How much does it cost to build a website?

Obviously, the cost of a website depends on many factors: the type of website, number of pages, design quality, specific functions, etc. This is why the majority of web agencies require a fairly accurate website project brief before a quote. When planning to create a website for a business, whether a simple windowed website or e-commerce site, it is good practice to get a quick estimated budget. By knowing the price, even vaguely, we can more easily decide to include certain features in the specifications or choose to target a certain type of web provider. This article should help you get a better idea of the factors and their magnitude when calculating the cost of creating a website.

Depending on the intended website, the budget required can vary from €1 to €100. The workload involved in creating a dozen pages is obviously not comparable with that of a web portal consisting of over 500 pages, with a member area, back office, and dozens of modules. In simple terms, you have two options to design a website, use a website creation software like Wix or Jimdo (see our comparative analysis of the two platforms), or refer the project to a service provider, one or more freelancers or web agency. Depending on the chosen solution for creating your website, the cost of web project varies greatly.

The table below shows the price of orders based on their magnitude, type of website, and type of solution/service provider. Obviously, these price ranges are given for information purposes only; they are very rough because of the diversity of needs and web service providers.

Before further analysis of the cost of creating a website, I would like to make several points.

• For the same quote, prices can vary from €1 to €10. For an e-commerce site, a freelance can prompt you to install and configure Prestashop for € 1,000 while an agency asks you € 10,000. These price differences may seem surprising, but they are generally justified by the project coordination, design quality, and scalability of the source code. In some cases, these differences are instead simply abusive and some estimates are a total scam!
• Depending on the type of solution or provider you choose, you will have to spend more or less time on the project. And your time is money! If you decide, for example, to entrust your website project to a freelance web developer, you will need to provide the site map, all modules, and an accurate description of each feature otherwise you run the risk of his vision of the website not being the same as yours. Web agencies will work with you on these items, in most cases, and the customer has to provide a comprehensive brief and is then asked to validate the structure tree as well as the modules proposed by the agency.
• Website maintenance, whether you are outsourcing servers, updating modules, or adding new features, can be expensive. Instead of calculating the project on only the cost of creating the website, it is best to consider the cost of the web project over one year; the cost of the initial development of the website and the maintenance / improvement of the site over a year. It is particularly important to anticipate the maintenance of the website from the start, and the maintenance cost can vary greatly depending on the chosen provider. Entrusting the creation of the website to a junior freelancer, for example, creates a good chance for the freelancer to no longer be available for the site’s development. You would then have to find a new provider who would need to agree to take on the existing code. This is a very common situation and it greatly increases the cost of maintenance for the website.

To more accurately assess the costs of a website project, it is necessary to take a number of criteria into account: template or custom graphic design, number of pages, special features, etc. A 5-page brochure site with photos and contact form can cost €2,000 or €7,000, depending on the customer’s choice of graphic design, modules (comments, social network), and SEO benefits.

To help you assess the budget of your projects to create a website, you can download our Excel template to calculate costs.