HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO BUILD A WEBSITE ?

Hello Reader,so you may be having a new business idea that you want to give life to it in the form of a website that you can then in turn into the next big thing like Facebook,Instagram,etc or into an extremely profitable business venture. Or you might simply want a simple website just for having either an online presence or as a form of an advertisement. In either case,the next immediate question that you of course will be having is the million dollar question and that is HOW MUCH REALLY WILL IT COST TO BUILD A WEBSITE ? Well,Don’t worry,in this article,I will help you out by making sure that you will have an approximate idea as to how much your website will cost by the end of this article.

Nowadays,building a website is not really a big deal as it was some few years back. Thanks to the presence of many automated and DIY(Do It Yourself) website builders and platforms out there , anyone can build a website with or without any coding knowledge and experience.The cost to build a website really depends upon many various factors like the website size,complexity,features,functionalities,timeline,platform,languages used and even the location of your developer or agency.So it is nearly impossible to guess the correct cost of a website simply by the idea or wireframe,etc as lots of the previously mentioned factors are involved.However,a developer or an agency can surely give you an estimated cost after having an in-depth analysis of your websites requirements,features and business objectives

CLEARLY SPECIFY THE REQUIREMENTS TO THE DEVELOPER .

When you go out to a developer or any web development firm/agency,you might be inclined to directly ask how much the website will cost to the agency ? However this simple question will not answer your question. The right approach as a client for you will be to first clearly specify the requirements of your business objective or idea . After you specify your requirement clearly,the developer will then analyze your requirements,design,technical aspects,resources needed,number of pages,timeline to complete the project and other factors of your project in order to come up with an estimated cost to develop your project. There is also another factor that you should keep in mind . If you want the website to be done very urgently,then the cost of the project might increase significantly.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF WEBSITE

Normally,websites can be divided into the following types :

Static Websites or Brochure Websites

Static websites are designed for primarily to display information to the site visitors.These kind of websites do not allow engagement with the audience or users directly.The cost to create of a static website is normally very less and it is often the most affordable one.

Approximate Cost : A few hundred dollars

Approximate Time To Complete : 1 week

Corporate Websites Or Business website

These kind of websites are used to provide background information about a business, organization, or service.

Approximate Cost : 1000 to 4000 dollars depending on the size of the company, content,pages and functionalities

Approximate Time To Complete : 2 to 3 week

E-commerce website

These kind of websites offer goods and services for online sale and enabling online transactions for such sales.

Approximate Cost : 1000 to 6000 dollars depending on the size of the technology and functionalities involved

Approximate Time To Complete : 1 month plus

Web Portal

These kind of websites are typically internal websites for businesses or organisations where users log in to systems and will perform their business or work related operations

Approximate Cost : 1000 to 6000 dollars depending on the size of the technology and functionalities involved

Approximate Time To Complete : 1 month plus

Interactive Education website

As the name suggests,they are e-learning sites for schools,college or other educational institutes for the educational purpose of their students

Approximate Cost : 1000 to 6000 dollars depending on the size of the technology and functionalities involved

Approximate Time To Complete : 1 month plus

Portfolio website

These kind of websites are basically an online portfolio to display your work

Approximate Cost : A few hundred dollars depending on the size of the technology and functionalities involved

Approximate Time To Complete : 2 weeks

Customised website with integration in mobile apps as well

These kind of websites will be typically customised and modelled as per the business requirement and objectives of the clients.These can either be small or very huge projects

Approximate Cost : 5000 dollars onwards depending on the size of the technology and functionalities involved

Approximate Time To Complete : 1 month plus

Blogging websites

These are basically like an online journal or blogs ofr information purposes depending on the client and are dynamic in nature

Approximate Cost : A few hundred dollars

Approximate Time To Complete : 2 week

FACTORS THAT DETERMINE THE COST OF A WEBSITE:

The price of a website will ultimately depend upon certain factors that will allow us to determine the exact cost.And these are the following factors explained in detail below :

1 . Tools ,Technologies and Database To be used

Very often,this point is a major factor in determining the cost of a website. Here,Technology means programming language.Some technologies or programming languages will cost significantly more while others will cost significantly less. eg. Websites made inNode JS,React JS will cost more while the ones with PHP will often cost less. Same is the case with database as well. eg. Websites that use Mysql as database will cost lesser than websites that use Mongodb as database.

2. Type Of Website

As explained in “DIFFERENT TYPES OF WEBSITE” section above,your cost will depend upon what kind of website do you want to fulfill your business objectives and goals

3. Working Functionalities

By working functionalities,we mean the kind of functionalities that you would want in your website.So another factor that will depend upon is the kind of complexity of the functionality involved.eg if you want to develop a social networking website like facebook,then you are thinking of having a unique functionality like you want to have a feature where users can search someone by uploading that person’s photograph. Here,ultimately your imagination is the limit(and even budget too)

4. Design Quality

This means what kind of design and look and feel you want in the website.Whether you want a modern look or retro look or any other kind of design inspiration that you want. Since very often,at first instance,the design or visual aspects of website will be a good factor to impress the site visitors initially

5. Domain and Type of Server to be hosted

A domain is the online address of your site.eg www.google.com,www.bitcalibur.com etc . The server is the place where your website will be hosted. These two services are very crucial in a website to be live. Either you can buy it directly from a 3rd party service provider like godaddy,namecheap,etc or we will buy it on your behalf.

The type of server to be hosted means what kind of server would you like to host the site on. To give you an example,there are shared servers,dedicated servers,VPS,AWS,etc . If you exect very feew site visitors,then you can opt for shared server while if you expect more than 10,000 visitors per month or week or even in days,then you should opt for dedicated or AWS. Normally shared servers will cost less while dedicated servers will cost a lot. The speed of the site will often be depending on the kind of server that you purchase. AWS and dedicated servers are very fast while shared servers are very slow.

6. Website Maintenance

In order for the website to run smoothly and without any outages or hiccups,it is often recommended that you should opt for a website maintenance package as well to constantly update and maintain your website.While some kind of websites do not exactly need a maintenance package,but it is recommended that other kind of website should have a regular maintenance.eg. static website do not need website maintenance while web portals and ecommerce websites do need regular maintenance.This is often an optional additional service that you may or may not want in the contract.Normally,as a general rule of thumb,website maintenance will cost annually and it will often cost 40% of the cost of development

SO,OVERALL APPROXIMATE COST TO DEVELOP YOUR WEBSITE

So to conclude the blog, without again specifying the usual cliched point that the ultimately cost will depend upon the tools, technologies, functionality, etc,the following is the conclusion of this article:

For a small corporate or SME website,the total cost will be between 100 USD to 500 USD

For a medium or large sized corporate,the total cost will be between 400 USD to 1000 USD

For a ecommerce website,the total cost will be between 1000 USD upwards

For a customised website or web portal,the cost will be above 2500 USD

And thats it folks,thank you for spending your valuable time reading this blog and I hope that you have found it to be extremely useful and got a rough idea regarding the development of your future website.