This article is going to outline OUR web design pricing. Not anyone else’s. You can get a website builder and DIY for much less or hire a huge agency that would cost many multiples more. This article will, however, give you an idea of the cost of building an awesome website by our agency.
The beginning of our journey to establish a budget for our web development costs is to determine the tasks that all of our projects would include. For instance – any website we do would require a home page design!
All of our custom website designs would require an information architecture phase, and we wouldn’t be able to have a website without a project manager keeping everything on time, up to specs, and on budget.
Below is a list of items that are included in all of our custom web design projects that justify our starting prices.
Web Design Cost Calculator
Using our web design cost calculator will give you an accurate estimate of the cost of developing a website with us. The calculator steps you through all the elements that determine the cost of building a website.
Even if you aren’t interested in working with us, using the web design calculator will likely help solidify your understanding of what goes into creating a website.
Because of all of the very pointed questions, it will help you develop a better picture of your future website and gain an understanding of what determines custom website design costs.
Starting Price
This article is going to outline OUR web design pricing. Not anyone else’s.
You can certainly get a free website builder and DIY for much less, or you could hire the most sought-after designer on the planet, which would cost many multiples more. However, this article will give you an idea of the cost of building an awesome website with our awesome agency.
From a basic website to a complex website juggernaut, the primary defining element that determines website costs comes down to the amount of labor (time) that goes into the project.
The amount of time a project takes is directly determined by the website builder’s process and the website’s desired quality, size, schedule, and complexity.
At Connective, we have a starting price of $6,900. If you have a one-page website that requires no special functionality, this will be your price! Read on to learn what items are included and what features will add to the cost of building a website.
Website Architecture
All of our projects ship default with an architecture phase. To help ensure a stellar user experience, we sort out all of the architecture of a website before we jump into design.
This process aligns both parties on the scope of work and gets everyone on the same page before the “pen is put to paper.”
Great architecture sets expectations, clearly defines deliverables, minimizes change orders, and will make for an all-in-all smoother project.
Sitemaps
Price: Included
We start the architecture phase by ironing out the sitemap. Then, we take a list of pages and dive deep into defining a URL structure, accounting for every page of the website, where it should live, and identifying all related functionality.
This assessment will refine the website user experience and guide the content creation on each page.
Deliverable: A well-thought-out Google sheet of all pages on the future website.
Wireframes
Price: Included
We now make a wireframe for every major section of the website, such as the home page, article detail pages, services pages, product details, and any other page that requires a unique design layout.
The designs needed for a website tend to get defined during the sales process, which we feel is vital for transparency in the cost of building a website.
A wireframe is a blueprint that illustrates what elements should be represented on the page and where they fall. Wireframes allow us and clients to look at each section of the website from a user’s perspective without being influenced by design.
Deliverable: A package of images showing what will be on each significant section of your website. One for each template needed.
Branding Costs
Before jumping into a web design, does your branding need a look? Having on-point branding is literally the most essential part of making sure you’re communicating the right message to your target audience.
Your branding should be driving all decisions with your website as it’s defining how you are perceived, what your point is, and how and to who you want to communicate that message.
If branding services are desired, it will certainly add to the cost of a project. Read below to learn more about branding packages, logo design costs, and 1-page branding documents.
Price: $4000
Having a branding style guide package put together will provide you with a single source of truth for all marketing endeavors.
Is someone going to design some social media imagery for you? Give them your branding guidelines document.
Is someone working on a new blog post for you? Make sure to give this document to them so they can understand how you want to be represented and learn crucial insights into who the article should be speaking to.
Our branding package includes the following:
Buyer Persona: A fictional character that embodies your ideal customer.
Color Palette: Having a palette will help you be consistent in your marketing and advertising efforts when choosing what colors to use.
Brand Image Style: This image style guide will inform your photoshoots and image selections.
Font Recommendation: Choosing fonts that reflect your brand’s values will help you attract the right kind of customers.
Deliverable: The Brand Style Guide .pdf document.
Logo Design costs
Price: $2500
This will be a critical step for a successful web project if you need a logo. A good web designer will play off your logo’s shapes, type, and colors to tie it all together.
