Every business owns a website nowadays. It has become an integral part of the business. Also, website building has become significantly easier and cheaper than in the past. You don't need a professional developer for building a website anymore. There are multiple ways to build a website.
The overall cost of building a website depends on the route you pick. Some expenses are common across all the ways, and some are unique to the approach used. So, if you are looking to build a website for your business and are not sure what's the best way to do it, you arrived at the right place. After a lot of research, we provide you here the various cost breakup of different methods of building a website.
Typically, you have to pay an upfront $200 to build your website and an ongoing monthly cost of around $50 per month for maintenance. These costs go up significantly if you hire a professional developer. You might end up paying about $5000 upfront and an ongoing cost of $1000 per year.
The main features that could drive your cost are
Website feature | Cost |
---|---|
Domain | $10 - $40 |
Hosting | $35 to $600 |
SSL Certificate | $0 - $200 |
Template | $0 - $200 |
Ecommerce functionality | $20 - $25000 |
SEO and Marketing | 0 - $90 |
The website domain is a mandatory cost that you will incur. The price depends on the registrar you use, and the latest extensions such as .app cost more than .com domains.Ecommerce feature costs extra as websites with regular features won't let you sell online. So, depending upon your need, this cost will be incurred. There are many cheaper plans for SEO but beware of paying for it as most of them are spammers and scammers.
Using a website builder to build your website costs you roughly 10$ to 50$ per month.
Cost breakdown | Price | Description |
---|---|---|
Monthly subscription | $10-$50 per month | Provides security, hosting and many building features |
Apps | $0-$20 per month | Integrate apps to enhance functionality(Optional) |
Hosting | $0 | Provided in subscription |
Security | $0 | Provided in subscription |
The major costs you will incur while using website builder are the subscription fee and fee paid for integrating apps, if any, to enhance functionality. The rest of the required functionality, such as themes, hosting, and security, are inbuilt provided by the website builder. In this way, using a website builder is one of the cheapest ways to build a website. Needless to say, you don't need a professional developer for building your website using a website builder, thus eliminating the enormous cost of hiring a developer.
Price plan | Usual cost |
---|---|
Free plan | 0 |
Basic plan | 12$ per month + App integration costs |
Ecommerce plan | 18$ - 50$ per month + App integration costs |
Enterprise plan | 500$ per month + App integration costs |
If you are not a tech person and are building a simple website for personal use rather than a complex business.
Website builders provide a free plan, too, along with a subscription plan. But it has a lot of limitations while building your site. So, how to decide which plan is best for you?
If you are building a website for personal use, such as school projects, and don't intend to run for a long time, then the free plan is the best option. But, if you are building a site that many people will see, it is better to go with a paid plan.
Therefore, if your website needs any of the above functionality, it's better to go for a paid plan. Some of the best affordable website builders are
Wix: | This is one of the cheapest but a decent website builder to build your dream website. Its subscription rates are around 4.5$/month. If you require more features and a business-focused plan, then it will cost more. |
GoDaddy: | This is a user-friendly website builder with drag and drop functionality, customizable themes, and many more. It even integrates your social media functions to your site. It starts from $9.99/month. |
Weebly: | Weebly has been in the website builder business for quite a time now and offers excellent features. It provides an effective cost of 6$ a month subscription rate if the annual plan is taken. |
Zoho sites: | Zoho is a huge internet company and offers a user-friendly website builder also. Its subscription starts from $4 per month. But the key selling point is, it enables you to integrate other Zoho apps. |
Jimdo: | This is best suitable for small businesses, and you can quickly create simple websites. This may seem a little basic and might not be very useful for designing complex websites. It has a free plan, and its paid subscription plan starts from 9$ per month. |
$40 - $600 upfront cost and an ongoing cost of $10 - $50 per month
Cost breakdown | Price | Description |
---|---|---|
Monthly subscription | $0 | Using WordPress is free |
Apps | $0-$100 per month | Integrate apps to enhance functionality(Optional). |
Hosting | $3 - $50 per month | Mandatory cost to make your website visible online |
Security | $0 - $200 per month | To enhance security of application. |
Themes | $0 - $50 per month | For premium themes |
Using WordPress is free, and it provides a few free themes and plugins too. So, it is possible to keep your costs low. But, if you want to develop your site using some paid themes, then your costs might go up. Hence, you can get away with free themes and plugins, but there are a few costs that you can't escape. For example, hosting is an essential cost. If you want to hire a professional WordPress developer, then your costs will go up significantly high.
