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Overview of Website Costs
Summary of Website Design Costs in 2025
“It depends” – This is going to be your answer. What makes up the cost of a website is how it looks and how it works as part of more extensive functionality.
If you want your website to do more than look pretty, for example, if you need a custom online quiz system, or the website needs to integrate with an API to handle bookings, then this is all going to factor into your website design quote. Our easy to use cost estimator runs through a simply questionnaire of what our project managers will look at when doing up a quote for a website and is an excellent tool for getting an idea without talking directly to a website project manager.
If you’re still in the early stages and need a rough idea, here is a rough guide of our prices with different levels of functionality:
Associated Costs
Hosting Explained
Shared Website Hosting
This is the cheapest form of entry level hosting, you’ll be sharing a hosting space and resources with many other site, which comes with it’s pros and cons.
The cons are limited resources and availability, meaning in turn that they are the least powerful. They are also more likely to be targeted by bots and hacking, as shared hosting tends to be less secure and an easier target.
The pros are that it is cheap and accessible, making it a good solution for small websites, with a lower budget, receiving around 500-1,000 sessions per month.
$5-20 per month
VPS
Virtual Private Server – ‘virtually’ private hosting, which essentially means you’re given your own hosting space inside a larger server, which is broken down into 20-30 small VPS’s.
A VPS gives you additional flexibility, available storage, and allows you to harden your hosting by having it configured for additional security.
Additionally, there are much more resources and power available to you, as well as root access.
A VPS will be tend to be able to deal with higher sessions, have additional memory allocation, and may allow your website to load quicker (depending on how your site has been built).
$50 – 260 per month
WordPress Hosting
This is the cheapest form of entry level hosting, you’ll be sharing a hosting space and resources with many other site, which comes with it’s pros and cons.
The cons are limited resources and availability, meaning in turn that they are the least powerful. They are also more likely to be targeted by bots and hacking, as shared hosting tends to be less secure and an easier target.
The pros are that it is cheap and accessible, making it a good solution for small websites, with a lower budget, receiving around 500-1,000 sessions per month.
$30-200+ per month (depending on traffic requirements)
Cloud
With Cloud hosting you don’t have a set space available to you, but rather you’ll essentially be pooling resources from lots of different locations as and when you need them.
The pros? It’s extremely flexible, as you pay per usage. Making it the perfect solution for those starting small and looking to expand. It’s also ideal for those who experience large, but predictable, peaks and troughs in monthly sessions.
On the flip slide, whilst pay per usage can be a positive, it can also be unpredictable. For example, if you get a sudden influx of unexpected, not relevant traffic you’ll likely be receiving a large bill at the end of the month. It’s can also complex and requires a lot of technical set up, meaning it’s likely you’ll need to pay a professional to do it for you.
Prices for Cloud hosting tend to vary greatly depending on the level of set up and support required, as well as the monthly usage.
$POA
Managed Hosting
Virtual Private Server – ‘virtually’ private hosting, which essentially means you’re given your own hosting space inside a larger server, which is broken down into 20-30 small VPS’s.
A VPS gives you additional flexibility, available storage, and allows you to harden your hosting by having it configured for additional security.
Additionally, there are much more resources and power available to you, as well as root access.
A VPS will be tend to be able to deal with higher sessions, have additional memory allocation, and may allow your website to load quicker (depending on how your site has been built).
$30 – 90 per month
CDN
Content Delivery Network – A CDN can help to boost your website’s loading time by delivering your sites content from multiple servers and locations, reducing latency and speeding up first byte time.
A CDN can also help with optimising images as they’re loaded, which can be a really useful tool for those unskilled in re-sizing imagery appropriately for their website.
Free – $200 Per month
Email hosting
Your email hosting needs to be considered, and with a reputable provider, in order for you to avoid running into deliverability issues. In our experience, the best providers tend to be either Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange.
Email hosting is completely separate from your website design, however, given access to the domains DNS is required for web hosting, it often comes hand in hand.
$5 – 25 per email address, per month
How will it look?
Associated Design
Your company logo and branding forms the foundation of your website and company as a whole. It’s important to recognise that these are two completely separate things.
Your website is the channel through which your logo and branding is ultimately presented, so you will of course need these things in place prior to beginning the process of designing and developing your site.
If you’re designing a website then you’re going to need a logo.
