How much web design costs is one of the most common, most important questions clients ask us.
The biggest reason they ask is because they need to know what the investment is going to be. But most also just don’t know what to expect.
That’s because you can find someone to build you a new website for $100, or more than $100,000, and everything in between.
How can there be so much range for something like a website? Are the options really that different? And more importantly, how much should you spend on your website? Ultimately, that’s the question we want to help answer in this post, by breaking down the factors in getting a new website, and how the price can range so dramatically.
What Options Do You Have To Build Your New Website?
As a business owner, you likely know what you need — or at least what you think you need — for your new website. You probably have some kind of expectation, even if it’s not verbalized yet, for how much that will cost.
The problem is, you’ll likely get dramatically different quotes from every vendor you ask, even if you describe your project the same way to each one. So let’s break down the different options you have and the pros and cons of each.
Freelance designer: $1,000+
There are many creative professionals in the world that offer their services as guns for hire. Website design and development is no different.
A good freelancer to work with is usually someone who has been a designer or developer at a marketing agency, or someone that has an extensive portfolio. You can find some amazing independent contractors to build a website for your business, and the more affordable price can be tempting.
- Freelancer pros:
- Can be less expensive. You can find some amazing contractors that are really good at what they do, and have less overhead or administrative costs compared to working with an agency. They might have great experience and decided to go freelance for more flexibility, which makes them a cost effective option.
- Freelancer cons:
- Expertise limitations. The best websites are a blend of three or more very different roles. It’s hard for any one person to be really good at all of them. A freelancer might be an amazing designer, but can they really code the unique features you need? They may be a good developer, but can they write compelling content that will help your customers have the confidence to purchase? A freelancer is probably going to be good in one area, and ok (or bad) at some of the other aspects of a good website.
- Timeline. A freelancer might be more responsive to your needs, but what happens if one of their other clients also has needs? If only one person is working on your project, your project timeline is completely dependent on their schedule.
- Longevity. Every business should expect their website to need updates. It can be content or features, but there will definitely be technical issues from time to time. The web is an ever changing thing. And as technology evolves, your website must keep up, or it will start breaking. Your partner needs to be around for the long haul, and freelancers aren’t always reliable in that regard.
- Project Management. Managing a website project involves coordinating multiple moving parts—design, development, content creation, testing, and more. A freelancer might excel in one or two of these areas, but they often lack the experience or resources to manage the entire project efficiently. This can lead to miscommunications, missed deadlines, and a lack of cohesion between different aspects of the project.
- Security. There may be some overarching security and support needs for your organization that a contractor won’t be able to handle. What happens if your site has a vulnerability? Do they even know the key issues around website security?
Small Local Marketing Agency: $5,000+ or Subscription
In almost every town across the country, there are a handful of small marketing agencies. Most likely they have anywhere from 2-10 employees, they’re members of the local chamber, and have worked with many of the other local businesses around town.
Agencies offer more expensive but more customized options than most freelancers, but they’re usually less expensive than big agencies.
- Small agency pros:
- Local. Most likely, the owner and most of the team are local to your area. They probably have some kind of office space, so it’s nice to know you can meet in person if you need to.
- Trust. You probably know of other local businesses that have worked with this company before, and can say positive things about working with them. You may even know the owner personally.
- Team. There’s more than just one person working on your project. Hopefully, they have a handful of specialties that focus on web projects.
- Small agency cons:
- Capabilities. Many small agencies like this say they do custom web design, but more than not, they don’t have developers on staff, which means they’re most likely just minimally editing templates online. Take a look at their portfolio, and you might see that every website looks almost identical, with only the client’s logo and some specific colors being used. Check their team page and make sure they have a designer, a developer, and a copywriter on staff.
Web Development Agency: $15,000-$100,000+
Agencies that focus exclusively on web development are getting more and more rare. Oftentimes, they can focus more on the custom development side of things which can include application development or custom functionality.
- Web agency pros:
- Expertise. These agencies are probably the best equipped to build a custom website. They have teams and processes dedicated to building sites, and they’re super efficient.
