Jun 13, 2019
How much does an effective website cost?
How much does an effective website cost?
How much does an effective website cost?
Watatow, this is one of the most controversial questions in the history of controversial questions: how much does a website cost?
Is your brother-in-law's website, which was created by his nephew in his basement for his construction business, a good site? Probably. Given that the infrastructure needed to create a website is very minimal, anyone can be qualified to do it. However, web agencies often have a huge advantage: the sharing of knowledge!
Here is a small practical guide to understand the value and price of a website divided into 9 sections:
General expertise
The CMS
The structure
SEO strategy
Conversion strategy
The design
The code
The plugins
The hosting
What is expertise?
I have expertise in the field of construction. I had a business for 10 years that evolved well and thrived. I know the market well, and especially the needs of clients. My added value for a client in the construction field is very hard to beat. However, on one of my food projects, I realized that my expertise was not what I thought.
Therefore, I feel much more comfortable charging higher fees to a construction company than to a food company, and I am always very transparent with my clients. There are ultra-specialized agencies in food e-commerce, but their fees are much higher than mine. In that situation, I leave it to the client to make a decision based on their budget.
Transparent agencies often have the clients they desire; this is the philosophy we adopt at Gro.
The CMS: Content Management System
A website can be made in 3 ways:
100% custom (without any CMS)
Custom using a CMS
With a template using a CMS
What is the difference between the 3?
First, let’s start by understanding what a CMS is. A CMS is the structure that will allow you to access the “back-end” of your website: it’s your dashboard. You can add and remove content, pages, services, articles, products for sale, etc.
There are many different CMSs; here are the main ones:
WordPress accounts for 60% of websites on the planet for several reasons. It’s one of the easiest to use, and the community is huge. This allows for the addition of thousands of new extensions every week. However, it is not suitable for all situations.
For example, one of our clients has an e-commerce site that synchronizes its inventory among its eight different stores. We opted for Prestashop because it’s a perfect CMS for this kind of situation.
For micro businesses or companies with very small budgets: Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify can do the work quite well.
WordPress was originally designed for blogging. However, due to its immense popularity, it’s now possible to add extensions to turn it into an e-commerce site. For service companies, for blogs, or for small e-commerce (2000 products or less), we believe WordPress is the best solution.
The structure
The more pages there are, the more expensive a site will be to program. The structure is the layout your website will have. If it’s well thought out, this will have very positive impacts on SEO (organic search engine optimization) and UX (user experience). By prioritizing certain pages, your SEO can improve for important keywords in your market.
If the structure is built in the following way: from pages with little information to pages with a lot of information, this will provide visitors with a better UX experience, encouraging them to visit multiple pages… which greatly helps organic search engine optimization (SEO).
The SEO strategy
SEO can be very expensive, and it is often recouped in the medium term. That’s why it’s essential to consider its importance in your situation. If you already have a website with significant organic traffic, and we plan to redesign your platform, it is crucial to have an SEO strategy to avoid affecting your traffic. Prices vary depending on the number of pages and traffic on the site.
Next, if your site is new and you want it to “appear” on search engines (Google and such), you will need to prepare a list of keywords, a structure, and set up/optimize a Google My Business account.
The costs for this strategy mainly depend on the size of the site. Between approximately $1,000 and $5,000.
The conversion strategy
How much does a website with a good conversion strategy cost? The best way to achieve a good conversion rate is to maintain a monthly budget for the continuous improvement of your site. There are many examples of sites that convert well online; you just need to do research and create wireframes for the design team.
Then, with tags, pixels, and the tool Hotjar, it becomes very easy to identify conversion flaws on a website and/or to improve it continuously.
What is Hotjar? It’s a software that allows you to track movements, clicks, and actions taken on our site. It is also possible to “record” the visitors. This becomes very effective on conversion pages (landing pages). A/B testing is also essential for continuously improving the conversion rate of a website.
There are two possibilities:
You learn to do the tests yourself
You hire an agency
Don't forget that the fees are about $125/hour on average.
