in counting the cost of website building, though every aspect is not that much important for every business. If exemplified, payment integration is necessary for eCommerce websites, but not for blogging websites. 

In fact, there is a lengthy list of elements that affect website building costs specific to each business and project. But, here we’ve discussed the common factors that affect costs while building a website and need to look after. 

1. Domain Name

The name of your website refers to Domain and there are extensive domain registers, which you can buy your domain from. GoDaddy, HostGator, Bluehost, and Namecheap are the common name for domain register.

Try to find the relevance to your brand and easy-to-remember domain, so people can’t find it hard to recall. A domain name costs somewhere around $10-$12 per year. However, it relies on the domain registrar, Top-level Domain(TLD), Length of commitment, and Domain privacy. 

2. Website Hosting

All website files are stored in Hosting, some websites are hosted on in-house data centers while others are on third-party locations called host data centers. Hosting services providers offer you different hosting plans for every standard hosting.

Hosting ensures your website’s speed and performance. The cost of hosting depends upon the type of hosting provided, the storage size, the number of visitors, etc. You can opt for hosting which provides a free domain, SSL certificate, and professional email IDs. This might help you save money. Hosting plan accounted for almost $20-$120 per annum for Shared hosting, $60-$180 per year for a website builder’s hosting service, VPS(Virtual Private Server) costs $240-$600 per year and a dedicated server accounted for $1,200-$24,000 per year.

3. SSL Certificate

SSL is for your website’s protection by protecting sensitive data transfer. For instance, an SSL-protected website URL includes “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP”. In simple words, an SSL certificate shows the credibility and safety of your website.

SSL certificate might be provided by hosting in most cases, but if not, then you need to pay for it. SSL certificate costs $0-$1,500 per year.

4. Website Software

Today, While creating a website, many options such as premade software are available for you to ease out your work. Often called a Content Management System. 

Almost 43% of all websites on the internet are made by the most powerful software – WordPress. The number is insane, nearly half of all websites on the internet are using WordPress for their website development.

Despite the flexibility, the reason why WordPress is so popular is it’s totally free. So if you’re choosing WordPress, you don’t need to pay for your website software.

Rather than WordPress, there are a couple of other website software too, which are famous for their website building functionality, like Squarespace and wix. 

Squarespace: $16-$144 per year

Wix: $16-$150 per year

Whichever software suits your business type and helps you build a stunning website, you can go with it.

5. Website Theme or Design

It’s mandatory that design elements come together to create your website.  A good web design focuses on visuals as well as the usability of the website. This is the factor that directly affects your website’s performance.

Surveys show that almost 94% of the first impression depends on web design. If the navigation of your website is too difficult or the website is old, the user will abandon your website as soon as possible. 

Mainly there are two choices, you can pick themes or you can customize your website design, according to your specifications. Themes are cheaper compared to custom web design. While using themes, you just need to change your website’s look, feel, and style. Dozens are themes available in the market both free and paid.

You should go with the paid theme if you want

• Exclusive website design
• Steady user experience
• Every browser compatibility
• Mobile responsiveness 
• Regular updates

The paid themes cost you nearly $60-$100 for a single purchase, While designing your website custom-made, you will need a $2,000-$15,000 budget.

6. Responsive Design

To experience your website the same on all different sized devices, you need to look for its responsiveness. If a user visits your website on their desktop, mobile, or tablet, they will have the same website experience. Responsive design is essential because most of the traffic came from mobile devices. Also, they consider opting for the services of a website having a mobile-friendly site. 

You can either go with responsive design or an independent mobile site, It will cost you $3,000 and $5,000-$25,000, respectively.

7. Website Infrastructure

The way you plan the infrastructure of your website, it’s often has a positive impact on your website. The more pages your website has, the more content you need to add. Most agencies and freelancers charge according to the number of pages you want on your website.

To exemplify, an eCommerce store with extensive product listings will require more content and more pages than a blogging website. The prices for number of pages in a website are as follows according to web design freelancers and web design companies:

Number of Pages	Usual Cost
1-10 Pages	$1,000-$2,000
10-50 Pages	$2,000-$3,000
50-150 Pages	$3,000-$6,000
150-250 Pages	$6,000-$10,000

8. Unique Media

In order to increase the engagement of your website from the start, you need to use creative media like graphics and elements that enhance the beauty of the website. This might help you to gain engagement from your website visitors.

