How Much Does It Cost to Make a Website in 2020?

It can be tricky to estimate website development costs. There are many factors influencing the final price. Pages, features, tech stack, design. Without knowing those details it’s impossible to define an exact cost to build a website.

For example, our business analysts ask dozens of questions just to find out how much time an authorization can take. And the scope may range from 10 to 100 hours depending on those answers.

Still, it’s possible to figure out the average cost to build a website. This estimate can’t be very accurate but at least will inform you about approximate prices.

So, how much does a website creation cost? Let’s find it out.

Average Cost to Build a Website

We have prepared a breakdown showing phases that make up a website development price. In a nutshell, custom website development costs can start at €2,000 and go up to €35,000 and over.

UI/UX Design

Tools that can be used: Sketch, InVision, Zepplin, Adobe Creative Cloud

You’ll barely find a poorly designed yet successful product. Most users are visuals. Good design is what captures their attention and calls to action. Bad design is what makes them leave and never come back.

In other words, UI/UX design services are as essential as engineering. That means expenses on design are one of the key points answering how much it costs to build a website.

There are three main stages defining custom website design cost:

• Research. Defining the target audience, their preferences, and analyzing competitors.
• Wireframe. Creating wireframes to show a schematic placement of elements and agree it with a client.
• Prototype. Crafting the final user interface to show how the app will look like on devices.

The breakdown above allows to reach the best efficiency and settle down every project detail.

So, what is the average cost to build a website’s design? It can vary from €700 to €3,700 and over.

Again, the time and cost to create UI/UX design depend on your requirements. They are number of pages, animation complexity, and so on.

Front-End Development

Some technologies that can be used: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, TypeScript, SASS, LESS, Angular, React

Imagine a registration page with three standard fields: name, login, password. You can see shades they throw, shapes of the input fields, and a red Register button below. You click that red button and see its animation. That’s the front end.

The front end is everything your visitors can see and interact with on the website. It typically starts once the UI/UX design is ready. So what you saw on prototypes before, developers would turn into a working product running on any browser.

QA engineers are starting to participate in the project from this stage and continue working on it till release.

The main factors that influence website creation cost on this stage are:

• Website responsiveness or adaptiveness
• Complexity of animations (yes, again)

Front-end development costs can vary from €900 to €11,500 and over.

Back-End Development

Some technologies that can be used: Node.js, Express.js, Nest.js, .NET

Let’s get back to that registration example. Without the back end, nothing would ever happen after you click the red Register button. The back end is what makes input data travel to the server and register you as a new user.

If something is wrong, it returns an error saying you’ve already been registered or another message. In other words, the page alone is just a bunch of code visualized by browsers. It can’t fulfill its end purpose — register users.

Back end is at the heart of every website powering all its features. That means the back-end development makes up a considerable part of the website creation cost.

The main factors influencing total development time and the average website cost are:

• Integration with third-party services
• Non-standard data processing (for example audio)
• Complex queries
• etc.

Back-end development costs can vary from €3,700 to €11,500 and over.

Admin Panel Development

Content management system (aka admin panel) is a solution that allows to create, manage, and edit website content. So if you want to change a word in a paragraph somewhere on the website, you won’t need to ask developers to do that.

There are a plethora of ready-made CMS engines like Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, and others. They are designed to cut on development hours and reduce the cost to build a website.

But as any out-of-the-box solutions, they can be limited in functionality and security. The latter is because malicious software is generally written to target popular systems rather than custom-built ones.

Expenses on custom CMS development can vary from €2,600 to €8,600 and over.

Final Development Cost of All Stages

Summing up the development time and cost of every stage described, you’ll get an approximate website development price.

How much does it cost to build a website (rough estimate based on €45/h)

The Cost to Create a Website (By Types)

Websites are created for different reasons: from hosting personal blogs and portfolios to maintaining complex enterprise solutions. Accordingly, development time depends on their complexity that influences web development costs.

Since Berg Media Group offers web development services to clients, We have singled out several frequently requested types of websites.

Also, we have estimated how much money it’s required to build a website of each type (approximately).

The Cost to Create a Website for a Business

As a rule, this type of website is informational. It may focus on brand promotion, increasing the loyalty of customers, and so on. Again, the cost of making a website like this depends on its complexity.

In our experience, customers who want to learn business website development cost usually request the following pages:

• About company
• Services
• Contacts
• Blog / Press page
• Testimonials

Every web project is unique and may have a structure different from that. Those pages are kind of a basis for such websites.

So the cost of creating a website for a small business is typically formed based on the number of pages. But it also depends on features you’d like to fill them with.

Among other frequently requested features for business websites are:

• SSL certificate
• Contact back form
• Integration with live chats ( Intercom, Freshchat, Chat.io)
• On-site search
• Mobile-ready design
• Admin panel

Things get more complicated with business website costs for mid-sized businesses and enterprises. It’s hard to estimate even average cost to build a website for them. They often have specific requirements for security, features, and pages which is hard to single out.

So, how much does a website cost to build? Business website development prices can vary from €9,000 and €12,000+.

E-сommerce Website Cost

E-commerce is a rough industry. It can be pretty hard to define the average cost to develop a website for this field. There can be hundreds of thousands of pages (Amazon has millions) and complicated functionality.

E-commerce website design concept

Let’s first take a look at some of the frequently requested pages:

• Main page
• Shopping cart
• Favorites
• Check out
• Blog
• Category pages
• Product pages

And the features:

• Integration with payment systems like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, etc.
• Personalized push notifications
• Recently viewed products
• Leave reviews and rate products
• Search
• Admin panel

Large e-commerce websites have to be well-architected to sustain high loads and rank well on search engines. These and many other peculiarities make e-commerce a field demanding considerable investments. Accordingly, this affects the average cost of a custom website.

As for technology stack, it can also differ significantly from project to project depending on its complexity and objectives. The best way to define it is to consult with a specialist.

So, how much does it cost to develop a website for e-commerce? Check the file below.

E-commerce website development price can vary between €16,500 and €36,000.

Landing Page Cost

There are two definitions for a landing page in terms of web development:

• It’s a single-page website intended to promote or sell something.
• It’s a separate page on existing multi-page website created to promote or sell something.

Usually, these pages aren’t overloaded with content. It’s needed to keep users focused and call to certain actions: from purchasing something to downloading a file. Landing pages are often created to promote apps.

Despite this page can be really long, the average cost to build a website of this type is lower compared to multi-page ones.

The time can vary depending on the animation complexity the same as the website creation cost.

Landing page development price can vary between €900 and €2,000.

Additional Website Creation Costs

There are several additional website expenses you’ll definitely face.

Domain Name

The website's domain name is a unique address. You can see in the address bar of your browser. To access a specific website, each of them has its own address called domain name. You can register it on dedicated services.

The domain name should definitely be included in the cost of a website.

Price: €5 to €15 yearly.

Several time-tested domain name registrars:
• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• Interserver
• Hostinger

Hosting

In simple terms, hosting is a service that keeps your website accessible on the internet 24/7/365. Hosting providers impact the loading time of your website.

So don’t forget to include hosting expenses to website monthly cost.

Price: €70 to €185 yearly.

Several trusted hosting providers:
• Inmotion
• Hostgator
• Ionos
• GoDaddy

Maintenance

Just like any mechanism the code has to be maintained. The website maintenance includes making sure everything functions just fine and users don’t face any problems and bugs.

Price: The average cost to maintain a website can range from €400 to €11,000 yearly.