Whether you’re a business, a nonprofit, or even a freelancer, you need a website to showcase your work. However, with the sheer number of options, freelancers, and web agencies available online today, it can sometimes be hard to know where to start. So how much does a website cost? Between a website builder that lets you create one for free in just a few clicks and a web design agency that charges the equivalent of 10 to 100 k €, you need to understand what factors are taken into account when preparing a detailed quote.
If you’re a business looking for a service provider to create your professional website, you’ve likely realized that prices can vary from as little as half to double—or even triple—in some cases. Every day, nearly 2 websites are created per second—that’s nearly 172,800 per day on average—for a total of 1.72 billion worldwide (Source: Internetlivestats). Let’s take a closer look at the jungle of service providers and their varying prices.
Costs Vary Depending on the Type of Website
Depending on your goals and your initial concept, costs aren't necessarily the same everywhere. Whether it's an online store, a simple one-page website, or a portal site, here's how to get a clearer picture!
Cost of a Showcase Website
In general, it is very popular with small and medium-sized businesses. It allows you to promote your brand, establish an effective marketing strategy for your products and services, and provide useful information to your customers—information that is, above all, very easily accessible.
Ideally, a showcase website should have fewer than 20 pages, as it needs to be as concise as possible. The customer shouldn’t get lost among your pages. Of course, your main goal is to convince potential customers to contact you or take a specific action, in order to generate a lead or additional revenue.
Creating a turnkey website is the ideal solution for gaining visibility on search engines without having to be a coding genius. If your knowledge is limited or you don’t want it to be too sophisticated, there are several website-building tools available on the market, such as Strikingly, Wix, and the well-known WordPress CMS.
For an accurate estimate, expect to pay between €100 and €10,000 for a showcase website, depending on the project.
Cost of an e-commerce website
When it comes to creating an e-commerce site, the cost can skyrocket pretty quickly. Whether it’s a small sales platform offering just a few products or services, or, conversely, an e-commerce giant, keep in mind that there are options for every budget. Generally speaking, it makes more financial sense to opt for solutions such as WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, or Shopify than to choose a fully customized, 100% bespoke website. In fact, these platforms perfectly meet e-commerce standards and are specifically designed for this purpose.
In addition, if your project is larger in scope, it may be a good idea to consider customized services, such as:
- The integration of a tool for shipping, accounting, and procurement management,
- The addition of a large number of products, possibly at wholesale or retail prices,
- In fact, a line of customizable products…
Let's just say that a budget of between 5,000 and 50,000 euros is more than enough. Anything above that, and your project is very ambitious.
Pricing for a portal site
Used primarily by medium-sized and large companies, a portal site offers a much wider range of features than a traditional website. In short, it is simply a standard website structure to which content pages and/or specific features have been added.
Clearly, this type of website requires a greater investment of time and money than the previous examples. It is entirely conceivable to add:
- a dedicated member area,
- a platform for downloadable content,
- multilingual access,
- form integration,
- optimized sales funnels…
You can always use solutions like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, but it's clear that the result won't be as good as with a custom-built website.
Typically, this type of website costs between €10,000 and €100,000, depending on the scope of the work and the type of service provider.
Who should you turn to for professional website design?
It’s clear that the needs of a freelancer who wants a portfolio website and those of an SME looking to launch a new project are not the same. That’s why the choice of service providers will not be the same either.
Depending on your budget and the level of quality required, you have 3 options:
- Doing Everything Yourself
- Hire a team of freelancers
- Hire a digital agency
In practical terms, the process is simple: Whether they’re freelancers or web agencies, both bill for their services based on the time required to complete the task. They simply apply an Average Daily Rate (ADR). Given that, it’s obvious that an agency will be more expensive, since it generally offers a more comprehensive and higher-quality service than a freelancer.
If you receive a quote that is less than or more than 200 €/day (for a beginner freelancer) and up to 1,000 €/day (for an experienced agency), you should not work with these service providers. It is clear that the value for money is too low and does not meet your requirements.
Doing Everything Yourself
If your project isn't too big, it's probably best for you to be your own webmaster. You'll save a fair amount of money, but you should be aware that it requires a significant time commitment.
On the other hand, you’ll need to deepen your knowledge in several areas, such as web design, software development (CSS, JavaScript, HTML…), content writing and management, and even digital marketing. In fact, it’s all these skills that drive up the cost when you hire a professional. Keep in mind, however, that with just a few euros a month and a little patience, you can easily build your own website from scratch using turnkey solutions.
Hire a freelancer
Alternatively, if you don’t feel capable of doing it on your own, but your budget is still limited, there’s an interesting alternative: hiring a freelancer. As a self-employed professional, a freelancer typically possesses many of the skills essential for creating a website. You’ll also benefit from a close working relationship with the professional, who will be more attentive to your needs.
While they usually specialize in a single technical area—such as graphic design, development, SEO consulting, or web copywriting— they may sometimes be able to handle multiple tasks (so be careful not to fall into the trap set by certain snake-oil salesmen…). As a result, you’ll likely have to work with several professionals, which can make the process complicated if you aren’t organized enough.
