What Does a Serious Business Website Realistically Cost? 💷

Hello, it's Darren from Ilkeston Web Design. Let's talk about what a website realistically costs. The going rate is usually higher than you imagined.

For what I do, on average, it's £600 to £5,000. It depends on whether or not it's an information-only website, or if it's an e-commerce website. If it's a very complex e-commerce website, it could be more than 5k.

So that gives you an idea. If price is the sole deciding factor, I would keep in mind how much time and effort goes into websites. We'll talk about that in this video. We'll break it down.

People underestimate cost, of course, so that's why I'm going to set the scene. I'll give you some context, and I'll try and use metaphor and analogy to cut down on the amount of technical jargon.

The purpose of the website? What is it for? What do you want it to do? Do you want to drive leads and inquiries, or are you selling products directly online? Because those are two different kinds of websites.

If it is leads and inquiries, we want to make sure that it is functioning as a marketing and sales machine, right? We want to attract people. We want to engage people, and we want to convert people. We want to support the entire sales process. Content tends to be the thing that's missing from most websites.

You can build a technically sound website, and it can look very nice. It can look very beautiful, but it could be useless because the words just aren't there. Or it could be that there's no video. This video is embedded on my website, and you're watching it right now. So this helps to engage visitors. It drives sales. It supports sales. The website should be the nucleus or the center of the business universe.

Let's understand then the different methods of creating a website.

There's two different types of website. At least that's what I'm boiling it down to today because I want to try and keep this simple and straightforward. Content management system – that's one type of website. And custom website – that's the other.

So let's talk about the differences, beginning first with the content management system. Most modern websites are built with a content management system (that's a CMS), it's basically a chassis or a framework which gets you started. It's partially built for you.

So if it was a car chassis, you would have to create your own engine. You'd put your own wheels on it. Your own body work. You'd tune it up and make it look as you want it to be. But the chassis is fundamentally done for you, so you don't have to do that.

That's great because we don't want to spend time doing things that are already done for us. It's a waste of time and money to try and reinvent the wheel which is what we would be doing if we weren't using a content management system.

Wix is a content management system. Yola is a content management system. Squarespace, that's another one. They're okay but they're entry-level, they have limitations. They're not great and if you've used them, you'll know that WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, those are way better examples of a content management system. They're used by more serious businesses in all industries.

And I like WordPress. WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. WordPress.org, big distinction there. It's essentially free to get started with WordPress.org. It's orders of magnitude more powerful than the other CMSs we just talked about, Wix and Squarespace.

Yes, the code for WordPress.org is free to get started at first but you need to know what you're doing in order to configure it. Don't let the fact that it's free deceive you. Don't think that free must be bad.

Oh, no, no, no, no, not WordPress. This CMS is open source, right? So that means people from all over the world are contributing to it on a daily basis to make it better. Imagine you were building a conservatory and the materials were free. Let's say you had thousands of pounds worth of free materials at your disposal. Now you need someone to build the damn thing but at least the materials will be free which is a huge cost saving right away. Out of the box, it's great because it has all these free themes that you can customise.

Some of the additions to WordPress are paid for and sometimes it is necessary to use paid plugins, extensions and services but for the most part, you can use a lot of the free stuff and that's just fantastic. The White House website... that's the one I'm thinking. You know, the American administration, the White House? Their website is powered by WordPress.org and WordPress powers almost half of the internet.

Watch out for the low quality WordPress people as well, there's people out there selling very hastily constructed WordPress websites which are not the greatest quality and usually the price, you know, £99 for it... I mean, come on! We all know what low quality work looks like when we see it but if we're not an expert in that area then it's difficult to spot a botched job or shortcuts.

Custom websites, on the other hand, these are not content management systems. These are coded by developers basically. It's done by hand. More expensive as a result. If you try to recreate the equivalent of, let's say, the White House website... let's imagine you were trying to recreate that. That would be £30k, £40k, £50k, maybe £100k. Creating it all from scratch... that would be what I consider reinventing the wheel which I see as pointless when you've got WordPress.

So I wouldn't bother with a custom website. The cost is prohibitive and the person who developed it or the team that developed it are the only ones who really know how it works. It's not always easy to make changes to it.

I mean, with WordPress, you might need to get someone to come in and make changes but it's significantly easier to do that when there's an entire market dedicated to WordPress as a content management system as opposed to this very specialised bespoke custom build which not many people understand. So you don't want to be beholden to a small group of developers.

Let's do a detailed cost breakdown. Let's talk about the essentials. Domain, hosting, domain security certificate and website email. The good news is that some of these can be gotten free of charge because they come with certain web hosts.

So you've got to pay for the domain, you've got to pay for the hosting but you'll often get a domain security certificate which is essential thrown in. You'll often get website email which you might want thrown in as well. You don't want to be paying for all this stuff separately because by the time when you add it all up and put VAT on top, you might be looking at 500 quid before you've even started building the website and GoDaddy and 123Reg are notorious for overcharging small business owners.

