How much does website design cost?

Ask five web designers what a website costs and you’ll probably get five very different answers. That’s mostly because “a website” can mean anything from a few simple pages to an online shop connected to your stock system.

Rather than give a figure that wouldn’t apply to most people, this article goes through what changes the price, so you can see where your project is likely to sit and compare quotes properly.

How many pages you need

A small site with a homepage, an about page, a services page and a contact page is a very different job from a site with a page for every service, every area you cover and a blog. Each page needs planning, designing, building and filling with content, so the number of pages has a direct effect on the cost.

A template or a design made for you

Some sites start from a ready-made template, which keeps costs down but means your site will look and work much like plenty of others. A design made for your business costs more because it’s planned around your customers, your brand and what you need visitors to do.

Neither is wrong. It depends how much your website needs to set you apart and how much it has to do.

What the site needs to do

Features add work. A simple enquiry form is quick. Some things take much longer:

• online booking or appointment systems
• an online shop, with products, payments and delivery options
• quote calculators or product configurators
• connections to other systems, such as your CRM, stock or accounts software
• member areas or customer logins

The more the site has to do, and the more it has to connect to, the more there is to build and test.

Who writes the words and provides the photos

Content is often underestimated. If you’re supplying all the text and good photos, that saves time. If the words need writing from scratch, or the photos need taking, that’s extra work, but it’s often where a site makes the most difference. A well-designed site with weak content won’t bring in many enquiries.

The platform it’s built on

We build on WordPress or as static sites. WordPress means you can edit pages, add posts and change images yourself. A static site is quicker to load and has less to maintain, which suits sites that don’t change often. Each has different setup work, and the right choice depends on how you want to manage the site.

Keeping your search rankings

If you already have a website that ranks on Google, replacing it carelessly can lose those rankings. Doing it properly means mapping the old pages to the new ones, setting up redirects and checking nothing important gets dropped. It’s extra work, but far cheaper than rebuilding rankings you’ve lost.

Building a new site with good structure and fast pages from the start also saves money later, because the site doesn’t need fixing before SEO work can begin.

Ongoing costs

A website has running costs after launch, and it’s worth asking about them up front:

• hosting, so the site stays online and fast
• the domain name, renewed each year
• updates and security, especially for WordPress sites
• any changes or new pages you’ll want over time

Questions worth asking before you choose

Whichever way you go, a few questions will save you trouble later:

• Who owns the website once it’s paid for? It should be you.
• Who owns the domain name? It should be registered in your name.
• Can I move it to another provider if I want to? Some platforms make that difficult.
• What’s included after launch, and what costs extra?

How we quote for a website

We start by talking through what the site needs to do, who it’s for and what you have already. From that we can scope the pages, the features and the content, and give you a clear quote for the whole job, with the ongoing costs set out separately so there are no surprises.

If you’re planning a new website, get in touch or read more about how we design websites. If you’re local, here’s our web design in Hull.