The resources for including unique media content to your website costs $250-$10,000 as per the usage.

9. Website Functionality

In your website, functionality plays an important role. Rather than filling your website with optional functionalities, you just need to add important ones. Because the agency or developer will charge you accordingly, you need to narrow down the list of functionalities on your website. You can’t flood your website with unnecessary things in order to improve the user experience of your website. Following are some examples:

eCommerce Features:

There are certain tasks that need to get done for an eCommerce website, including 

1. Customer portals
2. Payment gateway
3. Shopping cart
4. Wishlist add-on
5. Shipping and tracking System
6. Multiple delivery options
7. Launching product pages

The minimum cost of building an eCommerce website could be $2,000.

Membership Functions:

Some of the websites need the functionality of membership portals, in which they want to enable some services for the logged-in users only. By enabling this feature on your website you can get some of the benefits like content credibility and a loyal customer base. You can add membership functionality from $85 to $400 per year.

Subscription Model:

The functionality of subscription services is mainly for the websites that need to offer constant delivery of products that differs from customer to customer and include renewal services. Integration of the subscription model starts from $50 per month.

Custom Coding:

Because of the complicated functionality, large business websites need complex programming compared to small business websites. Sometimes websites like web portals need to handle so many things at once, like big data, and custom access to users. The price of this varies according to the size and complexity of the code.

10. Website Maintenance

The only way to maintain your website is to hire experts to do it.

By building a website, your task is not completed. You need to take care of its maintenance. Now, you’ll be thinking about what exactly you need to do. Here are some tasks that website maintenance includes:

• Finding and fixing bugs and issues
• Update CMS regularly
• Managing customer support tickets
• Building links and optimize SEO 
• Update security updates, plugins, and themes

Ways to Develop a Website

Don’t confuse yourself while choosing the way to develop your website, because here we’ve narrow down all the possible ways with it’s advantages, disadvantages and also how much does it cost.

1. DIY(Do it Yourself)

There are plenty of tools and platforms available in order to develop a website on your own. All you need is a small basic budget to set up and host the website including domain name, web hosting, SSL certificate, website theme, and a website builder of your choice. The most eminent website builders are Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix. They have a good deal of packages to choose from. This option is the advantage in terms of costs among the others.

To handle your website through a traditional content management system, you can opt for CMS, like WordPress. It will not disappoint you in terms of Website responsiveness, Mobile-friendliness, SEO, Version Updates, Security layers, Design options, and so forth and so on. 

Once you decide to do it on your own, it might be difficult for you to take responsibility for every aspect of a website. Though it is a viable option to explore and design a website for small-sized projects, it is not always feasible to deal with larger projects. Because there are myriad challenges such as Website loading speed, Mobile compatibility, Logical layout, Accessibility, and much more that can be tricky for an unskilled person. For this, you need to ask a question yourself, “Should I build my own website or hire an agency?” To answer this valid question it is important to flesh out the pros and cons of this verdict.

Pros of DIY

• You can save hundreds of or even thousands of dollars by designing and building the website on your own.
• You can work as per your pace, as per your convenience. You don’t need to run behind the bars. In fact, you’re your own boss.
• You simply put your business knowledge to design a website accordingly. 
• You can enhance your skill set in website development.

Cons of DIY

• You might not be a professional, so you need to be well-versed in the web development area. 
• It took a lot of time to develop a website on your own.
• You’ll use free templates available, and that might not help you to stand in the market.
• The bug fixes, support, and maintenance of your website could be time-consuming.

How Much will it Cost?

You can expect to pay approximately $200-$400 for a small business website when building a website on your own.

Domain Name	$12 Per Year
Hosting Plan	$60/Year
Premium Theme	$60 – $100
Premium Plugins	$60/Year
Website Builder	$12-$20

2. Website Builder

A platform that allows you to design and develop a website without coding. Simply by using a visual editor, anyone can build a website using templates with drag-and-drop features. Mostly business and personal websites like blogs, web stores, business projects, landing pages, and portfolios could be made up using a website builder.

Though this gives opportunities to newbies, professionals also use it to quickly and easily develop a fully functional website without taking care of code. 

