How Much Should I Budget for a Website Design & Development?

This is a great question. I’ll begin by saying this—many looking to either design a website from the ground up or redesign their pre-existing website often underestimate the cost of the design/development process.

Before we dive into numbers, let’s discuss why you should make your website a top budget item and a mission-critical endeavor.

Your Website—the Most Important Marketing Communications Asset You Have. Period.

Let’s make one thing clear right off the bat—a website is not a brand or a brand strategy. It should be the result of a thought-through brand strategy. Any decision you make from logo usage, to colors and type, to messaging and imagery should be guided by your brand strategy.

In terms of the assets we use nowadays to carry out our marketing communications plans, however, a website is your most important communicator for several reasons:

1. It’s a 24/7 communicator. Your website is delivering brand experience and communications whether you’re awake or asleep. Prospects can access your website at any time from any place from any device.
2. It’s usually the first place people go for follow-up info. It doesn’t matter what communications strategy or tactic you have in place. Most of the time, people who receive those messages are going to follow-up via your website for more information. Media placement? Journalists often cite your website for more information. Billboard? The website is listed as a next step. Social media content campaign? Connected back to your website. Word of mouth? People look to follow-up with more information from your website.
3. It’s a digital fortress in a competitive digital world. Search engines play a large role in how we do business nowadays. Whether you’re an agency or a product, your ranking for keywords prospects are entering into search engines can be crucial to your overall plan. If a website isn’t developed with the best practices in mind, it doesn’t have a chance to rank. If a website doesn’t look good, then when you win that click on that hard-earned search engine ranking then it’s a waste of time because the prospect bounces.

Budgeting for a Website Design & Development Project—Ballpark Sizing

Now that we’ve established the importance of a killer website in today’s business landscape, let’s dive into price ranges.

Website design agencies and freelancers price projects differently based on their unique approaches, but the following are the ballpark ranges you can expect.

Key Note: These prices apply to built-from-scratch websites. Those pre-fabbed templates don’t count.

Regular, Small-Sized Website Design & Development: $5,000 – $10,000

The small-sized development has some flux within it based on total number of templates, pages and whether content is being migrated or not. The rule here is that when budgeting, you don’t want to save anything less than $5,000.

Dipping Below the Starting Point of $5,000 Isn’t a Good Idea

The talented and credible practitioners in the marketplace today charge in these ranges. Anyone charging below this should be questioned with deep scrutiny. But … We’ll talk more about that later.

What’s Regular Mean?

Regular means that this website is for marketing communications purposes. It’s communicating messages through its pages. There isn’t any ultra-advanced functionality or eCommerce possibilities included.

You might be sitting there saying, “Yeah … Well I can install a WordPress plugin to achieve eCommerce in the blink of an eye.” While this may be true, and while many developers use eCommerce Plugins, someone still has to totally customize those templates to fit in with the rest of the website’s design and function. This takes time and a great deal of effort along with in-depth testing to make sure everything works.

What’s Involved in a Small-Sized Design Project

Here’s what you can expect from a trustworthy website design agency. Keep these five areas in mind because they apply to all of the website sizes:

1. Strategy Session. Evaluating the creative brief, challenge and goals of your organization.
2. Design Rounds. Before a single line of code is written, it’s important that everyone is united around the design. Design is such a critical aspect of a website. Yes, the way something is developed is important, but if it doesn’t look good or brand-specific, the mission has failed.
3. Development of Structures and Templates. This is where the major designs are developed in the live code. This is a major flex point in the budget range.
   • In a regular, small-sized website the total number of templates developed are in the 5-10 range. A template is a page layout that determines content areas. Examples often include the home page, about page, internal page, blog listing, blog post, service/solution pages, etc.
4. Page Implementation/Content Creation. Page implementation and content creation is another area where the budget range will flex.
   • Usually for a small-size project, the agency/freelancer will implement 10-20 pages of content. Anything beyond that will increase the budget.
   • If you don’t have content then you’ll need to invest in it. An integrated agency will have the creative talent to do this, but this will increase budget.
   • If you don’t have brand images, you’ll need to either buy them from a stock website or invest in a brand photography session to capture your image. In today’s day and age, a huge differentiator is having your own brand photos, so I can’t recommend that enough.
5. Launch and Due Diligence. Once content is settled and perfected, and the website is assembled, it’s time to launch. This is a labor-intensive step in the process. If you’re launching from scratch, then the budget range is often lower than a website redesign. Redesigns require content migration, setting up 301 redirects and other configuration.

Advanced, Small-Sized Website Design & Development: $7,500 – $12,000

In contrast to the regular, these small-sized website have advanced functionality. These could manifest in several types of functionality requirements:

• An Advanced Platform. If you’re developing on an advanced platform—say the HubSpot COS for example—the cost out of the box will be higher. WordPress websites generally fit into the Regular category because they’re more documented, open-sourced and easy to work with. Complicated platforms take a niched skill-set, knowledge and approach, which not everyone has.
• Advanced Functionality. Trying to do something beyond the norm? Require some intensive functionality? This will bump your project into the advanced range.
• ECommerce. As mentioned above, eCommerce will tip a project into the Advanced, Small range.

In terms of the process, it’s the same considerations as mentioned above with the Small-Sized project. Again, the major difference in price comes from the three elements above.

