A lot of readers probably expect to receive an exact number (like 5,000$) in response but it can’t be answered that easy. The cost of a website strongly depends on which specific business tasks it’s going to perform. Is it just a brochure site that will provide information about your business? Or is it also intended to sell products? Or does it need to integrate with third-party services and process significant amount of data? Each functionality set will result in a different cost.
There are plenty of questions “How much does it cost to build an app?” on the net. But let’s focus on the price of websites today. To answer in short, we’ll look at prices for 3 most common types of websites. Then we’ll discuss the price of each stage of website development.
Common types of websites
Websites can be compared to shops. Depending on the size, shops can vary from small boutiques to huge hypermarkets. As for websites, they vary from single-page sites to huge internet portals. Of course, all of them require different time and technical skills that directly affect the cost of a website.
1) Landing page cost
Despite this website includes only one page, it’s highly effective in converting your customer from an unengaged visitor to a buyer. It usually contains a detailed info about your product. At the bottom of a landing page, there’s an action that users must perform if they is intrigued by your product. It might be purchasing, subscribing, leaving the user’s contact information, etc.
Due to its small size, time to develop a landing page is 20-40 hours on average.
2)Business website
A business website is intended to ensure an online presence of your business and to promote it effectively. It’s not necessarily to have hundreds of pages and wide functionality. Most customers ask for about 6 pages including Contact us, Services, About us, Blog. As for features, there’s high demand on the following:
- premium membership
- capability to download files
- subscription via e-mail form
Approximate time on constructing a business website is from 190 to 260 hours. You can count the final cost by multiplying it by hourly rate of your IT vendor company.
3) Website for e-Commerce
Not so long ago the majority of customers was skeptical about buying the goods online. According to current stats, all of us buy more online than offline. Buying became simple because you can buy anything you like in just two clicks.
E-commerce site is a more complex variant compared to the previous website. It requires more technical work, well-thought marketing campaign and a fitting design. That’s why it needs more time expenses, which amounts to 340-740 hours.
The stages of creating a website
1) Design
Brands commonly leverage design as a tool to serve their marketing goals.
In our experience, this stage takes about 20-90 hours. It may differ depending on a project complexity.
2) Front-end development
It is the visible part of a site including interactive elements. The factors that affect the cost on this phase are:
- animations and their complexity
- adaptive/responsive design
This phase occupies a solid part of the total cost of the site and takes about 25-260 hours.
3) Back-end development
The engine of your site. For example, a registration form is a front-end component and the data on the server which is used to check if your login/password is correct is a back-end component.
The factors that affect the cost are:
- non-standard functionality for data handling (like working with video)
- queries complexity
- third-party services support
This stage usually consumes about 75-240 hours.
4) CMS development
CMS is a software solution that enables to manage content on a website without having to contact developers. There are many ready-made CMS such as Bitrix, Wordpress, Joomla. If you choose one of these, you can decrease time on website development and its price.
The disadvantage of CMS is the inability to customize its specific settings in a flexible way. Also, all known CMS have a poor protection against malicious code.
In case you need to build CMS from the ground up, it usually takes 60-80 hours.
Summing up
We hope this article helped you to realize how the price for a website is calculated better.
About the Author:
Nataliia Kharchenko is a Technical Writer at Cleveroad, company that offers mobile software development services. We are focused on helping startups, small, and medium businesses create competitive and winning software. I enjoy bringing a digital world closer to people and writing about technology, mobile apps, innovations, and progressive management models.
