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If you ask ten experts about the costs of (re)designing a website, you will get ten different answers. Some would give specific price ranges, while others would answer, “It depends.” It’s easy to get confused with that many conflicting views regarding website design and development costs. 

How much does it cost to design a website? 

When exploring this topic online, you will find out that the price of redesigning a website varies between $5000 to $20,000. That’s way too vague!

Multiple factors affect the price difference and the costs of building a website from scratch or redesigning an existing one. Crunching numbers can get tricky with so many unknowns. So how much does it cost to create your website?

In this article, we will help you create a more precise estimate of how much your website can cost. By exploring how you can make better estimates, you will know when you are offered an overpriced service and when you get an affordable price. 

Let’s see how to narrow down price ranges first. When more work is required to be done on a website, get ready to pay a higher price. In most situations, simple websites are affordable. Below, we explain the breakdown of costs depending on the website size, complexity, and industry.

• The cost of developing a small business website

There is a high chance that you won’t need a lot of content for your website if you manage a small business. Usually, you wouldn’t go beyond $8000. If you limit your page to a functional one-pager, you shouldn’t even exceed the cost of $2000.

• The cost of developing an eCommerce website

Developing an eCommerce website doesn’t usually cost less than $5000. For complex websites with online sales, you would expect the cost of $40000 or even higher. The costs depend on the number of products, categories, the complexity of each page type, number of payment providers, integrations, and related aspects.

If you have already developed a website on Shopify and want to move from Shopify to Woocommerce, get ready to pay more. 

• The cost of large websites

The bigger and more complex your business offering is, the more content you would need to feature on your webpage. The cost of a big website usually starts at $25000.

To sum it up, if you are planning to build a simple life coaching website or a single property website with a few subpages and even introduce some simple checkout page and a few payment providers, you would pay around $5000. 

What affects the price of website (re)design

Multiple factors affect the price of website design and development. By knowing them, you will be able to find the most optimal website solution in terms of functionality and cost. So what are those factors? Let’s dive into the most important ones here.

1. The complexity of the website

The simpler your website is, the easier it is to build it. You can’t compare a one-pager to a huge website with dozens of pages and categories, all with different layouts. Introducing more pages with different themes and layouts can significantly increase the price.

Apart from the number of features that have to be developed such as page styles or layouts, you also have to remember that the more complex each of them is, the more time and resources it will take to bring them live. Complex animation, dynamic websites, eCommerce features, integrations bring the price up.

Apart from the technical aspects, if you don’t write content on your own, you will also need the help of a copywriter specializing in writing conversion-focused copy.

2. The team size

The final price of website development also depends on who is going to develop your website – a freelancer, a team of developers, or, perhaps, yourself. Even if you decide to build your website on your own using off-the-shelf tools, account for the time you dedicate to assemble it. Your time costs a lot as well! 

When comparing the costs of hiring a freelancer and a professional team of developers, you would most likely pay significantly less to a freelancer than to a development shop. 

However, when deciding on the solution, assess if a freelancer will handle it all. In some cases, you would need access to specialists that have different skills required for your project. It means you would need much more than just one developer. 

For example, in some cases, you would need some help from a business analyst or marketer who could collect necessary information about your clients’ needs before coming up with a concept for your website. In other situations, you would need a UX/UI designer to prepare designs before handing them over to developers. 

Without the right knowledge of building websites from A to Z – from the research phase to testing – you would most likely end up choosing a team of developers rather than a freelancer.

2. Complexity of design

Sometimes, developers have experience with UI and can prepare the designs for your page – the visual elements. However, in most cases, you would have to look for professional web design services and designers with the knowledge of user experience techniques. 

Before you move to a visual element of the website, you have to first make sure the idea behind your website is fully intuitive and leads a user to the desired action – buying your products, sending a contact form, or completing a registration. With a complex business logic behind your website, diverse product offering, and business goals, you will end up spending more on the UX part. 

The cost of graphic design in turn is affected by the complexity of visual elements. For example, the animation aspect and dynamic elements can increase the price.

