How much does a website cost?
‘It depends’.
Just kidding.
A lot of people avoid answering this question directly because it really does depend and can be very variable. People also seem cautious about coming across as cheap (race to the bottom and bad) or over priced (overpricing yourself out of the market, also bad).
Ignoring that, and with a big ol’ pinch of salt, let’s take a look.
Constants – hosting and domain
Let’s start with the constants. You always need a domain name (your web address e.g. mysite.com) and a place for the files to live (your web hosting). Domain names are something like £10 – £20 a year and hosting depends on how many visitors you get. A typical website for a small business can easily get away with some half decent shared hosting like krystal.io and it’ll cost you £80 – £100ish a year. Email service is something that in recent years you sometimes need to pay for. Typically £5 a month, but sometimes it’s included in the hosting up to a certain point (when your inbox has filled up and taken up too much space).
So ongoing costs you are looking at around £150 to keep a website running. This is true of a custom built WordPress site or a cheap DIY site. With a cheap DIY site this is all you pay!
Cheap DIY Websites
The cheapest possible website you can get is one you make yourself. Something like Wix or Squarespace. These generally charge a monthly fee of £10 – £15. That normally covers the hosting and the upkeep of the site. It’s cheap and cheerful – you pick a template and off you go. The downsides with this are obvious. Firstly you have to make it yourself, secondly it’s an off the shelf product so it’s not the highest quality and it will look like a lot of other peoples sites because they will have used the same template.
For some small businesses or individuals starting out, this is maybe going to do the job. Sometimes a website is essentially just an online business card – it doesn’t even need to rank highly in google searches, it just needs to be there where you tell the address to people for contact info. In this case then using a DIY site is a smart move. Don’t waste money on something that is untested and get your business off the ground. If it all starts to work out and you have plenty of profit you can invest in a better website later.
The key thing I’d advise for small businesses starting out in these sorts of cases is to at least invest a little bit of money is a simple logo or some sort of branding. It doesn’t have to be mega fancy, and it does depend on the industry you are in. For instance a food market business is going to need a nice logo a lot more than a tradesman where visual branding is less important.
Elementor and other Page Builders within WordPress
I guess the next step up would be using something like WordPress with a page builder and a plugin like Elementor. These sorts of plugins have loads of built in layouts and it’s all drag and drop. You’ll need a developer to set them up but they’ll charge way less than a regular site – primarily because it’ll be a really bad website!
I don’t use page builders because they are the devils work. Their main problem is that they are a black box – of they break you have to contact the plugin developers, there is no way of fixing them or knowing what when wrong… and they do break. Aside from that they normally have some many layouts and functionality in them that the site looks like 10 pounds of stuff in a 5 pound bag. It’s a hot mess and it will usually cost you anything from £250 – £1k. Maybe this works for some people, but if I didn’t have the money for a proper website I’d sooner spend a little bit of cash on a decent logo and use a super simple and clean template with one of the DIY website builders.
Hiring a Freelancer
The next step up would be hiring a freelancer or freelancers. If you needed full branding you’d want a designer and a developer. An averaged sized, professionally built brochureware site with full design and dev would cost around £8 – £10k. This assumes design and dev and roughly split 50/50. This can cost more in design if there isn’t an existing brand and you need print assets and the like.
A smaller site – say for a small business or an individual where you have maybe a handful of pages – about, contact, what you do type thing would cost more like £2.5k – £5k. It depends on the levels of design needed and functionality of course. You can save money by hiring someone like myself who will give you a decent level of design and a quality build but not all websites are created equal.
In this range you might also find people charging from £1.5 – £2.5k but you need to be careful you are not getting an off the shelf theme of a page builder. Every site I make uses a custom theme for that project – it’s always bespoke and any developer worth their salt will be doing that. You also want to pay attention to the level of design. Not everyone can spot or see the value in good design but bad design sticks out like a sore thumb.
You’ll also find plenty people who technically know how to put a website together, but it ain’t going to be pretty. If it’s not at least neat looking, tidy and consistent then that is as just as much a black mark against it as being badly built and coded.
It is possible to find people out there who are good at everything but it’s pretty rare. As I’ve done so much front-end work over the years I’ve leant into design and learnt lots along the way. That’s made me care about and get pretty good at design (at least designing websites). You’ll find plenty of developers out there who are very technically gifted and can code all sorts… but they can’t make a website that looks neat and tidy on the front end and they can’t build something that a regular human with common sense would easily be able to use!
Hiring an agency
Agencies have higher over heads and charge as lot more. They quite often have dedicated departments – development, design etc. This means for something more specific and thorough you can go through a whole process. They also typically work on larger jobs. Anything from £15k – £100k+. It’s much like builders where you will find companies that specialise is loft extension that typically work on jobs of £50 – £60k. They rarely want to pick up a job that is £3 – £4k because for the way they are setup, it’s not worth their time. A lot of my work is doing builds for agencies and the work tends to take a bit longer as it’s more exacting and due to the nature of the process – usually fairly separate design and development.
It’s more work to really nail the build so it matches the design perfectly. This is an extra level of detail and polish that isn’t required for everyone, but for some more established companies is essential to maintain their brand.
Kitchens
Sometimes it’s easier to compare websites to something else, something tangible like a kitchen. At the low end of the scale the DIY site builders are akin to the cheapest Ikea kitchens. You can buy something off the shelf, and even add your own worktops and install yourself if you’re quite handy.
The next level up is the slightly fancier modular kitchens in Ikea. Working with a builder you can get something decent for a reasonable price. Ikea kitchens can also get quite fancy if you want them too and the price range varies massively. You are using off the shelf parts, but if you’re clever you can save money and still make it look nice. Conversely you can use still spend a fortune on an Ikea kitchen if you want all the bells and whistles and fancy work tops.
At the top end of the scale you can get a kitchen custom made. You could use someone like Howdens who design the kitchen first and plan out every detail. Further than that, you could find higher-end cabinet and kitchen makers where you get to pick the wood and it’s fully bespoke. These kitchens are obviously going to be way more expensive and not something that everyone wants and needs.
The point is there are lots of different needs and what is right for one person isn’t right for the next. Where do I sit in the strange analogy of kitchens?
The Sweet Spot
The sweet spot for me isn’t cheap and it isn’t paying over the odds for a label or a badge. I want something high quality and robust, but I don’t always want to spend lots of money on something just because it’s fancy. For certain things I’ll push the boat out if I think it will last a long time and make a big impact.
I think that’s where a lot of people find themselves. They don’t want cheap, but they do want value for money and quality. You might be happy to pay for something robust and quality, but don’t care about paying for status.
That’s where I try to pitch myself and I try to work within sensible budgets and adjust as appropriate. I can absolutely build fancy hand crafted metaphorical kitchens but more often than not I’m using Ikea shells, a nice worktop and maybe some custom plywood doors (ply-kea for the win!). Always with the goal of crafting the best metaphorical kitchen (or just a real website) for your money.