Some of the best WordPress sites are
Using WordPress gives good control of your website, and you can customize it the way you want it. Anyone who wants to build a website for complex businesses or wants full customization can use WordPress.
BlueHost is one of the best WordPress builders in the market. It has many great features, and it's affordable too.
Now, let's look at how much a BlueHost plan costs. There are typically three types of plans in BlueHost.
Provider | Cheapest shared WordPress | Cheapest Managed WordPress | Cheapest Managed WordPress |
---|---|---|---|
Bluehost | $2.95 | $19.95 | $6.95 |
A2 Hosting | $2.99 | $11.99 | - |
HostGator | $5.95 | - | - |
Apart from these usual costs, there are some extra costs that you might incur when building using WordPress.
Hiring a professional developer: Hiring an experienced WordPress developer will increase your costs significantly. But, if you want a complex website and are not very confident in building it on your own, you might need this professional help. As per our research, we found that professionals charge you around $100 - $300 per hour.
The Average Cost Of Subscription | 2.95 $ to 50$ per month |
Domain Cost | 12$ per year |
Plugins and Themes | 5$ to 200$ |
Upfront Cost | 300$ |
Maintenance Costs | 12$ to 200$ |
Cost breakdown | Price | Description |
---|---|---|
Monthly subscription | $500 - $1000 per year | You poy an ongoing montly fee to your designer for training and maintenance |
Apps | $0 | Generally included in the quote given by the designer |
Themes | $0 | Generally included in the quote given by the designer |
Hosting | $2.95 to $50 | Mandatory cost to make your website visible online |
Security | $0 - $300 per year | Need this to enhance security of website |
Hiring professional | $5000-$30000 upfront cost | Upfront cost you will incur for hiring a web designer |
Hiring a web designer to design your website removes most of the work out of your hand, but you still need to work with them regularly to get the site you love. This is a costly approach compared to the other two ways.
This way is best suitable if you
You can either outsource your project to an agency that does website development or hire freelancers to do the work. So, it depends on whom you are working with, and the cost varies according to that. The price for these developers is roughly between $ 5000 and $75000. You can get the work done for less than 5000$ also, but you might end up receiving a poorly coded website with glitches and errors. Also, cost depends on the number of pages your website needs, as the coding required will change according to that.
Hiring freelancers for designing and building your website is cost-friendly than hiring an agency. Based on the website's complexity and talent of freelancers, the cost changes. For a simple website, freelancers can charge anywhere between $2000 - $5000, and for a complex website, it can range from $10000 to $30000.
Freelancers generally work with your ideas and build something you want. So, you expect a glitches-free website with superb aesthetic appeal. You should be careful in hiring the right person, or you might end up losing a lot of money.
This is obviously the costlier approach than hiring a freelancer. As the agency provides you with seasoned developers committed to your project and helps you in training and maintenance, they charge a higher amount.
For simpler websites, they generally charge between $15000 and $30000, and for complex websites, it can go as high as $75000. It also depends on the number of pages you need and the various custom features you require for your site.
Apart from the hiring costs, there are a few standard costs which you will incur, just like the other two options.
Also, you might need to provide the basic infrastructure required by the developer for the website. If this is the case, you might end up with this cost too. Some designers use WordPress to create, and there could be an overlap between this and the WordPress approach.
Therefore, if we try to breakdown the costs, these are the costs you will incur:
We researched the average cost for each process and presented you below the expected price.
Cost Type | Cost Incurred |
---|---|
Infrastructure Setup | 150$ to 200$ |
Design and development | 10000$ |
Training | 300$ to 500$ |
Maintenance | 500$ |
Total | 11075 $ |
You can observe that this way is significantly costlier than the other two ways. You can try to cut down the costs by coming to a common ground between these multiple approaches.
For example, you can buy a premium WordPress subscription and give the predefined template to a web designer to customize it. Also, you can buy the best and cheap domain and hosting plan you need rather than leaving it to the designer. This will keep the cost and website in your control.