How Much Should My Website Design & Development Cost?

You have a viable business idea, the products and services you want to sell, and an efficient team in place. However, these days you also need to have an interactive, functional, and visual website for your venture to ensure continued growth.

There were approximately 1.72 billion websites in 2019. The number continues to rise, inundating your prospective audiences with tons of data and product information. If you aren’t a part of this movement, your business is going to get left behind. That’s why you need to create an online presence for your business to reach customers.

Your website is more than just an amalgamation of data, links, and pictures. It has to attract visitors, retain their attention, and get them to click on the purchase buttons.

A website design is essential for creating this engaging and impactful website.
Read ahead to find out what it entails and how much it costs to build a website.

How Much Does A Website Cost?

Here’s the average cost of building a website:

How Much Does A Website For A Business Cost

Business website designs can range from $2,000 to $90,000, and annual maintenance costs can be from $300 to $70,000. However, these figures depend on the size and features of your websites.

Web Design Costs For 2021

It’s 2021, and you need to keep up with the times. Whether you want to launch a new website or update your current one, you should consider the web design costs that come with it.

Web Site Maintenance Costs For 2021

The following prices reflect the ongoing costs for a website so that it doesn’t go offline.

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Website?

When it comes to designing and developing a website, its scale contributes to its cost. Expect to spend anywhere from $10,000 to more than $100,000, depending on your requirements. Sometimes this can discourage business owners from investing in a new website, even though it could hugely impact its growth.

There are many cost factors behind a website’s design and development, which are essential to understand to select the features you want according to your website budget and scale.

Let’s delve into these factors:

Domain

A domain name is like an online fingerprint that makes it unique. It allows you to be recognizable and create a distinctive brand identity. That is why purchasing and registering your domain is the first step towards developing your website.

Importance Of A Domain

Every website wants to stand out and have its own identity, and a domain name does that. This might suggest why there were 370.7 million registrations for a domain across all TLDs at the end of 2020’s third quarter.

Additionally, it also provides credibility to the site visitors who could be potential customers enabling your brand to grow.

Cost Of A Domain Name

A new domain name usually costs around $2 to $20 per year, depending on the TLD.

You can also purchase a domain name that’s owned by someone else, but for that, you’ll have to get in touch with the existing owner. The price you pay for it entirely depends on the owner, and they’ll take into account the history, age, and your need for the domain when setting it.

SSL Certificate

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate protects your brand and site visitors by securely transferring sensitive data. This makes it essential for the users to have the certificate displayed in the URL with the domain name.

The difference between a website URL with an SSL certificate is the presence of “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP.” To get more information about the SSL certificate, check out the padlock that appears on the right side of the URL.

Importance Of SSL Certificate

We are all aware of the amount of sensitive data that transfers online daily, including credit card information for online purchases and email IDs for newsletters. Naturally, as part of your business, you want similar information from your customers.

According to a report, there is at least one major security vulnerability in 86% of websites.

This is why you need to build trust and credibility for your customers to feel safe doing business with you. However, with internet browsers alerting users of an absence of a valid certificate, they are reluctant to visit your website affecting its revenue, email subscribers, lead generations, etc.

Cost Of An SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate can range from $0 to $1200 per year.

You can either pay for your SSL certificate or get it for free, depending on the company. However, experts suggest paying for a maximum security certificate because it usually has additional protection with more encryption levels and a higher warranty.

Website Hosting

Obviously, you want internet users to access your website. For that, you’ll have to pay for a server where your pages, pictures, data, etc., are to be hosted. A website hosting service sells space on their server where you can put your website so people can view it globally.

Importance Of Website Hosting

The importance of website hosting is quite evident, but there are other reasons too why it matters so much:

• Impacts website expansions
• Affects page loading time
• Impacts customer support throughout site crashes or issues

Hosting providers significantly impact your website’s functionality. While you can get free hosting, it is better to pay for good tech support.

Cost Of Website Hosting

Website hosting can set you back $24 to $3,600 a year, which is why they are divided into categories:

• Shared Host: The service costs from $24 to $120 a year. As the name suggests, your provider hosts several clients on a shared server along with your website. Due to its sharing feature, you can experience slow performance.
• Website Builder: These servers usually charge around $60 to $500 a year. While these are good for small businesses and startups, bigger ones are better off with some other hosting service.
• Virtual Private Server: A VPS ranges from $240 to $950 per year. Your business shares a server, but it has complete access to the resources of numerous virtual servers.
• Dedicated Server: This service costs around $950 to $3600 a year. Your business gets its server and its resources with this service. If your website gets more than 100,000 visitors a month, you need this server.

Design

It is easy to think that a website design is only concerned with great visuals. However, it doesn’t just make your website look good but also enhances its functionality. A well-designed website is easier for visitors to navigate through and find what they are looking for.

It’s no surprise, then, that website designers contribute significantly towards your expenses. What they do can directly affect your site’s performance.

Importance Of Web Designs

Web designs are essential for users and search engines. These are the first aspects of your website that visitors notice and use to form an opinion. Users are prone to leave your site if they find it challenging to navigate or outdated. It could also negatively impact their opinion about your brand.