A bespoke logo design is aimed to be the most effective, most genuine representation of your brand. This includes:
Brand Discovery: We will provide you with a Discovery Questionnaire to help you communicate the key characteristics of your business, your mission, audience, capabilities, and your vision for your brand. Part of this process is an assessment of your competitors’ visual presence. This initial research will set the direction for the design we are about to do.
Logo Design and Development: After completing the research and defining a direction with you, we will begin sketching and developing original ideas and providing you with the best three (3) concepts. Your chosen design out of the three will be refined and finalized. We will provide up to two revisions to ensure you are satisfied with the final solution.
Deliverables:
Final Logo Assets: The final collection of files includes the logo in three versions (full-color, white, and black). Each version will be rendered in the standard file formats (.ai, .pdf, .png, .jpg, and .svg).
Logo Files Guide: A quick visual reference that illustrates all the files provided to you.
Branding 1-sheet
Price: $1500
We will provide a reference guide that you can share with your organization, partners, media, and agencies to brief them on communicating your brand correctly and consistently. This document will be informed by the approved home page design, defining your brand colors, font pairings, and imagery style.
This is a more streamlined and faster-to-produce version of a branding guideline doc.
Deliverables: Branding One-Sheet Document PDF
Custom Web Design
The amount of effort (hours) that goes into the web design itself when trying to figure out the average cost of a custom website design plays a HUGE role in the project’s final cost.
Anyone that has ever designed anything would tell you:
“A design typically doesn’t end… you just run out of time.”
You have pre-designed templates, custom designs from scratch, or super high-end web designs explicitly tailored for the client. All three can produce beautiful websites, yet all have a different approach and, thus, a different amount of time, effort, and money needed.
We only work in the custom design lane, and for us, the cost of custom design is baked into our starting price of $4,000. Additional initial design comps will raise the price from there.
Home Page Design
Price: Included
All of our projects include a custom home page design! It’s built into our base pricing.
To help in the web design’s success, we go through a discovery phase to put ourselves in your thought processes.
By fully understanding your goals, audience, competitors, product, service, strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of your business, we can be sure we are considering the most critical factors and set the most successful outcome for the web design. A general design direction is discussed during the Project Kick-Off.
After all relevant assets are received from you, we will start with your home page design following the Design Strategy Meeting meeting. Then, a flat design will be presented at a scheduled design presentation meeting.
One round of revisions is included. If additional rounds of changes are needed, we can perform these revisions at our hourly rate. We will provide you with an estimate of hours based on your feedback.
Deliverables: One flat of the home page design.
Inner Page Designs
Price: $350 / each
How many unique design templates will be needed to build out your website?
Each custom design template we design will increase the price by $350.
The custom inner page templates we design add to the cost because they all require a wireframe, a flat design, additional quality assurance, and implementation.
As we have an established look and feel from the home page, it doesn’t affect the website cost as much as the home page itself does. It does, however, add to the final website cost.
A unique page design uses a distinct, custom layout appropriate for a particular type of content. A unique page design can be re-used for similar kinds of content.
Here are a few examples:
If you have a parent staff page and you want an individual page for each staff member, that would be two (2) unique designs
If you have a blog on your website, that will require two unique designs – One for the category pages and one for the blog detail page.
If you have services pages, you will need two (2) designs for the main services page and one for the services detail page.
Most sites will need a contact page design and a default page that can be used for pages such as privacy policy etc.
We design all of the inner page designs. One round of revisions is included. If additional rounds of changes are needed, we can work on these revisions at our hourly rate. We will provide you with an estimate of hours based on feedback.
Deliverables: One flat design for each template that requires a unique design.
Website Development
Any custom-built website using a content management system will come with its own set of costs. From straightforward sites to more advanced ones, all of our custom website designs would require an information architecture phase. We wouldn’t be able to have a website without a project manager keeping everything on time, up to specs, and on budget.
Below is a list of standard items for any custom web development project.
WordPress development costs
Price: Included
We build all of our websites on a WordPress content management system that will give complete control over your website to you and your staff. More than 37% of the entire Internet, including many Fortune 500 companies from Sony to Rolling Stone, is currently running on a WordPress CMS.
