How to Calculate Web Design and Website Development Cost
Find here the ultimate guide for CEOs, Founders, and Project Managers that will help you find out how much does a website cost, estimate web design and web development costs and understand the process better if you hire a dedicated designer.
We understand business owners’ concerns regarding the cost of developing a business website and all the technical solutions available. To help you navigate the market regardless of the recession and make a well-informed decision, we’ve created this guide to calculate website design and web development costs. So, let’s consider the key points and web development trends you must be aware of before you start building a site with a web development company.
How much does a website cost on average?
The average website development and design cost varies in different countries. Just to give you an idea of the brackets: it sometimes starts at $8,750 and goes up to the area of $38,000.
Other factors affect a website design’s average cost, too. For example, your website’s style, size, functionality, and additional features. According to Upwork statistics, the cost to design a website starts from $15/hour. From there price depends on the amount of work and the size of the website.
| Website Size | Average Hourly Rate |
| Basic One-page Site | $15-40 + |
| CMS Code Customization | $30-75 + |
| Full Custom Site Code | $75-150 + |
The hourly cost of website development also depends dramatically on the region in which the developers are located. According to Accelerance, the rates in different parts of the world are as follows:
- North America: $132-$140/hour
- Western Europe: $61-$80/hour
- Eastern Europe: $35-$56/hour
We at Fireart base our estimates on the average cost per hour ($50/hour) in our region, Poland. According to HackerRank, Poland has the third-best software engineers globally and offers affordable prices for high-quality services. When estimating software development cost, it’s crucial to consider factors such as project complexity, scope, and timeline, in addition to offshore developer rates. This comprehensive approach ensures accurate budgeting and successful project delivery.
How much does building a website typically cost?
How much does it cost to build a website? It’s hard to estimate exactly. The average price is around $200-300, but it depends on what kind of website you want and which tools you’re going to use. For example, you can use a website builder service and pay around $13 a month. But if you need a custom-made website for your business, the average website cost would increase to $5000 or more for the bare minimum.
To calculate website costs, you should also consider different options and features. For example, hosting, domain, SLL certificate, content, SEO, and Marketing. Let’s take a look at what different features cost.
| Website Feature | Pricing |
| Website Domain | $12 – $130/year |
| Website Hosting | $35 – $600/year |
| SSL Certificate | $5 – $150/year |
| Template or Theme | $0 – $200 |
| E-commerce Functionality | $250 – $24,000 |
| Website Content | $100 – $10,000 |
| Apps and Integrations | $100 – $15,000 |
| SEO and Marketing | $100 – $10,000 |
| Payment processor | from 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction |
So, how much does it cost to design a website? The price starts from $200 and can skyrocket to infinity. Your business and what you’re specifically looking for are the biggest factors.
How much does a website cost using a website builder?
If you’re a small business owner, a small website with a limited number of pages for your shop will be enough. Using a website builder service is a great option in your case. A small business website costs from $0 as some of these platforms offer free plans or free trials. The most popular website builder services are Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Site123, and GoDaddy.
Let’s compare web design pricing and subscription plans.
| Service | Basic plan | Personal plan | Popular plan | Advanced/VIP plan |
| Wix | $4.50/month | $8.50/month | $12.50/month | $24.50/month |
| Squarespace | $12/month | $18/month | $26/month | $40/month |
| Weebly | $0/month | Websites: $5/month | Websites: $12/month | Websites: $25/month |
| Site123 | $0/month | – | – | $12.80/month |
| GoDaddy | $1.99/month | $4.99/month | $11.99/month | $14.99/month |
How much does a website cost using WordPress?
WordPress is a free, open-source content management system. WordPress as a platform continues to dominate the market. According to W3Techs, more than 43% of websites ran on WordPress in 2023.
You can start building your website for free with a free trial. WordPress also offers four types of paid plans: personal, premium, business, and e-commerce. All the plans include a free domain for a year, in-class hosting, ad-free usage, payment collection, and unlimited email support. If you’re considering WordPress for personal use, website development costs $4 a month.
Let’s check out the options for more expensive subscription plans.
As we can see, setting up a website with WordPress is fairly affordable. However, the price isn’t final. There might be additional options you want for your website. Apps and plugins, themes, or extra security measures might add up to $3 to $200 a month. Moreover, if you decide to hire a developer, the price can rise significantly. The average cost of website development is $15–$28/hr, according to Upwork statistics.
How much does a website cost using a web designer?
If you need a more complex website and your budget is flexible, consider hiring a web designer. You may ask them, ‘How much to design a website?’ And it’ll depend on the website’s size and type. It also depends on the developer’s location and their set of skills or the team of developers you hire.