The design
This is the most difficult part to quantify since it involves artistic creation and is therefore very subjective. However, a design with a good budget ($500 to $700/page) will allow enough time and leeway for the design team to do research and make the site as unique as possible, using as little content from stock images as possible. Custom content will be created as much as possible. The artistic direction will help the programmer anticipate visual effects while navigating the website.
The code and the plugins (including security!)
How much does a website with good plugins cost? The more a website contains plugins, the riskier it is in terms of security. Themes and plugins are often created by individuals and are not always well-coded. This is the main entry point for malware and hackers.
This is why our websites are 100% custom coded with top-notch, certified WordPress plugins. This avoids many security issues.
The better the code of your site, the more efficient your website will be. A site that takes more than 2 seconds to load already loses 50% of its traffic! Imagine if you invest $5,000 in advertising per month and 50% of your traffic goes down the drain...
Our programmers use a tool called ACF. This tool allows site owners to modify almost everything on the site themselves. This avoids having to pay the agency for modifications on their website!
Finally, a good programmer will build the site with a naming convention and an easy-to-use structure allowing for transfer to another programmer. This prevents you from being tied to the agency.
The hosting
A “cheap”, insecure, and shared hosting costs between $12 and $30 per month for a site with low traffic (less than 10K unique visitors per month). A performing, secure, and non-shared hosting costs between $50 and $75 per month.
For e-commerce, it’s a different matter. We do not have the expertise to talk about premium hosting for e-commerce, but we recommend Likuid or Stock Harbor if that is your need.
Here is a little true story:
How much does a website with good hosting cost? One of our clients, who invested $10k in marketing per month, had a WordPress developed by us. It was previously 100% custom and hosted by a company whose name I'll keep to myself. After 10 months, in the middle of September, the site became blacklisted by Google.
Result: 80% decrease in leads during my client’s peak season.
Everyone's fingers were pointed at us.
After 15 hours of analysis and testing, we were able to determine that the site was not infected and that the problem was actually with the server that was shared with several other websites...
If we calculate the financial losses for my client, our billable time, that of the marketing agency, etc., it comes to around $30,000. All this for putting a site on a “cheap” shared server.
It’s not my client’s fault; he absolutely knew nothing about this...
Moral of the story: cheap is bad, especially for hosting.
Conclusion
So, how much does a website cost? As you can see, creating a high-performing website aiming to be profitable and to create value for your business requires expertise in several different areas:
Conversion
Design
SEO
Programming
Marketing
Marketing Automation
Hosting
The more experts included in your project, the higher the chances of success. The costs related to your project will increase too!
Watatow, this is one of the most controversial questions in the history of controversial questions: how much does a website cost?
Is your brother-in-law's website, which was created by his nephew in his basement for his construction business, a good site? Probably. Given that the infrastructure needed to create a website is very minimal, anyone can be qualified to do it. However, web agencies often have a huge advantage: the sharing of knowledge!
Here is a small practical guide to understand the value and price of a website divided into 9 sections:
General expertise
The CMS
The structure
SEO strategy
Conversion strategy
The design
The code
The plugins
The hosting
What is expertise?
I have expertise in the field of construction. I had a business for 10 years that evolved well and thrived. I know the market well, and especially the needs of clients. My added value for a client in the construction field is very hard to beat. However, on one of my food projects, I realized that my expertise was not what I thought.
Therefore, I feel much more comfortable charging higher fees to a construction company than to a food company, and I am always very transparent with my clients. There are ultra-specialized agencies in food e-commerce, but their fees are much higher than mine. In that situation, I leave it to the client to make a decision based on their budget.
Transparent agencies often have the clients they desire; this is the philosophy we adopt at Gro.
The CMS: Content Management System
A website can be made in 3 ways:
100% custom (without any CMS)
Custom using a CMS
With a template using a CMS
What is the difference between the 3?
First, let’s start by understanding what a CMS is. A CMS is the structure that will allow you to access the “back-end” of your website: it’s your dashboard. You can add and remove content, pages, services, articles, products for sale, etc.
