Whether you’re a small business operating from home or a large company moving product on a grand stage, the modern world calls for a website. However, it’s not as simple as just waking up and claiming a domain.

When it comes to the cost of a website, there are 4 main things to consider: What kind of website do you want, will you do it yourself or hire someone to create and manage it for you, website marketing, and maintenance. These will account for a $100 website or a $10,000 one.

All Kinds of Websites

In general, there are 4 types of websites that people tend to start for their business. Those are blogs, online sales, small business, or enterprise sites. Before you find out the extraneous costs for each of those, you first need to understand why each one costs differently.

Blog

Blogs are a great way to get word of mouth spreading through reviews and advertisements, but they can vary in cost from as low as $1-200 to thousands of dollars. If it’s a blog for personal reasons or a from-home sales business, the cost will be on the low end. However, there are corporations that pay a freelancer or company to create and run a blog for them which puts the cost much higher. The good news is that these are usually the simplest to do yourself compared to the other sites.

Online Sales

Ecommerce sites cost anywhere from under $1,000 to well over 6 figures depending on the size of your business and, if you hire out, if the cost is hourly, monthly, or annually. Still, knowing that online sales is directly related to marketing it can be helpful to hire someone. While the cost will be higher, they usually have a plan to brand your product and market it to the target audience. They might have contacts in the industry of your business or be able to upgrade your site as the user-base increases.

Small Business

Websites for small businesses are basically more complex blogs, with several working links to other pages, ads, and a few other things that you’ll have to brush up on coding to do yourself. With that in mind, setting up a small business site can be anywhere from $200 to tens of thousands.

Enterprise

These are websites for the larger businesses, joint ventures, and multi-brand partner companies. Because they tend to hire freelancers they can vary in cost the most, but the general range to develop an enterprising site is between $100,000 and $300,000. The good news is that anyone building this website for you should cover hosting, design, operational software to help keep up with everything, and a number of other helpful capabilities for your expanding business.

Flying Solo or Riding Shotgun?

Now that you know what the different sites are, we can get into what each one would cost if you do it yourself or hire someone to do it. The options to hire are usually a freelancer, website builder, or a company. We’ll also look at some pros and cons of each choice.

Do It Yourself

This is always going to be the cheapest option across the board, but it’s not always advisable. Especially with the enterprising websites, it just becomes impractical to do without help. Still, if you have an understanding of coding and design you can save yourself some money. The good news is that doing things yourself will allow the lowest costs and the most creative freedom, but it also means you’re in it alone. There will be little to no support and you’ll need serious coding skills for the more complex sites, specifically Ecommerce. Not only will you need coding knowledge, but you’ll have to know the rules and regulations of those kinds of sites that anyone you hire would already be aware of. Because of that, doing it yourself will take a lot more time.

Freelancing

Freelancers are a great option to save yourself time because they know their craft and can provide extra services that you might not have thought of. However, they can also be expensive by charging per project, hourly, or at a fixed cost. It can also take a while to shop around and find the right freelancer for your site, whether you’re searching for a specific quality of work or price.

Website Builders

Website builders like Wix or GoDaddy are available for all of the website types, but you’ll have significantly less control over the site due to vendor control. The cost for a website builder is almost always monthly, from $20 to possibly $3,000 every 30 days for a small business or enterprise respectively. There are fewer customization options as well but, especially for a blog, website builders can be a great way to start out for the experience without as much technological know-how.

Agency

Without a doubt, hiring an agency or web design company to create your website is the most expensive method but it can be the most-effective so you’d get what you pay for. With an agency, the price goes up based on what you want to do. Custom work raises the cost, so the more options you want your site to have the more expensive hiring an agency will be. Still, their branding, marketing, design and development, and other resources can prove the best. Of course, they can cost as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Marketing Costs

Marketing is important to any business and websites can be the best way to spread your products. Let’s start with a content management system, which basically controls any graphics on your site. WordPress and most website builders have this already. The only site complex enough to need a custom CMS is an enterprise, which will cost upwards of $40,000. Web design is another big part of marketing, which is entirely optional. You don’t need to hire a web designer, but a good one can help your branding and concept for a few thousand to $25,000. Other marketing resources you might want are SEO, or search engine optimization, and social media, which is responsible for a large part of paid advertisements. SEO affects how often and how high your content shows up on searches, such as Google. It can be $200 or $2,000 depending on what you want to put in. The same goes for social media marketing, which is a cheap but effective way to spread awareness of your website and business with as little as $5 daily.

Website Hosting and Maintenance

There are a number of costs associated with creating a website, so let’s take a look at some of them. The first is a domain, which you might get for free through your hosting site. If not, it’s usually not bad at around $10 or $12 a month. The next step is an SSL certificate, which basically protects online transactions. Any business that provides online payments, especially Ecommerce, will need one. Again, it can cost anywhere from $0 to $300 a year depending if your hosting provider comes with one. Speaking of hosting providers, website builders will usually have the cost built-in to their package but you’ll need a host if you’re using another website. Hosts are usually around $100 annually, so do research and shop around for one.

So How Much Does a Website Cost?

As you can tell by now, the cost of a website varies between what type of site you want to create, who’s building and running it, what marketing you want to use, and maintenance. Generally, a blog can be as little as $100 to create while an enterprise website can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.