The Full Estimate

Website development cost calculation is quite a challenging process with a diversity of price-forming factors. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to get a precise final estimate as each company has to conduct such them individually, depending on the specific case.

Depending on the software complexity, the cost of a web solution may vary from 10 to 100 hours. Such an answer seems pretty imprecise. Yet, the price of certain website features may be easily estimated to have a reference point in this uneasy question.

This post will cover factors impacting the price, hourly rates of various vendors, essential features, and website creation cost formula.

Average Website Development Cost

Let’s begin with integral stages of web development and define their costs:

UI/UX Design

To build perfect software, designers prepare wireframes with tools like Zeplin or Sketch to plan the layout of your website’s elements, like buttons, screens, sections, and navigation. The modern market offers lots of digital products from diverse domains with a flawless design, so you should take this stage seriously.

This phase includes a row of actions for successful design creation:

• Market analysis. Researching competitors and target audience
• Wireframe. Building a mockup according to your requirements and approving it with you
• Prototype. Developing a UI that will show how the software looks when opening it on various gadgets

The price of this stage is highly variable- from $750 to $4000, and more.

Front-End Development

Front-end refers to the interactive user-side of the website, where all the internal processes of the client’s queries are invisible.

This stage is also the first one involving QA software testing, completed systematically through the entire website development flow.

The main cost-affecting points are adaptiveness, responsiveness, and the future website’s animation complexity, possible with technologies like HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. The approximate price is about $1000- $12,500.

Back-End Development

This stage implies creating the server-side of the product inaccessible for clients, which makes the website operate correctly and smoothly. It’s responsible for delivering user requests to the server and fulfilling them. It’s a vital part of every software creation, and its price (from $4000 to $12,500) is formed by the number of integrations involved, complex queries, and nin-standard data processing.

Admin Panel Creation

With this tool, the cost of which ranges from $3,000 to $9,000+, you, as a website owner, will be accessed to the software content management and editing.

Nowadays, there’s a wide choice of CMS platforms like Shopify, WordPress, and others, allowing to cut down development costs as well as time. Yet, products built with such solutions are plainer, have weaker security systems, and are not customized.

Total Development Time and Cost of Each Phase

The formula to complete the total cost calculation is the following: you should multiply the development time by the hourly rate of your vendor. Here’s the time estimate for each web creation phase:

• UI/UX design:15-80 hours
• Front-end: 20-250 hours
• Back-end: 80-250 hours
• Admin panel: 60-180 hours
• Total: 175-760 hours

As it was mentioned previously when you hire a web developer, you should pay attention to the hourly rate as it is one more cost determining indicator:

Yet, the estimate you complete yourself is quite imprecise, and to receive more accurate calculations, you should contact an experienced Business Analyst.

Website Development Cost by Types

There are lots of website domains that impact its complexity and, consequently, the cost. For example, a personal blog is not that difficult to create like an online marketplace.

Let’s see the approximate estimate of each website by type:

Business Website

Typically, this website model serves as an advertisement for a brand and provides information about the company to clients. The main sections such solutions comprise are the following:

• Brand information
• Goods and services
• Contacts
• Blog
• Testimonials

Each project requires an individual number of pages and implemented functionality, which also forms the total cost.

There are more essential features for business platforms:

• SSL certificate
• Contact form
• Online chats integration
• General search
• Admin panel

Depending on the business scale, the requirements for a website may make the price vary from $9,500 to more than $13,000.

E-commerce Website Cost

Another sought-after domain is e-commerce. It is also extremely difficult to conduct precise cost calculations without involving the professional, as the number of pages may be hundreds, or millions, like on a well-known platform Amazon. Besides, the feature complexity should also be taken into consideration in this question.

The essential pages for e-commerce websites are the following:

• Homepage
• Shopping cart
• Wish-list
• Checkout
• Category sections
• Product description pages

Here are the main features:

• Payment services integration
• Customizable push notifications
• Recently viewed goods
• Section for rates and reviews
• Search with filtering system
• Admin panel

Huge e-commerce platforms have to be scalable to efficiently process the high workload from the growing number of users. Such peculiarities make the total cost amount to approximately $17,500-$37,500.

Landing Page Cost

The concept of a landing page may be described with the two definitions:

• A single-page website serving as a promotion
• A separate page on a multi-page website for advertisement

The main aim of such web pages is to acquaint clients with the company and call them to certain actions, like product catalog reviewing or making purchases.

Due to the fact that such websites have only one single page, their costs and creation time are commonly decreased, yet, also depend on the functionality complexity like previous cases. The average landing page cost is about $1,000- $2,500.

Final Cost by Types

According to the formula we’ve described earlier, you should multiply the development time of your platform’s type by the hourly rates of your software development services vendor:

• Business platform:190-260 hours
• E-commerce platform: 350-750 hours
• Landing page: 20-50 hours

Additional Website Creation Costs

You should keep in mind that web development services are not your only investments. Here are other outgoings required covering when it comes to the site creation:

• Domain Name. This is the original address of your website by which users access the platform. The annual cost of the domain name registration is from $5 to $15.
• Hosting. Providers of this service make your website operate all time and impact its loading speed. The vendors require from $75 to $200 annually for these services.
• Maintenance. The website architecture has to be supported to ensure flawless and smooth work. This service also helps detect and get rid of bugs to enhance performance. The cost ranges from $500 to $12,000 every year.

Website Marketing Investments

To attract more clients to your company you should consider applying promotional services. They should also be included in the final cost:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

It is a promotional model by which the company’s advertisement is posted on certain websites, and business people pay this platform’s owner for user clicks on a placed banner. However, a considerable drawback of this model is that costs depend on your niche. Thus, many companies invest about $50 per click to make the service efficient.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The main aim of this service is your platform’s optimization in search engines (e. g., Google), so the potential customers will find your website according to the keywords they enter in the search line. And in case your site is optimized well, it will be ranked higher. Such services cost about $300- $1,500 monthly.

Copywriting

Professional writers prepare blog posts describing your brand or business-related processes of your domain to show your company’s high expertise, wide experience, and raise trustworthiness in the eyes of consumers. To generate more leads, specialists usually optimize their articles with keywords. You should averagely invest from $50 to $500 per article for this service.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media platforms can also help in your website’s promotion. SMM specialists advance your company via the chosen networks. This method is suitable especially for startups and small companies. Its approximate cost is about $400 to $20,000.

Summarize

The total price range in terms of website development is extremely vague, which is between $2,500 and $38,000+. To receive proper and precise estimates, you should apply to an experienced software development company. By selecting a credible and competent partner, you’ll be provided not only with detailed calculations but with a full-fledged website attracting more clients and bringing your business success.

Author’s bio

Katherine Orekhova is a technical writer at Cleveroad – a mobile app development company. She is keen on technology and innovations. Her passion is to tell people about the latest tech trends in the world of IT.