How much does it cost to hire a website designer? Website developers usually charge per hour, and the amount of work directly affects website design costs. For example, a simple landing page development might take 50 to 100 hours, while an e-commerce project would need at least 350 hours.
At this point, you can evaluate the cost of website development according to your company’s needs. As per the developer location, the most expensive hourly rates are in North America; the lowest are in Eastern Europe and Asia.
| Location | Cost |
| North America | $46,200 – $237,600 |
| Western Europe | $21,350 – $109,800 |
| Eastern Europe and Asia | $12,250 – $63,000 |
How to estimate website development costs?
Website development is a long journey comprising many steps and phases. How much does it cost to design a website? To estimate, we should consider all the development steps. The process usually consists of:
- Developing the UI/UX design
- Front-end development
- Back-end development
- Creating an admin panel
Let’s take a brief look at them and consider how much you may spend at every stage of full-cycle website development.
UI/UX Design
Every great project starts with an amazing idea and a well-thought-out design. As per Steve Jobs: “The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works.” That’s the holy truth, particularly when it comes to website development.
In the web development cycle, the UI/UX design stage includes market research, business analysis, and, firstly, creating a target user persona. Without understanding your end-users and business goals, it’s impossible to create a robust website. So, a web development team should really take time to understand your business and industry landscape. Usually, accessible and convenient UI/UX design adds to website development costs significantly, as this is a really important part of the development process.
“The perfect combination of Design Thinking & Business Thinking in product development lies in the preliminary Product Design Research. It is detailed market and competitor research that includes the evaluation of risks, costs, and time needed to build a market-ready product. It makes you step in the client’s shoes, think from their perspective, and take a more complex approach to product development.
After design research is completed, you get a clear understanding of what is better for the product’s health and what can break the initial concept on the way to its implementation.”
– from the interview “How to Grow a Business and a Digital Product” with Dima Venglinski, Founder and CEO of Fireart Studio.
The next step is creating wireframes to show a schematic placement of website components and agree on them with a client. After design and layouts are approved, we usually start prototyping – creating the final user interface to show how a site will perform on devices.
The best web design companies commonly charge from $750 to $4,000 and over for this step. The cost to design a website depends significantly on complexity and client requirements.
Next, front-end developers will estimate the approximate time they’ll spend working on your project and decide how much to charge.
Front-end development
Front-end developers work with the user-facing part of the website. For example, they’re responsible for the color and shapes of the functional buttons, animations, and other visual effects.
Imagine a standard registration form with three well-familiar fields: name, email, and password. You can see the shades they throw, the forms of the input fields, and a beautiful Register button below. Sometimes, you can even see an engaging animation after you click on this button. It’s front-end in a nutshell. Front-end is everything that end-users can see and interact with on a website.
There are several popular technologies for front-end development, namely HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, TypeScript, SASS, LESS, Angular, and React.
At this step, QA engineers are commonly involved in the process, and all the next stages are ongoing under their thorough checks.
The average website cost from a front-end developer side starts from $1,000 to $12,500 and over. The front-end cost of website development depends on website responsiveness and animation complexity.
Back-end development
Back-end development is extremely important in website creation, and it takes a lot of work to make a website function correctly. Without the back-end, nothing will happen on a website. Even a big button under the registration form mentioned below will not work when you click. Data about you as a new user won’t be delivered to a server either.
The back-end is the heart of the website’s functionality. No feature, even the smallest one, will work without it. It also means that back-end development may take a good chunk of the overall website development cost. The most frequently used technologies for back-end development include Node.js, Express.js, Nest.js, and NET.
Like front-end development, website cost estimates for back-end development are based on the time it takes to properly build a website. Back-end development costs usually vary from $4,000 to $12,500 and up. They’re influenced by the integration with third-party services, non-standard data processing (e.g., audio, video), and complex queries.
How do we estimate website development costs? If the website needs some unusual data to be processed or third-party services to be built in, the price will increase. Overall, the back-end development process may take up to 500 hours.
Admin panel development
An admin panel (or content management system) allows you to create, organize, and edit website content. It enables you to easily change and edit a website’s text without asking developers about it. The admin panel provides access to website analytics, orders, customer information, messages, or emails through the graphic interface from the user’s side.
An admin panel, in most cases, is a part of a CMS or content management system. There are many ready-made and comparatively less expensive CMS solutions like Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. However, any out-of-the-box solution has a limited number of features and may not be secure enough to protect all data about your users, customers, and company.
These ready-made options would be a great solution for small companies and simpler websites. Larger projects might face some limitations and issues, so a custom CMS is a perfect choice. Costs of custom CMS development range between $3,000 and $9,000 and more. Don’t forget to add this point to the cost of setting up a website while you’re planning your project and your budget.