In most cases, a website builder could be beneficial for, 

• Technical newbies
• Small companies
• Small businesses
• Start-ups
• Personal website and portfolios
• and the one who wants to live their website faster

Typically website builders offer, Website design themes and templates, Template customization Options, Built-in tech support, Pre-formatted web layouts, eCommerce solutions, Hosting, Mobile compatibility, Form builder, Image libraries, Blogging features, Analytical tools, SEO tools and many more. You need to examine the advantages and disadvantages of this option before deciding.

Popular Website Builders

Mainly numerous website builders are available in the market, but you need to choose according to your needs and budget. Here we’ve listed the best website builders and comparison charts according to the features they offer.

1. Wix – Overall best website builder
2. Squarespace – Best template designs
3. GoDaddy – Faster in website development
4. Shopify – Best for selling products online
5. Weebly – Free plan availability

Website Builder Comparison Chart

Facts of 5 good quality website builders are compared below to help you build a better website within your budget.

	Wix	Squarespace	GoDaddy	Shopify	Weebly
Overall Rating	4.8	4.7	4.4	4.1	4.0
Starting From	$16	$16	$6.99	$29	$6
Free Plan or Free Trial	Free Plan	14-day free trial	1 month free trial	Free Trial	Free Plan
Domain Renewal	$14.95	$20	N/A	$14	$9
Number of Templates	800+	100+	100+	86	50+
Free Custom Domain	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes

What Costs are Involved in Using a Website Builder?

Because of the website builder, you won’t need to pay for a website developer. You just need to maintain your budget for subscriptions, either monthly or yearly.

You need to pay for a custom domain name, which is sometimes included in the first-year plan, you need to pay after it. An average $12 per year is the cost for the domain name.

Added web apps could be accounted for $3 to $60 per month, all you need to do is opt for the apps you want on your website and the subscription.

In the subscription plan, the prices for themes, hosting, and security are included.

Pros of using Website Builder

• It’s easy for novices to use, they don’t need to learn difficult code.
• Designing skills are not mandatory, there are ample pre-designed templates available.
• You can choose from multiple plans which suit you for your business.
• The development process is faster than other modes of development.

Cons of using Website Builder

• It is not suitable for massive business websites.
• You may find difficulty in designing complex functionality websites.
• Functionality of eCommerce integration is very limited.
• You may face a lack of customer support.
• You might not rank well on Google, the SEO is poor sometimes.

How Much will it Cost?

Average price range from $10-$120 per month when you go for a website builder for web design.

Domain Name	$12/Year
Plugins or Themes(Optional)	$3- $60/Month
Subscription Plan	$6 – $50

3. Website Development Company

To get a wide range of services with the complex coded websites, you should consult a web design company. Such companies are involved in handling complex projects usually, and they are prominent in advanced techniques too. When you hire a web development agency, you have a set of professionals building a fascinating website for you. 

Basically, there are two ways of it:

1. Web development using themes and plugins
2. Custom web development as per your requirement

Why do you Need to Hire a Company

1. Saves your time: If you own a big-sized business, then your colossal website is easy for an agency in terms of time to develop rather than developing on your own.
2. Saves your learning expenditure: Developing a website on your own could be chaotic for a single person. The steep learning curve of web development insists you stay updated which might be onerous for one. 
3. Collective skill set: The team of web developers will work for your project in a company, which include different skill set of individuals. They will build an immaculate website for you.
4. Constant support and maintenance: While hiring an agency, you have the exemption of continuous support and maintenance of your website.

How to Hire a Website Development Company

Down here, We’ve listed a few steps to hire the right website development company for your project.

1. Do an online search

Google search will provide the best results to the users. Start checking your web design agency through their google rankings. List down all the top agencies that can help you to develop your website elegantly.

Once you have a list of companies, you can start with cross-check them with each other.

2. Look for each web design agency’s website

This is the vital step, you need to look a the agency’s website. If the web design agency’s website is outdated or cluttered, that might be not for you. 

By checking the agency’s website you will have the idea of website navigation, engaging graphics, and different elements.

If you have an agency’s website, now you need to look more for choosing the best web design agency.

3. Review testimonials from clients

In order to get an idea of the company’s previous work and client history, you need to check the client’s review. You can effortlessly find reviews on review sites like Google, Clutch, and GoodFirms. Make sure they are genuine reviews from past clients.

