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Question: How Much Does Website Design Cost?

Short Answer: You should expect to spend between $5,000 and $20,000 to have someone design a decent website for you.

How Much Does Website Design Cost – Long Answer – Big agencies are going to want more like $15,000 to $35,000 average, and will have projects that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Websites connected to databases with a lot of coding and automation can run into the millions. You could build yourself a website on Wix, Weebly, or SquareSpace for under $100. But you most businesses can expect to pay between $5,000 and $20,000 depending on how many website pages need to be built, how much content needs written, and wether your site is a static brochure, or e-commerce (with lots of SKU’s).

The price is also going to vary depending on how much “creative input” you want. If you want a $5,000 website, you should expect very little “creative input.” Meaning, you are going to give a designer photos you like, and some examples of sites you like, and they are going to build it, give you one or two revisions, and that is about it.

We explain this to our clients this way: If you want a good, fast, affordable and effective website done professionally, and you just let us do it, that costs between $5,000 and $10,000 ($10,000-$25,000 for an ecommerce website). If on the other hand you want to commission an art installation on the internet with unlimited revisions, we charge a retainer of $20,000 and we work till that is spent, and re-up it in $20,000 increments, and we keep charging you and keep going until it is done. See the difference?

Can you get websites designed for less than these prices? Of course you can. You can find a freelancer who is just starting out, and they can build you a website, and because they aren’t running a real business, and they don’t have any time constraints or expenses, they might charge you half what a real website design agency would charge. But before you do that, you might read our blog post about all of the website nightmares we have seen over the years. It is called House of A Thousand Website Design Corpses –

In fact we got one of these this week. A small business owner called and asked if we could fix his home page “slider” because he “hired some guy” who “screwed up his website” and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it himself. I took a look at the back end of his site and told him the news: Whomever did this altered the code so this slider spins perpetually and cannot be altered (settings and plugins were disabled). You would need a coder to fix it, and that will be $10,000 minimum, and you could just rebuild it for that price, because who knows what else this person did to your site.

A friend had a one-man-shop build their website to save some money. Then the person disappeared. They finally found his girlfriend, and she let them know that he was in the hospital and would be indefinitely. So they couldn’t access their website, and there was nobody else in this web design “agency” to let them in, or to make updates. They literally had to wait until this person got out of the hospital and recovered enough to let them into their own website.

My point is, we suggest you either learn how to design a website yourself (which is totally viable) or hire a professional website design agency. Do one or the other. Because just “hiring a guy” never works out for people in the long run.

This is what we are seeing out there in the marketplace anyway. So we hope we have answered your question: How Much Does Website Design Cost.

And of course, we design websites, and our website prices are right in the range we quoted. We are fast, affordable, and effective. Our websites set up to maximize SEO, and include free content writing (nobody else does this that we know of), and initial Google Ads Set up (we set up and turn on your first Google Ads if you want that).

Thanks so much for reading our blog, and happy hunting!

Sincerely,

Tim

If you want to get super-nerdy about this: Here is another really long article about website design costs