I mean, GoDaddy market themselves, they position themselves as being for small biz owners yet they're charging ridiculous amounts of money. I've moved a lot of websites from GoDaddy to Dreamhost and I recommend Dreamhost because of the value for money but website domain, regardless of where you purchase it from, whether it's from GoDaddy, 123Reg or Dreamhost, I recommend Dreamhost. You're looking at £10 to £30 on average.

It could be more than that, it depends what kind of domain it is. Maybe you're purchasing it off somebody who previously owned something that you want, in which case it costs more. When it comes to web hosting, it could be anywhere from £50 to £200 a year, depends on whether it's shared hosting or virtual private server, depends on what kind of website you've got.

I mean, if it's an e-commerce website, you need to spend a little bit more on your hosting. If it's an information-only website, then you could be spending, say, £100 a year. Dreamhost offer a shared hosting package which allows you to actually have multiple websites on one web host.

If you've got fairly low traffic because you serve a local audience, then the chances are it's not as if you've got thousands of people visiting that website daily, which means that the bandwidth isn't going to be quite so high. So you could actually have two or three websites hosted on one Dreamhost shared hosting account. Right? So that's good value for money. So it's as if you can take the cost of a shared hosting package and divide it by three.

Dreamhost works out better value for money. Dreamhost also offer domain security certificates. That's what gives you HTTPS. If you don't have a domain security certificate, the chances are the browser is telling the visitor, "this website is insecure. Are you sure you want to continue?" And it doesn't look good. So just add the HTTPS, use the Let's Encrypt free domain security certificate that comes with Dreamhost... that will automatically renew every month – no charge for that – whereas GoDaddy, yep, you've guessed it – they charge annually for a domain security certificate.

Website email comes with Dreamhost free of charge – I have info[at]ilkistonwebdesign.com – GoDaddy charge for that. Dreamhost include it. So you can see already that there are cost savings to be made before the website even gets built.

So we've done the logistics stuff, the initial setup. We've done domain hosting, website security certificate and email. Now we're talking about to actually build the thing. What is a web designer going to charge you?

Well, is it an information-based website for driving leads and inquiries? Or is it an e-commerce website? If it's an e-commerce website, you should expect to be spending thousands, at least a thousand pounds. And that's probably for a simple one. I charge £1000 to £5,000 for an e-commerce website, but if it's more complex, then it could be in excess of £5,000. If it's an information-only website, that starts £600 up to £5,000. Depends on how much content there is to add, how much writing and how many pages to add.

There's a lot that goes into it. And then you've got things like web development, content writing, a lot of that I include in my quote, so when I quote you a price, I'm going to be helping you write content.

I'm going to be doing all kinds of web development in the background. That's like wiring it all up and making sure it works correctly and it's all fully hosted.

Web design, typically, this is where a bit of confusion sets in... it's a misnomer. People, when they say web designer, what they really mean is website engineer, somebody who can build the whole thing and make it all work. Whereas technically, web designer technically means someone who designs what the thing looks like: the front end, the visuals, that kind of thing. So I'm going to be doing all of it.

Graphic logo design, that is going to cost you actually. So I work with a graphic designer and we work together on your logo and we'll create that. That's anywhere from £150 to £500 and you'll be supplied with the SVG, the master file. So you can take that to a commercial printer and do whatever you want with that.

There's extra stuff as well, like apps and integrations, external services like CloudFlare, which improve the performance of the website and help it load faster. That could be £50. I'd say it's a couple of hours work to set that up and that's £50 well spent.

There's search engine optimization, which is a contentious subject. Many people get their fingers burned by people providing these services. I offer a very basic SEO service. It's more what you call on-page SEO. That actually ties into content writing.

Local directory listings, you know, yell.com, that kind of thing, all those listings, those tend to rank in Google. Citations are part of local SEO. Setting up your Google business profile, we can say that's part of SEO because that is tied directly into the Google search experience.

I don't really do backlink building, which is key. That's what you call off-page SEO. You might want to engage the services of a digital PR firm or an SEO who knows what they're doing when it comes to backlink building. The prices for those things varies.

My labor charge would be anywhere from an hourly charge to a quoted price. We've talked about avoiding low prices – being careful about wasting money on something which might have to be rebuilt.

Many clients go through that process. They build something, they decide it's no good and have it rebuilt again. The problem usually is that there's a marketing problem. The website may be technically fine, but the marketing is just no good. It's basically non-existent. They don't go nearly far enough, so keep that in mind.

I'd always say have an honest discussion about money with people. It's not rude to talk about money. I know parents often teach their kids that it is rude to talk about money, well, it's an essential conversation to have. People want to know what they're getting for their money.

It's tempting to say, well, a website is a website. They're all the same, but they're not. It needs to be a revenue-generating money machine. And what powers that is the content ultimately, and if you're struggling to get organic traffic, you can always use paid ads. But if you're going to do that – and ads are an expense – obviously you need to budget for that.

Make sure that when you do run ads that you're sending people to a website which is worth visiting. Otherwise, you just get tyree kickers and time wasters on the phone. Whereas your website can function as the sales team and filter some of those people out and do a better job of qualifying people in the first place.

So I hope that was useful. Thanks very much for watching. This was Darren of Ilkeston Web Design. Bye!