More expensive than doing it yourself, but more cost-effective than a web design agency: it's up to you!
Hire a digital agency
For “large-scale projects,” there’s only one reasonable option if you don’t want to lose your mind: a web agency. Since web agencies are experts in several technical fields, they’re much better qualified to manage a large project than a team of freelancers.
Support is better, and communication is also streamlined. A project manager will be responsible for planning and allocating all the resources needed for your project. Team members are also used to working together, which is not the case with freelancers… In fact, your website can be developed more quickly. On the other hand, you’ll inevitably have to spend a larger budget…
What factors influence the price of a website?
Aside from the various service providers involved in creating a website, it’s important to know that there are other factors that cause the price of one service to vary from that of another. Here are a few examples.
Web Hosting
In order to function, your website must have a domain name and web hosting. This is clearly not the biggest expense, but it’s always helpful to have an idea of what it will cost in the long run. For example, a domain name can cost between €5 and €50 per year, depending on the extension you choose.
Next, you’ll need to choose a hosting option that provides a dedicated server and storage space so that your website can operate continuously. We’ll mention just two: OVH and O2Switch are good hosting providers. Depending on the size of your website, keep in mind that it will cost you between €5 and €500 per month to use such a solution.
Search Engine Optimization and Content Creation
All too often overlooked, content creation and search engine optimization (SEO) for search engines like Google are an integral part of building a website. Whether it’s for an online store, where you’ll need to write product descriptions, or a simple showcase site with a blog, you’ll need to write your pages.
Writing the pages is one thing, but you also need to make sure they’re all different so you don’t create duplicate content… Otherwise, you risk being blacklisted by Google. It’s actually not as simple as it seems. You also need to rank for very specific keywords. SEO (search engine optimization) is therefore essential. If Google doesn’t recognize you, you won’t be indexed, and as a result, no visitors will find their way to your website…
There are many platforms and freelancers who can write for your website, at a rate that generally starts at 1 cent per word and can go up to more than 10 cents per word for the best of them.
Customization
When it comes to your website’s design, you also have several options: using a template or opting for a 100% custom-built site tailored to your brand. If your requirements are quite demanding, keep in mind that a freelancer or web agency may charge you a premium price. On the other hand, if it’s just a matter of customizing a pre-designed theme, the cost will be lower.
Clearly, this is the largest expense item. Highly detailed customization can literally cause the bill to jump from just €1,000 to several hundred thousand euros, as seen with e-commerce giants like Amazon, Cdiscount, and Rakuten (given the thousands of hours of development that went into their own websites).
If your budget is limited, it’s best not to spend too much time on customizing the website, but rather on its content, as well as on driving traffic (marketing, advertising, etc.). Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from continuing to develop and customize your visual identity as your business grows!
Don't forget: Your website must be responsive—that is, optimized for mobile phones, tablets, and computers.
Maintenance
Keep in mind that once your website is completely finished, it’s not actually finished! As soon as it goes live, you’ll need to add new content, make updates, fix any bugs, and develop new features to improve the user experience. This is what we call maintenance.
That’s right—you don’t just have to work on creating a website, but also on “maintaining” it. This is the only way to keep the website effective and visible. Contrary to what one might think, you shouldn’t wait until the site shows bugs online before taking action. The goal is to ensure the site runs smoothly before any problems arise. Sometimes it’s simply an error made during development, but it can also be caused by users with malicious intent.
For this reason, when selecting your service provider(s), be sure to verify that they offer technical support and a range of after-sales maintenance solutions. The cost will certainly be higher, but in the long run, you’ll save a significant amount. Also, be careful, as some service providers offer attractive introductory prices but charge exorbitant surcharges for options such as maintenance services.
Marketing
Now that your website is up and running, it’s time to attract visitors to it. Although your website is an important element, it’s actually just one aspect of your digital strategy. Ideally, you should set aside part of your budget to promote your products and services on social media, for example (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.). These traffic channels are likely to reach potential customers and thus generate revenue.
You’ll also need to integrate an email marketing solution into your website to complement your paid advertising campaigns (primarily Facebook Ads and AdWords). Even though this may seem insignificant when you’re building your website, it’s not… Set aside a dedicated marketing budget from the very beginning.
Keep an eye on the future!
Finally, never forget that a website needs to be constantly optimized so that it can adapt to all the changes in the Internet over the years. This also applies to your own growth, since you’ll likely expand your business and have new needs in a few months or years. You will inevitably face major projects on your website to maintain optimal quality: changing hosting providers, adding features—some of which may be complex— updating templates… All of this will likely be impossible to manage on your own, so always set aside a dedicated budget for your website.
Just one piece of advice: plan as far ahead as possible for future tasks, improvements, and corrections. In any case, to find out how much your future website will cost, feel free to request a free and detailed quote. Once you have several quotes from different service providers, compare them!
