Introduction
Building and maintaining a website is crucial for any small or medium business owner. But how much does a website cost, exactly? If you’re not a whiz with numbers, never fear!
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through all the factors that go into calculating the cost of a website. By the end, you’ll know exactly how much you need to budget for your own business web presence.
Costs Of Having Your Own Website
Hosting Fees
The first thing you need to think about when budgeting for your website is hosting fees. Hosting is basically renting space on a server for your website. You can think of it like renting for your physical storefront; without it, your customers wouldn’t be able to find or visit your site!
There are two main types of hosting plans: shared and dedicated.
Shared hosting is just what it sounds like—you share a server with other websites. This option is generally more affordable, but it also comes with some downsides. For example, if one of the other sites on your server gets hit with a lot of traffic, it can slow down your site as well.
Dedicated hosting means that your website gets its own server. This option is more expensive, but it offers superior speed and uptime (meaning your customers will be able to access your site more often). It’s also more secure since dedicated servers aren’t as vulnerable to attack as shared ones.
Domain Name Fee
Every website needs a domain name—that’s the www.yournamehere.com part of things. You can usually purchase domain names through your hosting provider, which will simplify billing and make it easier to keep track of everything.
However, there are also a few domain name registrars out there that can offer you competitive rates. Number of Pages How many pages do you need on your website?
This is an important question to think about when budgeting because the number of pages will impact both the design fee (which we’ll talk about next) and the maintenance fee (more on that later).
A good rule of thumb is that most small business websites have between 5 and 10 pages. These include “static” pages like your Home page, About page, Contact page, Services page, etc., as well as any blog posts or other dynamic content you may have.
Design Fee
Your design fee covers everything from choosing the right color scheme for your site to laying out each individual page in an easily navigable way. If you want something completely custom-designed from scratch, you should expect to pay on the higher end of the spectrum; however, there are also plenty of pre-made themes and templates available that can save you some money.
Summary to sum everything up, here’s a quick overview of all the costs you need to consider when budgeting for a new website:
- Hosting fees: $10-100/month
- Domain name fee: $10-20/year
- Number of pages: 5-10 static pages + any dynamic content (blog posts, etc.)
- Design fee: $500-5,000+ Depending on whether you want custom design work or not
- Maintenance fee: $50-200/month Depending on how much ongoing maintenance & support you need)
Add all those together, and you’re looking at a total cost of anywhere from $560 to $6,060+ for your first year with a new website—not counting any additional costs for things like eCommerce functionality or ongoing marketing & SEO services (both of which we offer here at Metric Marketing!)
Of course, every business is different, so please don’t hesitate to contact us for a personalized quote based on your specific needs and wants. We would be happy to help!
Conclusion
We hope this post has been helpful in giving you a better understanding of how much a new website costs! Remember that the price tag will vary depending on factors like hosting fees, the number of pages on your site, whether you need custom design work done, and so forth.
If you’re ready to get started building your dream website (or if you just have more questions), don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Metric Marketing—we would be more than happy to help!
