Web Design in 2023

Research has suggested that by simply having a website, your business’ turnover can increase by around 45%. In addition to this, roughly 81% of people conduct online research before purchasing a product. Basically, you need a website! Sadly though, around 2 million businesses in the UK haven’t got this message and don’t have a website.

Features that a website should have and how much these features cost is a very confusing topic for a lot of people. Some people think that they need to spend thousands on their website. Others try and build one themselves to save money. As a web design company, we understand that finding where to start can be difficult as online research often gives conflicting answers.

We know all the costs involved in setting up and maintaining websites of all different sizes and have written this article to give you a much clearer idea.

Topics we will cover:

1. Website costs at a glance
2. Building your own website
3. Basic website costs
4. Small business website costs
5. Ecommerce website costs
6. Bespoke website costs
7. Upfront costs
8. Ongoing costs
9. Additional costs
10. What to ask your web designer
11. Other things to think about
12. WordPress websites
13. Next steps to take

Before going into detail about the industry average prices for a website in 2023, we want to show you our new pay monthly website packages which can be seen below. We understand that small businesses are often put off having a website designed by the large upfront costs that web design agencies often demand. With a pay monthly package, there are no large upfront fees or surprise invoices. We will update and maintain your website for you. All you have to pay is your monthly fee for 12 months and then the website is yours!

Now, lets get onto how much websites from other agencies cost:

Website designer prices

As a general rule of thumb, websites can cost anywhere between £200 – £10,000 depending on the type of website you need creating. There are a range of different types of website but, in this guide, we’ve categorised them into four basic types of website:

• Basic
• Small
• Business / Ecommerce
• Bespoke

This section of our article explains the average prices of a web designer based on these four types of website.

How much does a website cost?

Even with our basic, cookie-cutter website categories put in place, the price will still depend on which features you require. However, to give you an idea of how much you need to spend, we have provided the average costs of using a web designer for the different websites below.

Of course the cheapest option for building and maintaining a website is the DIY option. There are quite a few online website builders out there these days which allow you to to create your own website without any technical knowledge. These tools are great for creating a simple site that fits into a pre-designed template (e.g. restaurant, online shop etc.) However, for a more unique and professional website we would always recommend using an experienced web developer such as ourselves. We also offer pay monthly website packages to help you spread the cost over 12 months.

So, how much does a website cost?

If the cost of hiring a professional web designer is something you would rather avoid, you could look at using a website builder to create your site. Website builders are tools that allow to create nice looking websites very quickly without any technical knowledge or coding skills.

Web hosting is also provided by the website builder company you choose so, all you have to do is simply drag and drop sections around your page.

Another key benefit to using website builders is their low cost. Quite a lot of companies also offer a free version of free trial which will allow you to create basic websites with some functionality. For £10 – £20 a month you can upgrade to a paid plan, which offers greater customisation and specifications.

Note that creating a website this way means you will be kept within the constraints of the web builder itself. For more powerful, complex or unique websites, we recommend hiring a web designer.

Cost of a basic website

A basic website is made up from 1-5 pages and only has simple features. They are generally information-based websites to show off your services and have a contact form. They should also be mobile friendly and fully responsive to look great across all devices. Make sure you check whether this is included in the cost!

Basic websites are great if you just need a basic online presence. You can showcase your business, receive enquiries and get found online. A simple website is kind of like an online business card.

There are several different paths to go down when creating a basic website. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each one:

Build your own website

Website builders have become better and more popular in recent years. Unlike a few years ago, they can actually be used to create a realistic, semi-professional website. The obvious benefit is the low cost of website builders but, they also allow you to get up and running on the web in no time at all without any experience.

Web design agency

Web design companies are usually very experienced and reliable (as long as you choose wisely). Creating websites is their forte and they know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to the art of designing a website. Using a web design agency is a great option if you want a basic website but, lack the time or skills to make one yourself. Agencies like ourselves offer a quote for the whole project, making it easy to compare prices. However, unlike other web design companies, we also offer pay monthly packages to help smaller business afford their website whilst eliminating large, upfront fees.

Freelance developer

Freelance web designers are another option for having a basic website designed and developed. Finding freelancers can be quite difficult and may require a little bit of research however, you usually receive a more personalised service once you do find one. Freelance developers won’t have the broad industry knowledge that web design agencies offer but, they do charge an hourly rate which can work out cheaper (Anywhere from £15-£75/hour).

Cost of a basic website

These prices are rough estimates and can vary depending on the size and complexity of your website. When requesting a quote from a web design company or freelancer, try to be as specific as possible to make sure you get an accurate quote. Transparency between you and the designer is a key factor in web development and will prevent costly amendments later down the line.

Cost of a small business website

A small business website is the perfect size for a business that requires slightly more functionality than a simple, information-based website. Or, for someone who wants to upgrade / refresh their current basic website and add more features to it. These additional features could include things like social media integrations, responsive designs, a content management system, Google Analytics integration, Google Maps integration and or Google My Business capability.

