How Much Does it Cost to Build a Website?
Last updated: Feb 22, 2020
Building a Website is similar to cooking from a recipe. You should first prepare the ingredients; the final taste and look is up to you. Essential Tools You Need to Build a Website from Scratch: Domain Name, Web Hosting, Visual Design and Back-End Engine and Content
Domain Name Cost
Your domain name is your website’s address on the internet. That’s what users type in their browsers to reach you. Therefore, registering a domain name that is short and reflects your business is very important. Depending on the quality and authority of a domain, a domain name could cost from $10 to thousands of dollars. Normally, you can register a free domain name at less than $20 a year.
Web Hosting Cost
A host is where you keep your content and files on the Internet. There are myriad companies across the internet that provide web hosting services. The cost of hosting varies with features and amount of storage.
For example, the price of shared hosting, suited for personal websites and blogs, could be as low as $5/month. VPS hosting and Dedicated Hosting Plans are on the other side of the price spectrum. When you have an advanced website with millions of visitors, you may want to consider switching to a VPS or setting up a dedicated hosting for your company. In this case, you should allocate thousands of dollars per year to keep your website working.
Cost of Visual Design and Back-End Engine
The appearance of your home page is the front face of your business. It makes the first impressions on the visitor. Users decide to stay at or leave websites based on their first experience on the website. To create an elegant website, you don’t have to hire a professional designer. Most of the Website Builders such as Wix and Weebly provide an intuitive drag and drop interface that don’t need any coding experience.
Using a good website builder you can build a fully functional website within hours. Designing a website with these tools cost between $5-$15/month. The price varies based on your needs. For example, if you want to add e-commerce to your website, you should pay more.
When you want to create a website that is unique you should go for both web designers and developers. A web designer is a creative person that helps you build an aesthetically appealing and usable GUI for your website and improve user experience, while, a web developer’s job is to write codes for the logic of your website.
For example, a web developer is responsible for creating a shopping cart for the website or processing the payment. In some projects, you only need to hire a web designer, but in projects like online stores, both skills are in demand and should work together to build an elegant and functional website. A good web designer or developer can charge your from $80 to $180 per hour. That explains why the cost of development for some custom-made websites is more than $30000.
If you don’t have enough time and resources for a custom website you can benefit from a CMS (content management system) and a pre-built template. For this, you don’t have to be a Web Programmer. A good CMS such as WordPress takes care of both the visual and technical aspects of your website. Most of the time, building a website can be within minutes and without a single line of coding.
Since most CMS systems are open source and free, you don’t have to pay for the CMS itself, but for a professional website, you should buy a premium template. There are a vast number of high-quality templates available in the market customised for any business and niche. For example, some templates that are designed to fit into the needs of medical experts or online stores.
The price of high-quality CMS themes fluctuates around $50-$5000.
It happens that a pre-made template is not what you exactly want. In this case, you should expect $300-$1000 for template customisation. You can even hire some professionals to build a custom theme for your website. This service may cost you more than $1000.
In addition, if you are not a technical person you need to ask someone to set your website up, change its theme, build the website structure and customise contents such as images and text. The price is something between $50-$500.
Depending on your needs, building a website can cost you anywhere between $50 and $5000. For personal or a small website, you only need to pay for a domain name, a hosting and perhaps a website builder or a pre-made template. But if you want a feature-rich and custom-designed website, the price can go as high a $30000+.