Regular, Mid-Sized Website Design & Development: $11,000 – $20,000

Regular functionality in mind, here are the major considerations that make a project mid-sized.

1. Strategy Session. Evaluating the creative brief, challenge and goals of your organization.
2. Design Rounds. More templates and a larger project requires more design time. Also, with the more robust website on hand, the website is going to require extensive planning of content and flow of content to connect the dots properly.
3. Development of Structures and Templates.
   • In a regular, mid-sized website the total number of templates developed are in the 10-20 range.
4. Page Implementation/Content Creation.
   • Usually for a mid-sized project, the agency/freelancer will implement 20-60 pages of content. Anything beyond that will increase the budget range.
   • If you don’t have content, a great deal of content will need created. If this responsibility is on the website design agency, the pricing will go to the higher end of the budget.
   • Brand images for the content areas come into effect here as well. More content equals a greater need for imagery. Again, I can’t recommend a brand photography investment here to differentiate you from the competition. More images equals a larger budget overall.
5. Launch and Due Diligence. In the case of a redesign, more pre-existing content will need dealt with. If you’re deleting pages, or changing their URLs, these will need dealt with carefully to prevent penalization from search engines and dead-end content.

Advanced, Mid-Sized Website Design & Development: $13,500 – $23,000

The design and content requirements from above come into effect with the advanced considerations mentioned earlier in the advanced, small-sized website section:

• An Advanced Platform.
• Advanced Functionality.
• ECommerce.

The combination of the design requirements and advanced functionality will determine which side of the budget range this type of project will fit into.

Regular, Large-Sized Website Design & Development: $20,000 – $30,000

In normal cases, most websites don’t step into this arena. Most websites will either be in the small- or mid-sized ranges. Here are the considerations involved with a large-sized project:

1. Strategy Session.
2. Design Rounds. In large-sized websites, there are often a great deal of templates that need designed. Also, with more templates and pages, more time is dedicated in the site architecture planning phase.
3. Development of Structures and Templates.
   • In a regular, mid-sized website the total number of templates developed are 20-40. Why so many you ask? If you’re designing a website with dedicated content areas, and custom post types, there will be more templates to craft. An example of this would be a large content website with multiple types of blog categories and corresponding themed post templates. Another could be a robust solution website with dedicated feature pages.
4. Page Implementation/Content Creation.
   • Usually for a large-sized project, the agency/freelancer will implement 60-200 pages of content.
   • If you don’t have content, a great deal of content will need created. In this case, a very great deal of content.
5. Launch and Due Diligence. In the case of a redesign, even more pre-existing content will need dealt with. If you’re deleting pages, or changing their URLs, these will need dealt with carefully to prevent penalization from search engines and dead-end content. We’ve often seen projects of this size have a tremendous volume of URLs and factors need dealt with.

Advanced, Large-Sized Website Design & Development: $31,000+

Again, the considerations that turn a website from regular to advanced:

• An Advanced Platform.
• Advanced Functionality.
• ECommerce.

Depending on what you want this type of website to do, the budget range is really open ended and custom-tailored to the project. For some, they’re trying to create the next Facebook. Others are building functional softwares that are being sold for monthly subscription costs.

Why Are Websites Priced This Way Nowadays?

You may be evaluating your next project. Whether small, mid or large, you might be wondering why websites are in this price ranges.

Websites are extremely labor-intensive endeavors. When you build from scratch—like these ranges apply to—you have to go through design, development, implementation of content and launch. The average website project will take 60-100 hours of work from start to finish. Larger projects can easily go beyond 200+ hours from start to finish.

Websites Are a Long Game

When you think of a website, it is truly an investment in something that will return money to your business. It’s a long-term investment that you put a great deal of effort into to support your other activities in a big way.

Beware People Charging Less Than These Ranges

Although these ranges may flux slightly from agency to agency, these are what you can expect from a trustworthy team with the skills to get the job done right. That’s really the key here—getting this done the right way the first time.

If you are talking to a team or freelancer who’s low-balling these numbers then there’s something wrong. Either they’re buying pre-fabbed templates on the internet and not telling you about it, or they’re “secretly” outsourcing the work to another country.

You truly get what you pay for. In many cases, I’ve talked to people who come to us after dealing with a low-priced designer. What they come to us with are problems and failing websites that are losing them authority and marketing opportunities by the day.

“What If I Can’t Afford These Ranges?”

In many cases, we talk to businesses that can’t afford these ranges for a website. From my experience, there are two situations.

The first is that, yes, you truly can’t afford it at this time in your business. Maybe you’re a self-funded startup without volumes of investor capital. My advice in that case would be to invest what you can to start. When you get money flowing, invest that back into your website to expand it and continue doing so until you reach the size that supports your communications strategies.

The second case is just a lack of prioritizing. There’s a reason I started this post off with the fact that your website is your most important communications asset. It truly is. I’ve often found organizations blindly spending thousands and thousands on things that don’t have tangible results or sound strategies behind them. If you really want to make your website a success, you have to evaluate your budget critically. Where can you redistribute budget items to make room for a website?

Have More Questions or Looking for a Quote?

Have more questions on what your project might look like? Looking for a quote? I’d love to chat with you. Feel free to get in touch. I promise I don’t bite.