Generally speaking, your logo will set the colour scheme and typography for the website, assuming your logo contains text.
There are several ways you can go about obtaining a logo:
- The cheapest and quickest way is to purchase a basic logo template online. However this is not an option we ever recommend, given the lack of originality and rationale. It’s also likely to still need editing after you’ve bought it.
- You could hire a freelance designer, which will set you back around $100-400. This can be a great option if you have a freelancer you know and trust to do a good job.
- You can have your logo designed by the company designing your website. As it’s such a vital element of your website design, most website design agencies will offer a logo design service, coming in at around $500-700. Although this is the most pricey option, we believe it’s well worth the investment, given that it’s the only option guaranteed to leave you with a future-proof logo design that you love.
There’s a big difference between a logo design and branding.
Branding dives into the psychology of colours and words, exploring your competitors and your company’s messaging to determine the overall look and feel of your brand.
You’ll want to carefully consider how much time, effort and resources you need to put into your branding to build your company’s presence at this stage. A small start up for example, may look at launching with just a logo in place, opting to explore their branding as their company grows. Whereas for a high value venture, we would highly recommend acquiring a detailed brand strategy and identity, before pressing forward with a website.
Branding services can cost anywhere from between $100 for a basic package. All the way up to 10,000+ for a more premium service.
Additional design elements to consider:
- If you’re starting a business from scratch, you’re likely to need printed materials designed, such as Business Cards, Letterheads, Comp Slips, Brochures etc.
Social Media
- If you’re marketing your business through social channels, you’re going to need your logo resized appropriately for each platform, along with profile and cover images to promote your brand.
Newsletters
- Depending on your level of requirement or the type of email marketing you’re looking to carry out, you may require design for bespoke email templates, as well as e-brochures or PDFs.
Pricing for these elements is obviously highly dependent on your individual requirement. As an agency we commonly design a number of these under our standard hourly rate of $65+vat per hour. Or in cases where a lot of additional design work is required, this may be quoted as a single price at a reduced hourly rate.
Timing & Phases
Stages of Website Design
01
DISCOVERY
3 days – 2 weeks
02
WIREFRAMING
03
DESIGN
04
DEVELOPMENT
05
CONTENT OF POPULATION
2 -4 days
06
QA, TESTING AND LAUNCH
3 days – 2 weeks
Marketing
Promote your new website
You’re unlikely to see SEO or online marketing as an associated cost on most articles about the cost of a website, but it’s an incredibly important thing to consider. After all, what’s the point of a website without an online presence?
If you don’t know what SEO stands for, then you’re probably not ready to build a website. SEO isn’t technically required to build a website, but without a level of SEO your website will have no/little visibility online.
If you’re planning on handing out business cards or brochures with your website address, or you’re going to be relying on people searching for your brand name on Google (provided it’s unique) then you don’t have to worry about SEO. It’s very likely that this is not the case, and you’re going to be relying on people searching for terms such as ‘accountants Surrey’ to find you online. “Build it and they will come” simply isn’t how it works anymore – SEO is something you need to consider if you’re serious about your online presence.
You’ll usually find that SEO is only considered after the website has been created, which isn’t ideal as it means that your website will not be prepared to rank in search results, or worse, the structure you have decided upon may actually be detrimental. As such, you need to be prepared and be ready to consider SEO as an important associated cost of a new website.
If you’re considering a website builder, it’s likely that this will already be well optimised in terms of technical optimisation (loading speed, etc). However, you will need to consider things like keywords, on page content, and how you’re going to lay your site out to accommodate SEO. Website builders will typically provide tools within the website, which will help you to achieve a very rudimentary level of SEO. These rely on a pre-existing knowledge of SEO – which takes years to learn how to do properly.
Freelancers and agencies, on the other hand, are more capable of taking care of your SEO for you. If you’re serious about your rankings, you’ll need to consider an SEO company, SEO freelancer, or a website agency that offers SEO such as Creative Brand Design.
These ads come in many forms, the most popular ones being Google Ads and social ads including Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.
Time should be spent determining which platform you’d be best placed for, e.g. whether you should be advertising on Instagram or Linkedin (or both) to reach your target audience and demographic. You’ll also need to consider the expense of the ad creatives/graphics, as well as the cost per click/impression charged separately by the advertising platform.