- Web agency cons:
- Silo. They may be able to help with your website, but that’s just the foundation of a digital marketing strategy. Once you get a new site, how are you going to drive new traffic to the website and get new customers? Many development agencies aren’t thinking about the marketing strategy that’s critical to a successful website project.
- Design. While these agencies excel at development, it’s highly possible they haven’t invested in design. Check to make sure they have a UX/UI designer on staff to make sure your project looks great in addition to working great.
- Cost.True development is expensive. If someone has taken the time to learn how to do custom development, they expect to be paid accordingly.
Full Service Marketing Agency: $20,000-$150,000
These are larger agencies with 20+ staff members that offer “full service” or multi-discipline packages. A company’s website is fundamental to their digital marketing strategy, so these agencies must support web, or risk turning away potential clients.
- Big agency pros:
- Full service. For larger companies, trying to piece together services from multiple different agencies can be painful. If you need a dev agency for your website, a marketing agency for your ads, and a PR firm to run social, it can be a full time job just to manage vendors. Having a one-stop shop for all things digital marketing can be a huge value add.
- Strategy. Many of these agencies won’t work with clients to do just one-off projects; they want to craft a holistic marketing strategy for your business. A website is just a piece of that strategy, so this often means there is more strategy behind the websites they create and how it’s leveraged to build ROI.
- Big agency cons:
- Full service. Yes, we’re listing it in cons too. The reality is that no one can be truly “full service.” Most likely, it means an agency does a handful of things really well, and then they have a couple add-on services they do just to appease clients. You’re not likely to find an agency that’s truly an expert in everything.
- Cost. These are likely the most expensive website projects. Large agencies like this will likely have a minimum project cost — it’s just not worth it for them to do smaller ones. They also likely have large overhead; once your project team gets past 3-4 people, you start racking up administrative fees.
Website Subscription Model
There’s a relatively recent trend of agencies (and not just the DIY website companies) offering a subscription model for clients to get a website built. There are some attractive elements to paying a subscription for a website instead of a one-time project fee.
- Subscription pros:
- Cash flow. In this model, you don’t have a large upfront cost — the cost is spread out into monthly payments. It can help small businesses not have a large capital expenditure on the books.
- Ongoing support. Typically the subscription comes with some maintenance and support baked in, so it’s more of a long-term partnership between the client and the agency. Sometimes it even includes regular redesigns of the site.
- Subscription cons:
- Quality. Ultimately, you get what you pay for. If the overall cost of a new custom website seems too good to be true, it probably is. The agencies that most often offer a subscription model are generally the “template chopshop” kind of agencies. They can’t offer you a truly custom website, because whatever edits you ask for have to fit within the confines of the template they’re modifying.
- Cost. No agency is purposefully in the business of losing money. Cash is king, and accepting monthly installments for a product is risky. Agencies are only going to do this if they think they’re going to be making more money anyway. Likely this is by charging a monthly fee and not doing any actual work on your project. You can mitigate this by being a really dedicated project manager and consistently asking for updates and edits to be made, but the agency likely won’t drive these updates unless you ask for them (but they’ll happily keep charging you even if you don’t ask).
- Creative ownership. If you get frustrated at your agency, or want to move on for any other reason, you likely do not own the creative for the website. Agencies on the subscription model may force you into a contract with a certain term agreed upon before releasing your website. Or worse, there’s no term limit and if you ever want to stop services, you either have to buy the website you really already paid for or start over from scratch.
How Do You Choose the Right Website Developer?
With all the options out there to build your business’s website, it can feel overwhelming to choose. Getting it wrong can cost you thousands of dollars, either in wasted development time or an underperforming website.
Before you decide who to hire, you should consider these steps:
- Determine your budget. It’s really important that you think through your budget before asking for quotes. What can you actually afford? What is the needed ROI of building a custom website for your business? What happens if you don’t build a new website right now?