The work that goes into our WordPress services includes setting up WordPress in as secure a way as possible and configuring it to work the best way we can for our clients.
Careful thought is put into the permalink structure and the default structure of pages, portfolios, blogs, and categories to make it as future-proof as possible.
WordPress framework/theme
Our website designs will be implemented using a fast & lightweight theme called “Hello Elementor” if we will be using Elementor for the content. The look and feel of our websites are handled by the widely popular WordPress plugin called “Elementor.”
If it makes sense, we will use other themes as a framework, such as Divi and BeThemes. Still, typically we gravitate to Elementor as it allows for rapid development and an incredible end-user experience.
Default WordPress plugins
Default WordPress can handle a ton of functionality. We extend its functionality using a bunch of plugins, such as:
Gravity Forms:
Top-of-the-line premium form system for contact forms and any other forms needed. We include the license for free with our developer’s license. Create custom web forms to capture leads, collect payments, automate workflows, and build your business online.
Rank Math:
Rank Math is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices. On-site SEO, XML sitemaps, 301 redirects & every tool you would ever need to perform SEO.
Elementor:
Controls the look and feel of the website. Easy to use for non-designers to make WordPress pages look great!
WordFence:
Wordfence is the most popular WordPress firewall and security scanner, protecting over 4 million websites worldwide from attackers targeting WordPress.
Akismet:
Spam prevention.
WP Rocket:
WP Rocket is the most powerful web performance plugin in the world. It will instantly reduce your load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores. No coding skills are needed. The license is free because of our developer’s license.
Monster Insights:
The Best WordPress Analytics Plugin
Deliverables: A customized WordPress CMS solution.
Design template implementation
Price: Included in the cost per design price
Turning our beautiful designs into pixel-perfect clickable templates accounts for a lot of time in the web development process. The more templates we need to code and make look perfect on all devices, the more time and cost go into a project.
Deliverables: Clickable HTML versions of all approved designs.
Website Enhancements
This is where a website’s cost can start to skyrocket. WordPress websites can handle a ton of functionality out of the box, but when your website starts to require more functionality, the man-hours increase exponentially. In addition, each feature requires plugins, expertise, setup, and quality assurance steps that add to the total cost of building a website.
Major website enhancement costs
Price: a la cart pricing below
Major website enhancements would be functionality that requires quite a bit of work and usually defines a project’s characteristics.
Data transfer services
Price: $500
We lean heavily on Zapier. If you want to connect your contact forms and leads to Salesforce or HubSpot, then this is something you will want. It will save a ton of data entry, and the effort will help streamline your funnel and sales process.
Building a community with BuddyPress
Price: $1000
Building a website that has a community aspect will require the installation and setup of BuddyPress. If you want forums, private messaging, and enhanced directory functionality, this can add quite a bit of cost to a project but will be well worth it.
Paid Membership
Price: $1000
If you want to run a membership site that will have gated content, this is the option you need.
Event Registration
Price: $1000
If you would like a system that will allow you to create events, deprecate available tickets after purchase, and have users pay for attendance, we can build you a fully-featured system that is easy for your customers to use and easy for you to manage. Unfortunately, because of the complexity of these plugins, quite a bit of time is typically involved in getting these set up, thus increasing the cost.
Giveaways / Raffles
Price: $500
Running Giveaways or raffles on your website can be a fantastic attention grabber and source of visibility for your services or products.
Custom Photo Galleries
Price: $500 to $1000
If you want to have a deep and fully functional image gallery that can handle tons of albums and even allow for image purchases, this is the option you will need. We use a WordPress responsive gallery plugin called NextGEN Gallery for most situations.
Deliverables: Fully functional and tested website functionality
Minor enhancement costs
Price: a la cart pricing below
These are all of the small bells and whistles that we can add to a website to make it stand out and provide that extra something needed to make your website work for you.
Newsletter signups
Price: $200
We will connect a gravity form option signup to your email marketing program of choice. We can also add a checkbox to an existing form to add people to your email lists.
Live chat
Price: $200
We typically suggest the plugin called “Live Chat.” It’s a great system that allows you to chat via an app or phone. We will configure the chat to look good on your website by matching fonts and colors as best we can.