For your safer side, the agency with higher satisfaction among their clients will be right for you. 

Narrow your list down with a handful of web development agencies for your website development by their reviews.

4. Contact each web design agency directly

With the few companies on your list, you can now resume your work by contacting them in order to get more ideas about their work and additional details.

A good web development agency will ask you plenty of questions like what you expect, what are your goals, and many more in order to know what you want completely. They aim to understand your requirements fully so that they can deliver the best results possible.

By comparing them, you may now be ready to make a choice.

Factors to Consider Before Hiring a Company

You should pay attention to the company’s qualities which makes it right for you. Here are some of the factors that you need to look at in a web development company.

What makes a great web design agency?

1. Trustworthiness

The work efficiency and credibility of a company should be testified by their previous work, they should be trustworthy. To be precise, they should be reliable enough to answer all your questions, listen to your needs in order to implement changes on your website, and provide persistent support throughout the development.  

2. Proficiency

You need to check their portfolio that they have worked on similar web development projects before which makes them experts in your niche. Their team has proficient web designers and developers with tremendous skill sets.

3. Estimated Expenses

The key to building a successful website for your business is to find a company that suits your budget and offers the best possible outcome.  

Now you know which factors to acknowledge before hiring a web design agency, it is crucial to ask questions before hiring them in order to achieve your goals.

Questions Must Ask Before Choosing a Company

In order to understand the development process of the company, you must ask the following questions to the web development company.

• How will you research my business?
• Can you show your previous work in the same niche?
• Will you develop a custom website or use a pre-made template?
• Do you provide maintenance and support lifetime?
•  How long will it take you to design my website?

You can questions related to your queries and by knowing the answer, you’ll have an idea of the company’s overall reliability. It will be easy for you to choose the best web design company for you.

Pros of Hiring a Web Development Company

• You got all specialised skills in one place.
• You will receive high-quality work.
• The project follows streamlined workflow and project management, which will enhance the speed of the work.
• You will get Additional support and maintenance.

Cons of Hiring a Web Development Company

Charges are comparatively higher than other options.

How Much will it Cost?

The cost dependencies are varied from project to project, mainly depending on the type of the website,  complexity, and size of the project along with its functionality. Normally, the price reaches upto $100,000.

Type of the Website	No. of Pages	Functionality	Usual Cost
Blog Website	10	Mobile Responsive, Contact Form, Social Share Buttons, Newsletter Subscription Form	$20.000
Ecommerce Website	25	100+ Products, Payment Mode Integration, Order Tracking, Logistic Integration, Wishlist Integration, Mobile Responsive, Social Sharing, Contact Form, Newsletter Subscription Form, Image Slider	$50,000
Business Website	25	Mobile Responsive, Social Sharing Buttons, Image Gallery, Image Slider, Testimonial Section	$50,000
Custom Website	15	Custom Requirements	$60,000-$100,000

Tips to Cut Down Costs on Website Development

Developing a website is the most exciting thing to do, and you’ll probably do anything to run your website smoothly. But there are so many things to look into, So you can’t dream big from day one, you need to stay consistent.

Here are some tips to cut down the costs of website development without sacrificing the quality:

1. Start with Fewer Website Pages

When you are planning for your website structure, you need to consider the number of pages that are most important. Because building a website with more pages takes time, and time is money. Also, the web design agencies charge you according to the number of pages you’ve required. So at first, cutting down the number of pages in a website can help you with your budget.

2. Find Free Resources

Media is available for free in the market, you just need to research and it’s done! At first, you don’t need to invest your money for paid resources like stock images and videos for your website.

3. Do some Work In-house

If you don’t want to delay your work, you can do basic work on your own and then choose the right agency or designer to handle your further website development process. That might help you with your pocket, and time both.

4. Ask the Right Questions to Yourself

Everyone knows the first question: ‘How much does a website cost?’ But other than this, so many questions that you need to ask yourself before getting into it. 

• What is my total budget behind it?
• Can I handle the technical part on my own or not?
• What function do I need?
• How will I manage my website?

Develop your Website Now!

Now you know, the website development cost, how to cut the extra cost down, and also methods to develop a website. We hope that now you have a clear mind to decide which method to follow while designing your website. We suggest you hire a web design agency that helps you with their comprehensive ideas to stay at the top in your business. It’s time to get started!