- Interview prospective agencies for freelancers. If you want a white-glove service provider, the best service you’re going to get is at the very beginning of your engagement with a prospective agency. Are they responsive to your requests? How fast were they able to get on a call? Were they clear about what they offer? Did they seem to understand your needs? Did you like talking to them? Making sure they’re a good fit from the start is important — if they don’t have a good first impression, it probably won’t get better later on.
- Review their website. What services do they offer? Is it just custom website development, or are they full service?
- Review their portfolios.Do they have recent work posted? Do you like their work? Do all the websites in their portfolio look the same with just colors and logos swapped out? If all the sites look almost the same, they’re likely just a template chopshop and not actually custom website developers. Do they have clients that are in your industry? It’s not mission critical, but it can be helpful if they already understand how your business works.
- Review their team. Do they have dedicated staff for website design and development? Look for titles like Web Developer, UX Designer, Web Designer, SEO Strategist, Copywriter, etc. If they offer many different services, do they have enough people on their staff to specialize in all those services? Or are they going to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none? Don’t pay premium prices for generalists at a small agency.
- Review their proposal.You’ll likely get multiple proposals from different groups. It can be really challenging to compare them, but there are a couple key scope items you should compare:
- What’s the total timeframe of the project? That can indicate quality — good websites aren’t built in 15-30 days. And definitely not on a budget.
- How are they calculating the total scope of work?
- Did they include a sitemap for the project? How many pages are they including? Are they limiting the number of page templates they design?
- Are they including content? Or will you have to write it?
- Are there any custom development features needed? Integrations, custom applications, etc?
- How many rounds of revisions are included for each deliverable?
- What does the review process look like?
- Do you own the codebase, creative, etc. once the site is complete?
- Ask what happens after launch. What does the ongoing relationship look like? Do they provide support? Is it optional? Will it be easy for your internal team to make updates? Make sure the agency will create a website you can update yourself, and ask if they train you how.
Make sure that you break down any quotes you get into these key factors so you can really compare what you’re getting from each provider. If there are big price differences, one of the providers may have misunderstood the scope, or maybe they aren’t a good fit for your needs.
Factors in Website Pricing
So how is a website quoted? Typically, there are a handful of key factors that go into getting a quote:
- Total number of pages. The scale of the website is one of the biggest factors for pricing. Is the website 10 pages? Or do you need 200+? Some pages may have the same design, but how many unique page designs should be created? Generally, the more pages your website has, the more expensive the project will be. That being said, it’s not linear — you probably won’t get a “cost per page” in a proposal. In our experience, designing and building the homepage of the website takes the most time since you’re establishing so much of the look and feel of the rest of the website. Some of the subpages of a website take very little time.
Helpful tip: To get the number of pages on your current site, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush to see the number of pages on your site.
- Integrations. Does your website need to be integrated with any other software or tools? Simple examples are marketing tools like Hubspot or Mailchimp. Other examples could be dynamically pulling data through an API from salesforce to be displayed on the website. Or scraping data from a backend management system and pulling the content into the custom front end design. If your website needs to sync with another tool, it will likely increase the price tag.
- Custom development. Beyond building the custom design, are there any really custom features that you want to include? Examples could be a product configurator that allows users to create their own custom version and generate a quote. It could be an interactive, visual of the product that allows users to more dynamically explore your product offerings.
- Technical requirements. Does your website have specific technical requirements? Do you have a particular CMS you need the site built in? Are there security requirements in your industry that need to be considered?
Like most things, the bigger or more complex your website is, the more you can expect to pay. But hiring a professional web designer is important to ensure a good end product.
How HustleFish Prices Websites
We understand that every business is different, so each website proposal is customized to our clients. Our minimum cost for a web project is $15,000, and the most we’ve charged for a project is $187,000. And we’ve done everything in between.
To create a proposal, we start with a short discovery call to make sure we understand the scope of your needs. Our team will do some homework and create a unique proposal based on the information we gather. From there, we present our proposal and make sure we’ve met all of your requirements. If it feels like a good fit, we’ll sign a contract and get to work!
Need a quote? We’re happy to schedule a discovery call and discuss your project needs.