A functional website is the backbone of any business in the digital age. Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer or an e-commerce specialist, you need a website that delivers a fantastic user experience, accentuating your brand and its values.

Web design is a complicated process managed by professionals. While you can do it yourself with free web builder programs, you’re never going to get the same user-functionality and complete package for business that you get with hiring a design firm to build your site.

So, what is it going to cost you for a website?

According to research, it could cost you anywhere from £15,000 to over £100,000 to build a website from the ground up. The scale of the costs depends on the site’s functionality, how many pages you need, and many other factors. At WebDeveloperLondon.com, we’re dedicated to giving you the best website at the cheapest prices.

This post unpacks everything you need to know about the costs surrounding the building and maintaining a website. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

The Cost Of Different Websites

The primary factors concerning the cost of your website design are the complexity and size of your business. Here are the three primary types of website builds and the average price of each.

Business Websites

Business websites need a focus on informational functionality and transactional capability. This website typically has a dynamic interface. The price of building one of these sites can vary from £1,000 to £50,000, depending on the organization’s unique business requirements.

Typically, these sites are brick-and-mortar retailers and corporates looking to bring their business into the digital age. They don’t rely heavily on eCommerce, and the website serves more as a means of capturing leads and drawing prospects into funnels.

eCommerce Websites

If you’re planning an eCommerce startup, the cost of your web development will be higher than a typical business site. E-commerce sites require many product pages, and they have a heavy focus on SEO and marketing tools like sales funnels and sales and logistics platforms to automate their business.

Website functions like product categories and payment gateways add to the cost of the build, and you could end up spending anywhere from £50,000 to £100,000 or more, depending on the scale of your site.

Lifestyle and Business Blogs

Lifestyle and business blogs are the easiest websites to set up, and they cost very little to maintain. These sites capture leads and build email lists for other business strategies but have minimal site functionality.

It’s a pretty straightforward build. Most owners can learn to scale and add pages to the site themselves using the CMS (content management system), mitigating ongoing expenses involved with managing the site.

As a result, you could get by with a web-builder program for most of the build and use developers for the advanced tasks involved with building the site. Depending on its scale and functionality, one of these sites could cost you anywhere from £1,000 to £15,000.

What Are The Factors In Web Development Costs?

The final cost of your website development depends on several factors, and we’ll unpack those now to give you an idea of the costs involved with your project.

Here is a basic breakdown of what you can expect to pay for website development.

Domain Names and Hosting

Every site needs a domain, and your domain name could cost you a few bucks, or you could end up spending thousands of dollars on a premium domain name.

Look for domain names that don’t have huge price tags to keep costs down. If you want a specific domain, for example, “cryptocurrency.com,” it could come with a premium price tag.

However, you might find that cryptocurrency.org or .us could have a much more affordable price tag, and it won’t affect your site’s visibility to the search engines. 

Hosting is usually affordable, and you have plenty of services offering you the free setup of your WordPress site when you pay for your hosting.

CMS

WordPress offers you a free CMS, and there are plenty of options out there. However, some CMS modules require professional management, so know what you’re getting yourself into.

For instance, Magento requires a lot of time and effort to set up, and you’ll need a developer handling the build.

We personally believe that WordPress is one of the best CMS options for a business website – so much so that we have a whole blog dedicated to explaining why. You can read that blog here.

UX/UI Design

The UX/UI design of the site is where you will pay the most in upfront development fees. The site’s design requires the developer to go through a process of research, wireframing, and prototyping, and they’ll work with you to make adjustments to the project until it meets your requirements.

This phase of the development process is where your budget starts to take a beating. UX/UI design features can add anything from £1,500 to £50,000 to the development costs, depending on your site’s needs to meet your expectations.

Front-End Web Development Costs

The site’s front-end UX/UI design is the part of the site facing the prospects and customers. You need an interactive and responsive design coded to perfection. As a result, the dev team needs to use tech like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Angular, and Bootstrap to complete the build, adding to the costs.

You can expect to pay anywhere from £1,000 to £5,000 or more for this aspect of the site build. The total cost of the build will depend on the number of hours the development team spends on your project.

Back-End Web Development Costs

The back-end components of the site like Express.js, Node.js, .NET, and Nest.js technologies help with processing and resolving errors. It’s critical to the correct functioning of the site. You can expect to pay anywhere from £3,000 to £10,000 or more for this portion of the build.

Admin Panel Design and Development

Your admin panel manages your website, and it’s an integral component of the CMS. This part of the build gives you access to your analytics and reports.

You have options for plug-and-play solutions like Drupal or Shopify for your admin panel, keeping your costs down. Development of your admin panel can end up costing you anywhere from £2,000 to £5,000.

Mapping Your Web Development Costs

Website maintenance is another consideration for business owners. Chances are you can do a lot of the work yourself, but you might need to end up spending on maintenance projects like on-site SEO to keep your site running smoothly.

These costs can run you anywhere from £500 to £10,000 per year, depending on the extent of your requirements.