The cost of a good quality website in 2018

Having a website that you’re proud of is one of the most important aspects of any business and research has suggested that having a website can increase turnover by nearly 50%. So, it makes sense for every business to have one, right? Yet, around 2 million UK businesses still don’t have a website,  but what should the cost be?

Website Design & Development

Many business owners are still unsure about how much a website actually costs and how much a website should cost, so this blog aims to simplify things and assist business owners in getting what is right for them.

There are a lot of different types of website, but as we like to keep it simple at EagleSoft, we’ve condensed it down to four categories. When deciding which category your website requirements fall into, it is useful to think about how your business will develop over the next few years in terms of expansion and visitor numbers, as you don’t want to have to get a new website a couple of years down the line as things evolve.

Basic: One to five pages, ideal for Self-employed and small businesses who do not need to edit content regularly. Cost: £300 – £600

Small Business: As above, but the small website would be suited to those who need to edit content regularly and include functionality like a blog, diary or events list. Cost: £700 – £1200.

Ecommerce: A small website, plus Ecommerce functionality. Includes order management, delivery tracking and live chat. Cost: £1,500 – £2,500.

Bespoke: Database driven websites with advanced functionality. Cost: £2,500 – £10,000+

There are a couple more cheaper options aside from what has been mentioned above. One is to use an Offshore website provider. These generally cost between £5 and £20 per hour, which is great for small business owners on a shoestring budget, but they do tend to be less reliable than the other options we have covered above. Freelancers also work on lower end hourly rates (£15-£75), but this form of costing can make it difficult for customers to predict how much the website will cost.
The biggest problem with both these options is longevity of service. Many freelancers are freelancing as a stopgap until they can find a permanent job, leaving you without any support and no one to perform updates to the site. With offshore providers staff turnover tends to be very high, meaning that quite often, when someone comes to support or work on your website they are effectively going in blind.
Also, with both these options, should the worst happen and you need to find a new provider, the long term cost for an established provider taking over your existing website could work out to be greater than having them create a new website from scratch as they have to invest time in learning how your website was written.

By far, the cheapest option for building and maintaining a website is the DIY option, like Wix, for example. However, there are constraints with using free website builders and whilst that’s fine for many small businesses, others will get a considerable way through the process before finding out that they can’t do exactly what they want and compromise their plans instead of hiring an independent web designer. Unfortunately, if this happens because the web platform is locked down by the provider, there will be no other option than for the new provider other than to start again from scratch.

Ok, so hopefully by now you will have an idea of what type of website you need, what type of company or person will create it and how much it will cost upfront. It’s worth noting that you really do get what you pay for with online services, so it’s often a good idea to invest in using a slightly larger company in order to ensure stability further down the line.

Web Hosting

The next step is to work out what kind of hosting you will need. As well as the level of hosting, you also need to consider if you are happy to manage the hosting yourself (initial setup, installation of the website, liaising with the hosting company, ongoing maintenance, investigating issues etc..) or if you wish to pay for managed hosting, where all of these services are included in the hosting fee.

Shared Hosting: This is the cheapest way to go, as you share the hosting platform with other websites, thus, sharing the cost. If you don’t get a great deal of visitors to your website, this is the perfect low-cost option, which can be as little as £3 per month for self-managed hosting (£3 -£10 per month self-managed, £20 – £50 per month managed).

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: This is known as the middle of the road option. This works by having one physical server that allocates multiple separate servers to the different sites that are on it. The cost for this should be somewhere between £10 and £45 per month for self-managed and £50 – £100 for managed.

Dedicated Server Hosting: This option is the more expensive one, as you have a server dedicated to your website alone. This option is perfect for large or complex websites with high traffic and will cost between £65 and £200 per month for self-managed and £100 to £500 per month for managed

Keeping your website up to date

Depending on how frequently your website needs updating, you will need to allocate a budget for content updates. It’s a good idea to set aside a minimum of £50 per month. You may not need content updates every month, but that will result in surplus funds at the end of the year that you can use in other areas of your business.

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