Search engines take a site’s design, performance, and functionality into account when deciding its position in the search results. A slow website that doesn’t have a straightforward menu or is inundated with irrelevant content will never rank on top of the search results.

And as a result, that site will lose a significant amount of traffic because it appears on some back page of results.

Cost Of Web Design

A website’s design ranges from $2,000 to $15,000.

Generally, more straightforward designs cost less than complicated ones, but that shouldn’t make businesses choose a simple design. You need to prioritize your customer’s experience and create a website keeping your target audience in mind.

Responsive Design

Adaptation to a device is what makes a website’s design responsive. Your website design should be such that a user’s experience is smooth regardless of the device they use to access it.

Importance Of A Responsive Design

Users are changing their browsing habits. Everyone seems to be in a rush these days as mobile devices (excluding tablets) account for around half of the world’s Internet traffic.

This makes it essential to invest in responsive web designs for optimal website performance for your entire target audience.

Cost Of A Responsive Design

Responsive web designs range from $1,500 to $15,000.

There are two ways in which you can use responsive web designs:

• Responsive Design: Such a design lets your website adapt to the user’s device regardless of the type.
• Mobile Site: Mobile-specific sites help your company create your website’s mobile version and support mobile and tablet users.

A responsive design offers a cost-effective option to most businesses.

Website pages

Quality content is an essential part of a website, so designers charge by the number of pages on your website. The pages depend on factors like services, products, and business, but expect to spend between $1,000 and $10,000 or more.

An online retail store with a vast product line will require more pages than a restaurant’s online page.

Interactive media

Customers need to be engaged and impressed by your company’s website. You can achieve that with the help of interactive media. Video games, story scenario choices, and compelling visuals are just some forms of media that capture users’ attention.

Importance Of Interactive Media

An interactive media tool is handy if you want to engage users, describe products, and raise brand awareness. It interacts with the users, providing them with results based on their decisions and actions.

Cost Of Interactive Media

Adding interactive media to your site can cost you anywhere between $250 and $10,000.

A good plan for your interactive media can propel your company in the right direction and achieve its goals. You need to invest time and resources for meaningful interactive media for both your team and agency.

Usually, it becomes costlier to involve more development work in interactive media creation.

Content Management System

A Content Management System (CMS) helps you make slight website updates on your own. You and your team can easily make adjustments without modifying site codes or files.

Importance Of A CMS

A CMS offers benefits for your team as it makes updating your website straightforward and convenient. It is also easy to update contact information like store hours or contact numbers.

Cost Of A CMS

The average price range of using a custom or standard CMS is from $2,000 to $25,000.

In case you opt for a free CMS like WordPress, your web designer will charge a CMS addition fee.

Ecommerce Functionality

Ecommerce functionality provides enormous support to your ecommerce business by ensuring product purchase by shoppers and processing them by your team. It includes many tasks:

• Payment gateways installation
• Payment processing system addition
• Payment options, shopping carts, and shipping systems testing
• Product pages’ launch

Importance Of Ecommerce Functionality

For any ecommerce business, ecommerce functionality is crucial for its success. If there is a lack of order processing systems and facilities, you can wave your customers goodbye!

To provide a seamless experience to your shoppers, you need to invest in an ecommerce system. Your team should include the ecommerce functionality’s cost in the web design budget.

Cost Of Ecommerce Functionality

Ecommerce functionality cost ranges from $2,000 to $25,000.

There are a few factors that contribute to this cost:

• Product line’s size
• The average number of orders
• Business size

These are some of the reasons why smaller companies pay less than the larger ones for ecommerce functionality. They process fewer orders and can make do with a less robust ecommerce system.

Database Integration

As a business, you must have a database that contains important customer and company information. This can also feature client log-in data, their email and home addresses, and any other information provided by them and required to service their needs.

To make this data accessible to the clients or team, you need database integration in your website. For that, you’ll have to work with a database development specialist who knows how to add this functionality to your site without compromising on its existing capabilities.

However, you require developer expertise to add any database to your website.

Importance Of Database Integration

Database integration is essential for the company and its users because it allows access to valuable information about your team and the shoppers on your website. It saves your support team from spending time on appointment dates, product orders, etc.

Additionally, database integration acts as a unique selling point (USP) to shoppers who favor online convenience.

Cost Of Database Integration

Database integration costs start at $1,800 and can go all the way up to $25,000.

The most significant factors that affect its cost are its complexity and customization. If you want a unique database, prepare to pay more for it than a pre-existing third-party database.

However, a custom database has its own perks as it can resolve user inconveniences in the shopping process to improve customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.

Key Takeaways

Website design and development is a crucial part of success for a business. Anyone who wants to search for something goes on Google first, making it essential to have an online presence to grow your brand.

You need to invest in a highly functional and visual website to engage your users. It is necessary to know how much it costs to design and develop a website because many factors contribute to it.

Follow this guide to get an insight into what your new website design should cost you!