How Much Does a Website Cost?

If you own a business and want to look professional and continually attract new customers, you know that having a website is an important step. So how much does it cost to have a website? As with most services, the answer will depend on what you need. Here we outline the different components of a website and the factors that will have an impact on the price of your website.

Domain Name

This is what is typed in by a visitor on a browser to get to your website. It's the text right before .com or .ca or .org. For example, for our website, our domain name is quintemarketing.com

Cost: $10 to $20/year

Hosting

The is where the content of your website is located. There are some places where you can get free hosting (such as wix.com or yola.com or wordpress.com) but there are limitations and their company name will show up on your website.

Cost: $0 to $200/year

Content

This includes the planning, design and layout of your entire website, as well as all the content that goes into each page, such as the text copy, company logo, photos and videos for the site.

Cost: Depends on the following factors

  • Do you already have a company logo or does it need to be designed?
  • How many pages will the website have?
    Tip: Most local service business will include a home page, services page (1-4 pages), photo gallery page, testimonial page, articles (1 page per article), and a contact us page.
  • Do you have a specific design and layout that you like in mind?
    Tip: Design is a very subjective thing, so it's best to find some examples of websites you like.
  • Who is writing the content for each page? Do you already have some base content to work from or will the content need to be created from scratch?
    Tip: Even if you already have the text copy, some effort should be done to optimize the content with the relevant keywords to help with your search engine rankings.
  • Who will be making content updates to the website once it's launched? This will drive how the website is built (see section on “Website Type”).

Website Development

This refers to which technology is used to build your website. There are actually many different ways to build a website, so what we're including here are the options that best fits the needs of a local business website.

  1. You can build a website from scratch or use tools like Dreamweaver to create the pages. Knowledge of HTML/CSS is required or access to the tool.
  2. You can buy a pre-designed template in HTML/CSS and customize it. Knowledge of HTML/CSS is required or access to the tool.
  3. Use an open-source website publishing tool, of which Wordpress is the most popular. You don't need to know HTML given the platform gives you an easy to use interface, and there is a big community of developers that builds plugin tools to add to your website.
  4. Use the "website builder" service offered by many hosting companies. In these cases, you get a choice of pre-designed templates, and then you simply point, click, drag and drop content to make changes.

There are pros and cons to each option, such as the amount of customization you want to make, how different you want it to look from other companies, how much time you want to spend on learning how to use it -- we will cover this in a future article. You also want to make sure the website you get is mobile-friendly and responsive (i.e. it is designed to adjust automatically depending on the device used to view the website), which not all templates will have right off the bat.

Website Maintenance

There are many businesses that will create a website and not make any changes to it. However, if you want to show up on search engines, you should be regularly adding fresh new content to your website through new articles, photos and testimonials. It’s also a great way to show your visitors that your company is alive and well and that they should be doing business with you.

Cost: 2-5 hours a month

So how much will a website cost? If you decide to do it yourself, your cost outlay can be as low as the annual cost of buying the domain and the hosting fee of $10/month, plus the time it takes to create the content.

However, If you don't have the time to work on it yourself or want a website that is optimized for search traffic and lead conversions, we can help you create a website starting at $500 if you have most of the content created or from $2500 if you want us to take care of it all for you. Contact us today and we can talk about the best option for your business.