Advanced search
Price: $200
Default WordPress site search can sometimes be a bit lacking. Several premium search plugins are available to provide a better search experience for your users.
Website caching
Price: $200
We leverage WPRocket or Nitropack to handle our caching needs. There is quite a bit of setup involved in making these caching plugins work optimally.
Popups, slide-ins, and exit-intent
Price: $200 for each module
Each popup needs to be custom-designed, set up, and tested to work hard for you.
Accessibility
Price: $200
To handle the heavy lifting for ADA compliance and accessibility, we can use a plugin by Userway. They have a free or paid version that will handle compliance at different levels. The labor for either option is included. You will need to handle the hard cost directly with the vendor if you opt for the paid version.
Deliverables: Fully functional and tested website functionality
eCommerce
Price: $1500
Our eCommerce services revolve entirely around the WordPress + WooCommerce combo. WooCommerce will give you an extremely user-friendly shopping cart that is easy to manage and full of powerful features such as:
- Full Store management via an easy-to-use WordPress admin
- Marketing features such as coupons
- Easy-to-understand reporting
- Extremely SEO friendly (I can’t stress this part enough)
- One page checkout
- User-generated ratings & reviews
- Social media sharing integration
- Product filtering
- Multiple images per product
- And much, much more.
We have used many eCommerce systems in the past and have found that this is a truly great system for many reasons. We will also provide full training to you at the end of the project to easily manage your store in the future.
Deliverables: Fully functional WooCommerce eCommerce system
How many products & categories?
Price: $50 per product or product category
The more products and categories that need to be set up, the longer a project will take. A website with a ton of categories can get more complex in regards to faceted navigations etc. We keep our pricing transparent and straightforward. Count your total SKUs and categories and multiply by $50.
Keep in mind that we train you at the end of the project on how to add products and categories yourself. Some clients have us add just one product to each category on the site to help keep costs down, and they will handle loading the site after launch.
Deliverables: Categories and products added to your store
eCommerce Enhancement Costs
Price: a la cart pricing below
WooCommerce comes out of the box with everything you need to run a successful online store. There are, however, several additional features that can add to your store’s functionality that you may find worth it.
Below are a handful of these add-ons. The pricing is for our labor only. Each plugin will require a premium plugin we will ask you to purchase.
Wholesale selling
Price: $500
If you would like to provide wholesale functionality, this can be handled by a number of different solutions. All will allow you to define a user as a user group member and then allow specific user groups to have their own product pricing.
Subscriptions
Price: $500
One of the best ways to stabilize your income from your eCommerce site is to set up subscriptions. Our subscription solutions allow you to define intervals as well as the discount incentive for users to subscribe.
Live Rate Shipping
Price: $300
We can tie into a live feed of USPS, FedEx, or UPS shipping costs and provide a way for you to mark these prices up.
Quickbooks (Or other) integration
Price: $300
Tying into your accounting software will negate the need for a ton of data entry and keep your accountant happy.
Enhanced coupons
Price: $300
If you find WooCOmmerce’s default coupon system lacking, there are plenty of other solutions that can add BOGO and other coupons to your system.
Shipstation (or other) Integration
Price: $100
Once stores hit a certain volume, they inevitably look to outsource the fulfillment of their products. We can tie into your Shipstation or another account as long as they offer a WordPress plugin when that time comes. This is usually pretty simple for us, as most of the work will be between you and Shipstation.
Deliverables: Fully functional and tested eCommerce functionality
Content
It’s all too common for clients to underestimate the amount of effort (cost) required for the content aspect of a website. The words, imagery, and content need to come from somewhere.
This content will either need to be produced by the end client, which will take time (money), or it will be hired out (money).
How Large is Your Site?
Price: $125/page and $50/blog article
How many total pages are on your website? This can drastically affect the cost of building a website. A page is any unique URL on your website.
Remember to include every page, even pages such as privacy policy and “thank-You” pages for contact forms. If you are using a blog, count the number of new blog articles we will need to add.