Most feature-rich business websites also have more pages than basic websites and will be designed with mobile devices in mind (This is the current best practice for designing websites and applications). If you update your content regularly and often want to show off offers and promotions on your site, the perfect choice for you could be a small business website. Here are some average industry costs:

Do keep in mind though that by dishing out a large sum of cash to a company or freelancer to have a nice looking website designed does not guarantee internet success. Once you have a website, you have to build your online presence by marketing and updating your content regularly. Organising a monthly budget of time and money can be a good way to ensure that you don’t forget this vital step in bringing visitors back to your site and becoming an online success.

If you need help with the marketing and search engine optimisation for your business website, we also offer pay monthly packages to help out with that aspect. See our digital marketing packages and search engine optimisation plans.

When requesting quotes for your small business website, choose design companies that have experience in working with other small businesses. If you don’t do this, you may find yourself being overwhelmed with fancy features that won’t actually benefit you in any way.

Cost of an ecommerce website

The cost of ecommerce websites can vary massively. The price is impacted by the number of items you want to stock and the amount of variations available for each product. In addition, any added functionality will accrue extra costs.

Any high quality ecommerce website will come shipped with an order management system, delivery tracking functionality and live chat facility as well as all the features of a small business website. When commissioning a new ecommerce website, make sure that you think about what you really want from your site. Will this site be your brand’s main presence? Do you want people to navigate around and read blog posts or visit your social media channels? You also need to think about whether you want customers to return or just simply provide a more bare-bones ‘One stop shop’ kind of approach where customers buy and never come back.

We also recommend getting an SSL certificate on top of the usual maintenance, hosting, domain and design costs. SSL certificates are vital in this day and age, they add another layer of security to your website and help reassure customers and search engines that your site is safe.

SSL certificates give your site access to the https protocol instead of the usual http. The extra ‘s’ stands for secure. The certificate also gives your site a little padlock icon in the address bar to show users that your site is secure. You should make sure that your designer includes this in the package.

Once again, being specific is the correct approach with ecommerce websites. Listing every single feature you require will give you the best quote possible. If you are finding it difficult to guess the price of your new ecommerce website or need a quotation for one, you can fill in our contact form and we will get back to you.

Cost of a bespoke website

Custom websites are good for larger companies that need more functionality and have more visitors and information that needs sharing. Although you may be told that all websites are bespoke, that’s not always true. For small, simple websites without any unusual functionality, a web designer can normally use an old template or theme and just edit it slightly. In this case, your website is tailored for your business but, not truly bespoke. A fully bespoke website is one that is built from scratch just for the company that needs it.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, take a look below at our breakdown of bespoke, ecommerce website costings.

Bespoke websites tend to be database-driven with advanced functionality and as many sub pages as the company wants. Any business needing complex functionality will most likely find that they fall into the bespoke website price bracket. Bespoke websites are also built from the ground up in terms of mobile responsiveness. As over 50% of searches take place on mobile, most custom sites will look completely different on mobile to make this experience the best that it can be.

We would also recommend that you work with an agency for a fully bespoke, custom website. By doing this, you guarantee the best possible service and experienced teams. You will also be quoted on the whole project and not given an hourly rate like if your worked with a freelancer. Hourly rates aren’t great for a large project as some time consuming problems can arise that you are out of control of.

Bespoke websites are definitely the most expensive option out there however, you may need one depending on your requirements. If you don’t know whether you need a small business website or a bespoke site, think about what experience you are looking to provide. Do you need advanced functionality, how many visitors are you expecting to come to your site? But, most importantly, you want to make sure that your new website is primed for the future of your business. If you have a small website and then grow into a large company in a few years, you’re website may no longer cut the mustard, it would be better to invest in a future-proof website.

Again, if you don’t know what kind of website you need, contact us here and a member of our experienced team will gladly help you out.

Domain Names

Apart from design costs, the main upfront cost you will encounter is when buying a domain name (If you don’t already have one). A domain name is the unique address of a website. For example, our domain name is ‘teegeedigital.co.uk’.

Once you have found a suitable domain name for your business, you can pay it from a website like 123 Reg or GoDaddy. Prices differ depending on how popular the domain is. For example, .co.uk domains generally cost around £4.99/ year but, .com domains can cost upwards of £9.99/ year. The most popular domain names can cost thousands per year so, make sure you research what combination of domains are available before you buy one. In this guide, we have set the limit for a domain to £100 a year maximum.

Ongoing Costs

Hosting overview:

Every website needs to be hosted on a server. Hosting a site makes it accessible on the web. Hosting your site is pretty much the same as renting or buying some ‘space’ on the internet (known as bandwidth). You don’t need to fully understand what hosting means, you just need to know that you need it to share your website with potential customers online.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the cheapest form of web hosting . You share a hosting platform with many other sites but, you also share the cost. The disadvantage is that you also share the servers resources like the bandwidth. So, in effect, you are fighting for server space against the other sites. Shared hosting is great for simple sites that don’t get many visitors.

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting

A VPS server is a the middle ground between shared hosting and having your own server. A VPS is a physical server split up into smaller servers. This way, you are not fighting for resources like on the shared hosting.