Website design cost calculator
Estimating the cost of designing a website at the very start of your project is an extremely important step. If you have an idea of what your website should look like and the needed functions, you can easily find out the amount you need to pay to fit your budget.
Feel free to use our services to answer, ‘How much does it cost to create a website.’ Do reach out to us at any time to discuss your project details and to calculate the final price.
How much should you spend on professional web design?
We can all agree that the web design pricing range is way too broad and can be misleading. The cost of setting up a website starts from $1000 and can end at more than $100,000. Of course, we all know the correlation between time, quality, and money, and we all understand that a great product can’t be achieved within a short time and with a limited budget.
However, it’s also important not to get an overpriced product of average quality. So how much does a custom website design cost, when done by professionals?
We can divide website development projects into three groups:
- Basic web design
- Intermediate web design
- Advanced web design
Let’s take a closer look at them and the average cost of website development for each.
1. Basic web design
A basic web design is a great solution for smaller companies that need a simple yet functional website. The average small business website design costs between $1000 and $10,000.
A website with a basic web design will serve your company’s goals and needs yet will have a simpler structure and won’t have many pages. It’ll offer you a user-friendly and reliable website with the possibility to connect with your customers and receive orders.
2. Intermediate web design
An intermediate web design provides your company with a performance-driven website with thoughtful design. An intermediate website development costs around $10,000–$50,000, and some of the additional features, like copywriting, SEO optimization, and Content Management System, are frequently included.
Intermediate web design is a perfect option for small and middle businesses as it allows you to manage your unique digital marketing strategies.
3. Advanced web design
The final and most expensive option is an advanced web design. It offers your company a well-designed and innovative custom website. The average cost of website development on an advanced level is between $50,000 and $100,000.
If you have a big company and want your online sales to grow, advanced web design is your choice. With advanced web design, you receive several additional features like integrating a database, e-commerce functionality, CMS, etc.
What determines web design pricing in 2024?
So, what determines web design pricing, and how much does a professional website cost in 2024? There are several factors that determine how much a website costs, and we have distinguished seven:
- Size of the website
- Copywriting
- Style of the website
- SEO
- Responsive design
- Additional features
- Money-back guarantee
What would be the cost with all these factors included? The price range is really broad, and you should be precise with your specifications. However, you can estimate the cost of setting up a website using the table below.
| Website feature | Price |
| Size | $1000-$10,000 (1 to 250 pages) |
| Copywriting | $50-$300/page |
| Style | $2000 – $15,000 |
| SEO | $2000 – $10,000 |
| Responsive Design | $3000 – $25,000 |
| CMS | $2000 – $25,000 |
| E-commerce Functionality | $2000 – $25,000 |
| Database Integration | $2000 – $25,000 |
| Domain | $0.95 – $60/month |
| SSL Certificate | $110 – $1500 |
| Hosting | $24 – $24,000 |
1. Size
The first and probably the most important factor you should come up with before planning your website is size. The size of your project affects the website design cost directly. Bigger websites require more time and effort to develop, and it can be estimated by the number of pages. For instance, the average cost of website development as per the number of pages would be:
1 to 10 pages – $1000 to $2000
10 to 50 pages – $2000 to $3000
50 to 150 pages – $3000 to $6500
150 to 250 pages – $6500 to $10,000
2. Copywriting
The second factor affecting web design pricing is copywriting. If you’re launching a new project that needs content, copywriting services are vital. It’s also required if you have an old version of the website and your content needs to be updated and optimized for the web search. The customers may come for your website’s style, but they won’t stay for long enough if the content is irrelevant. Prices for copywriting start from $50–60 per page and depend on the number of words or characters.
3. Style
There are plenty of different website styles, and each serves a purpose. Your website’s style should represent your company and be connected to the product you sell or the content you provide. For example, a website for a photographer’s portfolio will differ drastically from the website of a building company.
The website’s style should be modern as well. Trends come and go, and you need to keep up with the times. For instance, a decade ago, 3D logos and complicated designs were trendy, while 2D simplistic and flat designs are favored now.
How much does a custom website design cost? For a one-of-a-kind creation, website design costs range from $2000 to $15,000, and it depends on the designer’s skills and the style you choose. Simplistic 2D designs cost less than 3D motion design pieces. However, it doesn’t mean that they’re worse; you should always consider if it suits your brand.
4. SEO
Another important factor in web design pricing is Search Engine Optimization. If you want your website to be found in a pool of thousands of Google searches, you need your content to be optimized. Thus, it’ll be higher on a search page in Google or another search engine.
Most companies offer SEO for your website and include a placement guarantee. It guarantees your keywords are first on the search page, and your website will get more clicks and customers.
The average prices of SEO services for your website range from $750 to $2000 per month. However, if you’re selling your product in a competitive market, the prices might rise.
