How Much Should I Spend On A Website For My Business?

admin - April 5, 2018July 21, 2022

In a time where your website represents as much about your business as your shopfront does, i’s more important than ever before to make the most of your online presence. 

In an article published by HubSpot, it was noted that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive and 39% of users will leave the site if it is slow or unresponsive.

In terms of what you can expect from a modern website, most of these crucial factors will be covered and banished to memory, until you come across another website that hasn’t been updated for the past decade. 

There’s nothing worse than Googling a service, finding a promising result, then landing upon the classic “website coming soon” page, or worse still, one with date stamps from years ago and no sign that the business still exists.

So you’ve decided the time has come to build a website that will take your business into the modern era. If it’s been a while or you haven’t gone through the process of building a website before, or perhaps you have grand plans to build a website your industry has never seen the likes of before, there’s one question that will be at the front of your mind: 

How much should I spend on a website for my business?

First things first – before getting a price on your new website, you’ll need to decide what CMS (Content Management System) fits your business. 

If you’ve decided against the gruelling task of building the website yourself (let’s be honest, who has the time to do that?), your next step is to find someone who can. There’s a heap of options, including freelance web developers, digital agencies, outsourcing the work overseas or even making a role for someone to come on board in your business. 

All of these options have their own benefits, skill sets, quality of work, and most importantly, their own price tags.

Depending on your website goals and requirements, here are some ideas of what you can expect to pay for a website when using a digital agency.

Small Business

Information-Based

For a basic business website with Home, About, Services, Blog and Contact pages, you’re looking at around $8,000 for a WordPress site build. This cost will include page design, a responsive layout that works well on desktops, tablets and mobile, and a user-friendly experience. 

Any extras, such as complicated calculators, bulk article import, content writing or heaps of additional pages will obviously add to the cost. These features often double the initial cost of the project.

$5,000 – $15,000

eCommerce

If you want to sell products online but don’t have a huge budget, WordPress is still a fantastic eCommerce platform that is a great place to start. 

Most web-savvy people find that they are able to set up a WooCommerce store with relative ease, thanks to their easy-to-use interface and user guides. 

The issue with taking on this task yourself is, once again, time. There’s an enormous time difference between setting up two pages with three products and building a store with two hundred products, a custom theme, with payment gateways and postage calculators all configured. 

If this is all too much to take on but you want to make your products available for sale online, a WordPress WooCommerce build will cost you between $5,000 and $8,000. 

As with any website build, it’s important to complete a website brief and disclose any website plans upfront. This will help avoid additional costs or possible delays with your site launch.

$5,000 – $15,000

Medium Business

Information-Based

If you’ve moved on from needing a small-scale website to something a bit bigger with extra functionality and security, look no further than Drupal. 

There’s a reason most government sites are built on this CMS. It isn’t as simple and user-friendly as WordPress, however, once you know the ins and outs there’s no looking back. 

Drupal can handle much more advanced requirements and allows you to build a stylish, functional and completely custom website for your business.

$20,000+

eCommerce

If you’re doing more than just listing a few products for online sale, and you need physical Point of Sale options, stock management, warehousing/multiple locations, payment gateway integrations, postage calculators and want to list external sales channels such as eBay or Amazon, Neto is the perfect solution. 

Neto offers this range of features out of the box, however, the configuration time and customisation of your store will take significant development time. 

The biggest benefit when choosing Neto as your eCommerce solution is that it’s capable of handling your business growth and expansion, meaning you won’t need to switch platforms when you open another location or ramp up your online sales!

$23,000+

Large Business

Information-Based

For large businesses, we would recommend building your project on Drupal. These websites will have specific web standards to adhere to and also offer advanced functionality for a large-scale project. 

The difference between a medium and large-sized project will come down to the functionality requirements and the amount of pages/content/data that is present on the site.

$50,000+

eCommerce

As per the medium business recommendation, Neto is the preferred eCommerce platform for large stores. For sites featuring thousands of products, with cross-platform integration and custom modules built, a large Neto store can handle it. 

With security and reliability in mind, there will be few other eCommerce options out there that can deliver the same speed and customer experience as Neto. You should be able to comfortably run most aspects of your business within the Neto environment, something that other eCommerce providers are unable to match.

$60,000+

Overview

So now that you know how much different web projects can cost, reach out to our web designers and developers to get started!