Cloud based hosting

With cloud based hosting, your website is hosted on a virtual server. This means that your site will be able to accommodate large surges in traffic and can adapt to your changing needs. With cloud based hosting, you pay for what resources you have used rather than a set fee. If your site started on a shared hosting plan but, have started to exceed the resources limit, moving to cloud hosting could be a good move.

Dedicated hosting

You have your own server that is ‘dedicated’ to hosting your website alone. Websites that are complex or receive large amounts of traffic normally require high levels of data security and would benefit from a dedicated server. Not sharing a server with anyone else has its advantages. The biggest benefit is that you don’t have to share resources with anyone. However, these huge amount of resources come at a price and this is why dedicated hosting is the most expensive option out there.

If you need hosting for your website or are going to need hosting for a future website, all of our website packages come with 12 months free hosting.

Content updates

In addition to hosting costs, you may need to think about the price of content updates. Costs can vary depending on the size of your website, the updates you need and how much you pay your web design agency. Your website is never completely finished even if you are happy with the design and user experience. You should always update your website regularly with fresh, relevant content to keep your audience interested and to rank on search engines.

Please note that on our pay monthly website packages, we offer unlimited updates for free and promise that there will be no hidden or upfront fees, you only have to pay your monthly fee.

Additional costs

There are some additional services that you should consider, separate from the website costs:

Content creation

Although you can produce written content yourself to avoid extra costs, it could be worth hiring a freelancer or agency to help you out. You could pay between £10 – £50 per hour for content creation and it would save you a lot of time and help your website rank on search engines.

Imagery

Hiring a photographer to take professional images of your products or services is a great way of creating a strong brand image. You could also look at buying stock images and graphics from stock image sites.

SEO / marketing

Lets pretend you have a go kart track in Liverpool. If you search for ‘go karting Liverpool’ on Google, there is around 700k results. So, how do you make sure that your go karting website shows up first to customers? Well, there are lots of different techniques for optimising your site but, it all boils down to making sure your website is relevant, up to date and has great, useful content. It also depends quite a bit on how many visitors are coming to your site from other channels like social media.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of improving your site’s position on the search engine results pages. Search engines view every website and give it a rank based on a lot of factors. This rank determines where in the 700 thousand results you will show up to a customer. Some factors include keywords, backlinks, page speed, mobile friendliness just to name a few.

If you don’t have much technical knowledge, it may be a good idea to ask a web design agency whether they offer SEO services as part of their package. For websites with a lot of content, consider getting a freelancer or agency that specialises in SEO to take a look at your site once every couple of months to ensure that it remains well-optimised.

Take a look at our SEO packages here.

Questions to ask your web designer

With web design, communication is key to making the process as streamlined as possible. You probably want to know exactly what you’re paying for and, the web designer themselves will also want to know exactly what you expect. With this in mind, here are some great questions to ask your web developer:

1. Can you purchase the domain and hosting for the site? Is this included in the price?
2. How easy is it for me to update my website? If it requires specialist knowledge, will you provide training for myself and staff?
3. Are there any ongoing costs for maintaining the site?
4. Will you optimise the site for search engines?
5. Will the site be mobile responsive?
6. If i am unhappy with the design, can it be amended? Will you charge for this?
7. Will you provide content and imagery for the site or do I need to provide it?
8. What is the scope for future development? Is my site built to scale further down the line?
9. How much will future updates cost?
10. How is my website protected if something goes wrong?

Other things to bear in mind

Web design is a service, not a product

Once you understand that web design is an ongoing service rather than a product, you will understand why it is difficult to price a project.

Quotes are subjective

You could be quoted £1000 and £50,000 for the same project. This goes back to web design being a service rather than a product. Different agencies have different ways of doing things and will prioritise different aspects and functionality of your website. Being as specific as possible will help you receive more accurate quotes.

Standards differ depending on the agency

As with any industry, the quality of work will vary from one agency to another. A good idea before getting a quote for any service is to look at customer reviews and past work to help decide which company is best for you. Do take note that the cheapest option is not always the best option!

A word on WordPress

People often ask how much it costs to build a website using WordPress. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and over 26% of websites on the web use it. Although WordPress is free to download and install, there are some costs involved which can be broken down as follows:

• Hosting
• Domain
• Themes / Custom Design
• Plugins

At the cheapest end of the scale, it is possible to build a beginner WordPress site using only the free templates and plugins and pay around £3/month for the domain and hosting. However, as the size and complexity of your WordPress site increases, so does the price. You can expect to pay around £1000/year for a mid-tier WordPress site with a paid theme and useful plugins. A unique, bespoke site will need extensive work from a developer with WordPress development experience. Costs for this can be anywhere between £4,000 – £10,000 depending on the design.

Where to go from here?

Even with an extensive pricing guide, pricing up websites is very difficult. If you need any help or are looking for a quote for your project, contact us here and we will be happy to help you out. Now that you have a better idea of how much your website could cost, you can hopefully go and have one developed and grow your online business!