Deliverables: Content added to the site
Copywriting costs
When dreaming up a website, people often neglect to factor in the very real costs of the website content. Writing and producing the content yourself will, of course, be free! As long as you consider your time a free commodity.
To help estimate these costs, if you want to outsource the copy costs on your site, we offer three types of copywriting services:
- Sales page / Services Page copy: $400 per 500-word sales page
- eCommerce website product descriptions: $400 per 400-word product or category pages
- Blog articles: $300 per 1500-word article
Imagery costs
A HUGE part of why any web design looks great has to do with the quality of the images that are used. Unfortunately, too many times, we have seen beautiful website designs not see their true potential because of subpar quality in their imagery.
Stock photography
Price: Included – We allow for one stock image per page that our designers will select
Stock images are used all of the time and, in our opinion, are much better than having no images at all. Our website, for instance, uses stock imagery alongside our custom-made graphics. We can help wade through the sea of available stock images for you to help find the right images to complement the copy on your page.
We tend to gravitate towards curated stock photography sites like iStock or Shutterstock for this purpose. However, many other websites offer affordable options, and we can help point you in the right direction depending on your needs.
Stock images can range from $1 to $50 each, depending on the level of quality needed and their intended use. We recommend having at least one image on each interior page as it dramatically increases the visual appeal.
Deliverables: Royalty-free stock images added to each page
Custom photography
Price: Varies greatly
We much prefer that our clients provide us with authentic original imagery to use throughout their websites. People can pick out stock images from a mile away these days.
Using your own unique images can only re-enforce your company’s commitment to quality. Handling your images in this way will help ensure that your website is unique and stands out among the crowd.
We do not offer this as a service currently, but we welcome any custom images you can provide.
Deliverables: Incorporating your custom photography into the website.
Quality Assurance
Price: included
During the architecture phase, our project manager will be defining project-specific functionality that will require individual testing. This will be added to your project tracker for monitoring.
Before launch, we go through our own rigorous QA process to ensure your site is fully functional, looks fantastic on all devices and screen sizes, and functionality such as orders and contact forms are fully functional.
At this point, our art director will also be looking over the clickable site to make sure it is up to our design standards before we pass it on to you for your own testing before launch.
Deliverables: A website that works as great as it looks!
Training
Price: included
At the end of the project, we will spend one hour on Zoom with you to help train you on all the fine details of managing your web application. We will tailor this training specifically to how you will be using your new website.
While building out your website, we will gain a clear understanding of how you will likely want to use your WordPress system and can tailor-make a training session based on your needs.
Our training sessions are very specific to the website we are talking about, and we have a knack for helping people accelerate their understanding of the WordPress system.
Deliverables: The transfer of knowledge!
Marketing
Aligning and elevating branding, design, and marketing as a unit will always yield the best results. When you design a new site, especially if you have new branding, it’s always advisable to hit the ground running with new social graphics to match and an inbound marketing strategy to get the new visitors through the door.
These, of course, come with their own sets of costs. Is your pocketbook sore yet? Sorry 🙂
Social Media account designs
Price: $200 per social channel
Designing Social Media Accounts to match the new look and feel can really create a cohesive campaign launch. You give the list of social media channels you are active on, and we will provide a new profile and banner images to match the new design.
Deliverables: A social profile and banner image for each
Search engine optimization
Build it, and they will come does not work in the world of large and small business web development. You will want to do everything you can to get in the good graces of the search engines. SEO services can benefit small business websites and large websites alike.
Included in our base price are all of the on-site search engine optimizations that a good developer should include. The website will be built using preferred semantics to give our system the best chance to perform in the search engines.
Onsite Optimization
Price: included
We will handle the following as part of our base price:
Keyword Research: Find the best keywords people use when looking for content like yours. We will set a primary keyword for all “Money Pages” on your website.
On-Site Optimization: Implementing the keyword research in your meta title tag, image alt text, etc.
301 Redirects: If your project is a redesign and we are forced to restructure your URLs because of a CMS change or poor site structure, we will set up 301 redirects. 301’s can minimize the potential negative SEO effects of URL changes by redirecting all old URLs to the new, improved URLs.
Search Engine Submissions: During the launch, we will create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console to speed up the indexation process.