One size doesn’t fit all
Choose a web design service to check the cost of website development for your company.
- Web Design and Redesign
Would you like to create the best website for your company? Feel free to use our service to design, redesign, renovate, or start your business’ website.
- Landing Page
Are you looking for an impressive landing page to present your service? Our professional team of skilled designers is ready to help.
- Speedy Web Design
Is your deadline for the website under a month? Our company can help you launch or redesign your website in 30 days!
5. Responsive design
Your website should be accessible and responsive to users from different devices and browsers.
According to Statista, mobile users make up around 59% of the internet traffic in 2023. This proves that your website design should be usable from a mobile device if you don’t want to lose a great number of customers.
So, how much to design a website with a mobile-friendly responsive design cost? The website price may be between $5000 and $25,000. It can also depend on the number of pages and features. Saving your website’s unique style in the mobile version is also extremely important.
6. Additional site features
There are plenty of useful and even necessary additional features that can be added to your website. The average cost of website development depends on the number of features you would like. Here are some of them:
- CMS: Integrating a content managing system can cost you around $2000 to $25,000, and it also depends on your business size and needs.
- E-commerce functionality: For online stores, accepting and processing orders is an essential function. The prices for e-commerce functionality integration also depend on the size of your company and your needs, and the price range is between $2000 to $25,000.
- Database integration: To store your data, you need a database integration. The more data you have, the more expensive this service will be. The average prices on the market are from $2000 to $25,000.
There are always more options for website integration. For example, you can add a Live Chat function to communicate with your customers, add specific content like video or audio, offer an email subscription, and many more. If you’re not sure if you need to get them or which option your website needs, it’s always better to consult a specialist.
7. Money-back guarantee
A money-back guarantee won’t cost you dollars but will gain your customer’s trust and satisfaction rate.
The majority of the most well-trusted agencies have a strong money-back policy that guarantees a refund if the customer is not satisfied with the result of their work.
Before choosing a website development company, study their terms and conditions and money-back policy.
8 most common questions asked by our clients
How much does it cost to create a website? How much time does it take? What is the price for a landing page for my business? Here are the most frequently asked questions we get and our answers. If your question isn’t on the list, you can always contact us, and we will always help you with your inquiry about website price.
1. How much should a website cost in 2024?
The cost of custom website development in 2024 can start from around $7,000 when done by a freelancer, and $10,000 and over when done by an agency. However, precise website design price depends on your specific requirements and goals.
2. How long does it take to build a basic website?
Usually, it takes from 50 to 260+ working hours to design and build a basic website.
3. How much does it cost to build a website for a small business?
The cost of a website for small businesses depends significantly on the features you’d like to include. The approximate cost to develop a website is $9,500-$13,000 and up.
4. How much should an e-commerce website cost?
On average, an e-commerce website may cost around $17,500–$95,000 and up, depending on complexity and your specific requirements.
5. How much does a landing page cost?
A well-designed and animation-rich landing page usually costs $2,500 to $5,000 and more.
6. How much does it cost to hire a web development company?
The price for website development services varies across locations. For example, you may pay $35–$50 per hour of development in Eastern Europe, $65–$90 in Western Europe, $75–$150 in North America, and $85–$130 in Australia.
7. How much does it cost to build a website from scratch?
The cost may vary between $2,500 and $95,000. Everything depends on your requirements.
8. How long does it take to create a custom website?
Commonly, custom website development takes from 15 to 750 working hours and more, although it may also depend on project complexity.
Conclusion: How much does a website cost?
Our article discussed the cost of website development, all the methods you can use to create your website, and factors that affect price. So, how much does it cost to design a website? From using a website builder to hiring a professional website developer, web design pricing varies a lot. It might cost you from $1000 to $100,000. We hope that this article has given you a clearer view of what elements make the website price so that you can start planning your budget for website creation.
To sum up, let’s recheck the website design cost options that you might consider.
- Website builder: $6–$50/month
- WordPress: $35–$780 upfront, $11–$50/month
- Web designer: $500–$10,000+
- Using a website builder is a good option if:
- You are on a budget
- You are a first-time builder
- You have a limited deadline
- You want to create everything yourself
- You don’t want to manage the technical stuff
WordPress is your choice if:
- You have a slightly bigger budget
- You want to have control over the site
- You have some extra time
- You want a higher level of customization
- You enjoy dealing with the technical side of website creation
Hiring a web designer is highly recommended if:
- You don’t have a limited budget
- You don’t want to create a website yourself
- You are short on time
- You require a complex or custom design
- You are happy to let a team of professionals manage your website
All things considered, we hope you now have an idea of the average website cost and are ready to start your project. Our specialists at Fireart Studio are ready to help you, and you’re welcome to contact us to check out web design pricing for your unique project.