3. Copywriting

We have briefly mentioned the element of page copy before, so let’s have a closer look at it. When planning to build a website, you can end up with a decision to write a copy on your own. It makes sense if you have had some experience in website copywriting. Writing website copy is different from writing a report or an article. 

The pages that convert well don’t usually contain thousands of words, but only the key information required to make users take the desired action. In most cases, after learning about the specifics of writing a website page copy, you will want to outsource it to a professional copywriter. The cost of their services will also contribute to the increasing cost of the project.

4. Development solutions

Depending on whether you are going to build a website on your own, with a freelancer, or do outsourcing of design and development, you will also have to account for the cost of licenses and programs needed to build a website. 

In case, you want to build your website on your own using a website builder such as Pixpa, you would pay a yearly or monthly subscription for using such programs. If you are going to hire a freelancer to build your website on WordPress, you would most likely pay extra for additional plugins or add-ons that a freelancer will be using. 

In most cases, freelancers and design agencies would already account for the tools in the final price, but it never means you don’t pay for them. Their price is hidden. 

5. SEO optimization

If you want your website to appear high in Google search results, introducing the best SEO practices in the process of website development is key. 

Those are the basic SEO aspects that you should consider introducing:

• Increasing website speed to its maximum
• Making design responsive
• Planning navigation and page structure
• Automatic sitemap creation
• Adding website analytics tags
• Optimizing title tags
• Doing keyword research and formatting content accordingly
• Adding meta description to all pages
• Adding alt tags to images
• Introducing internal linking
• Introducing SSL certificate

When changing your website design, you would follow slightly different SEO redesign rules. Apart from the basic ones that we have mentioned above, you would also have to introduce some other optimization such as checking on crawl errors, monitoring indexation, and organic traffic.

6. Marketing

If you build your website from scratch, the website development project doesn’t finish with your website going live. To get the expected business effect such as a certain amount of sales, you have to first reach your potential clients with your website and get them to convert into paying customers.

Once your website is live, it’s worth thinking of your marketing strategy. If you decide to estimate marketing costs after website development is over, you can end up with no budget and resources for marketing. So instead of missing this element from your web design business plan, think about it in advance and include all marketing-related activities as a cost as well.

Marketing expenses are usually made of hiring a marketing professional and running campaigns. For example, if Adwords is a profitable marketing channel in your niche, getting external help from a PPC expert who would set up and optimize your PPC campaigns is a necessity. 

Apart from human resources, you should also account for a comfortable budget with which you can run your paid campaigns. It can also be the case that you don’t want to run paid ads at all but focus on organic channels. In this case, you will have to invest a bit more in external marketing help.

7. Marketing materials

If you are planning to create a unique website and introduce the elements such as videos, audio, and photos, it’s best to produce them on your own, instead of using stock photos. There are a lot of benefits to this approach. Your team photos and videos add some element of authenticity to your webpage. As a result, you can establish trust with your website visitors faster.

However, creating all audio and visual materials is also connected to additional costs such as the cost of recording a voice-over for an audio or video project or hiring a video crew.

7. Maintenance

Once your website is live, you might need to introduce some changes or fixes. If you have to create an additional landing page for your new product, you need graphic design and development help again. 

If suddenly something goes wrong, you need a well-versed specialist to manage your website in the cloud, find tech problems, and fix them quickly. For example, if you are an eCommerce website, you can notice a significant increase in traffic during Black Friday. 

Your website can suddenly go down as more people visit your product pages. As a result, you can lose sales. For these scenarios, you need some tech support. It’s best to have someone you can contact in case of an emergency and who would be available straight away. When choosing the services of a development agency, you can ask to include 24/7 tech support in your estimate. 

Wrapping up

The prices for building or redesigning a website range from a couple of thousand dollars to over $50000. Various factors affect the cost such as the size of your website. They include complexity of features, the size of the team that is going to work on it, and various other aspects. As now you are more aware of what can increase your website price, you can prioritize, so you don’t break the bank with your website project.