Website Monitoring and Statistics: We will create a Google Analytics account and tie it to the website (or connect to your account if you already have one). This will give us website statistics such as visits by location, key terms, technologies, top pages, and an infinite amount of data to help monitor visitor activity and show our progress with marketing campaigns and the ability to pinpoint opportunities as they arise.
Deliverables: A well-optimized website with Google tracking
Additional SEO services
Price: a la cart pricing below
Google My Business setup
Price: $200
If you are a locally focused business and notice that Google Maps results tend to show when you do web searches in your industry, it’s vital to get your GMB set up correctly. We can help with this.
Local SEO
Price: $500
We can help coordinate a map submission campaign using a web service that will submit your physical location to every major (and minor) map system. This sends strong local signals to Google to help you rank.
SEO Strategy
Price: $500 / hour
If you are a DIY owner, you can hire us to develop an SEO strategy you can execute. This strategy will be heavily custom-tailored to your specific needs and capabilities.
Link building campaign
Price: $375 / link
When you launch a new site, a great way to kick off the search visibility is with backlinks from strong/relevant websites. Our link building services can get you the links you need.
HARO link building
Price: $600 / link
We can run an editorial link-building campaign that can potentially land you backlinks from some of the strongest websites on earth. Website writers need experts to be quoted in their pieces, and we can answer on your behalf.
Deliverables: Fully executed SEO tasks
Ongoing Costs
Several website costs will continue after the launch of the website.
The cost of a domain name
Price: From $15 / year
We suggest using a company like Godaddy to purchase your domain name. Even if you aren’t ready to build your website now, you should secure a domain name as soon as possible. It is a lot harder than you would think to get the domain name you desire.
If SEO is important to you, buying a domain name that includes your primary keyword may be in your best interest. Even if Google says that they do not want keyword stuffing domain names to work, you will see that the practice still does work if you look at a typical search result page.
Web Hosting
Price: From $35 / Month
We do not offer website hosting to our clients. Instead, we help create a relationship between a vendor and or clients. We feel you must have your own website host and think it is shifty for web design companies to charge for hosting.
There are many different types of web hosting out there. At a minimum, a shared hosting account that plays well with WordPress is needed. You can move up from basic packages to better hosting to help with speed and bandwidth if you so choose. Our favorite affordable web host is WP Engine.
Any reputable web hosting company will also offer a free SSL certificate. However, do not forget this feature. It’s crucial!
If your site is planning on a massive amount of traffic or you will be dropping large sums into paid search, it may be a good idea to invest in a dedicated hosting package. Every fraction of a second can have an impact on conversion rates. It will be up to you to determine if the lofty costs of dedicated hosting will be justified by the increased ROI of a faster-loading site.
Website maintenance costs
Price: $100 / hr
After the website’s launch, we will transition to an hourly arrangement. We can handle any edits for you hourly ($100/hr). We all run off from timers and only charge the actual time worked. We will bill on the first of the month for any support work completed in the previous month.
FAQs
How much does it cost to hire someone to build a website?
Small website: $5000 – $7000
E-commerce website: $7000 – $15000
High-End website: $10,000 – $50,000
How much does a website cost per month?
Shared Hosting: $10 – $100 / month
Software Updates: $85 – $1000 / month
Marketing: $2,000 – $250,000 / month
How much does a high-end website cost?
Typically starts at $10,000.
Pricing varies depending on the specs. As most factors relating to the cost of a web design project are based on labor and time spent, pricing can skyrocket quickly. The more time and detail that goes into a project and the more details, the more money you should plan on spending.
How much does it cost to build a website for a small business?
Depending on the project requirements, a small business website will cost you around $5,000 to $50,000. This is a safe range for a typical 5 to 100-page website with mostly text and image-based content (little unique functionality).
What makes a website more expensive?
One of the most critical factors that make a website expensive is how long it will take for developers to code. The number and size of pages and good performance and speed all come into play with this. For example, suppose your site has many more pages or takes longer than the average time to perform operations, then yes. In that case, indeed, you can expect those costs to be higher because there are just so many things that need attention which ultimately leads back down to the price tag!