There are many different CMSs; here are the main ones:
WordPress accounts for 60% of websites on the planet for several reasons. It’s one of the easiest to use, and the community is huge. This allows for the addition of thousands of new extensions every week. However, it is not suitable for all situations.
For example, one of our clients has an e-commerce site that synchronizes its inventory among its eight different stores. We opted for Prestashop because it’s a perfect CMS for this kind of situation.
For micro businesses or companies with very small budgets: Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify can do the work quite well.
WordPress was originally designed for blogging. However, due to its immense popularity, it’s now possible to add extensions to turn it into an e-commerce site. For service companies, for blogs, or for small e-commerce (2000 products or less), we believe WordPress is the best solution.
The structure
The more pages there are, the more expensive a site will be to program. The structure is the layout your website will have. If it’s well thought out, this will have very positive impacts on SEO (organic search engine optimization) and UX (user experience). By prioritizing certain pages, your SEO can improve for important keywords in your market.
If the structure is built in the following way: from pages with little information to pages with a lot of information, this will provide visitors with a better UX experience, encouraging them to visit multiple pages… which greatly helps organic search engine optimization (SEO).
The SEO strategy
SEO can be very expensive, and it is often recouped in the medium term. That’s why it’s essential to consider its importance in your situation. If you already have a website with significant organic traffic, and we plan to redesign your platform, it is crucial to have an SEO strategy to avoid affecting your traffic. Prices vary depending on the number of pages and traffic on the site.
Next, if your site is new and you want it to “appear” on search engines (Google and such), you will need to prepare a list of keywords, a structure, and set up/optimize a Google My Business account.
The costs for this strategy mainly depend on the size of the site. Between approximately $1,000 and $5,000.
The conversion strategy
How much does a website with a good conversion strategy cost? The best way to achieve a good conversion rate is to maintain a monthly budget for the continuous improvement of your site. There are many examples of sites that convert well online; you just need to do research and create wireframes for the design team.
Then, with tags, pixels, and the tool Hotjar, it becomes very easy to identify conversion flaws on a website and/or to improve it continuously.
What is Hotjar? It’s a software that allows you to track movements, clicks, and actions taken on our site. It is also possible to “record” the visitors. This becomes very effective on conversion pages (landing pages). A/B testing is also essential for continuously improving the conversion rate of a website.
There are two possibilities:
You learn to do the tests yourself
You hire an agency
Don't forget that the fees are about $125/hour on average.
The design
This is the most difficult part to quantify since it involves artistic creation and is therefore very subjective. However, a design with a good budget ($500 to $700/page) will allow enough time and leeway for the design team to do research and make the site as unique as possible, using as little content from stock images as possible. Custom content will be created as much as possible. The artistic direction will help the programmer anticipate visual effects while navigating the website.
The code and the plugins (including security!)
How much does a website with good plugins cost? The more a website contains plugins, the riskier it is in terms of security. Themes and plugins are often created by individuals and are not always well-coded. This is the main entry point for malware and hackers.
This is why our websites are 100% custom coded with top-notch, certified WordPress plugins. This avoids many security issues.
The better the code of your site, the more efficient your website will be. A site that takes more than 2 seconds to load already loses 50% of its traffic! Imagine if you invest $5,000 in advertising per month and 50% of your traffic goes down the drain...
Our programmers use a tool called ACF. This tool allows site owners to modify almost everything on the site themselves. This avoids having to pay the agency for modifications on their website!
Finally, a good programmer will build the site with a naming convention and an easy-to-use structure allowing for transfer to another programmer. This prevents you from being tied to the agency.
The hosting
A “cheap”, insecure, and shared hosting costs between $12 and $30 per month for a site with low traffic (less than 10K unique visitors per month). A performing, secure, and non-shared hosting costs between $50 and $75 per month.
For e-commerce, it’s a different matter. We do not have the expertise to talk about premium hosting for e-commerce, but we recommend Likuid or Stock Harbor if that is your need.
Here is a little true story:
How much does a website with good hosting cost? One of our clients, who invested $10k in marketing per month, had a WordPress developed by us. It was previously 100% custom and hosted by a company whose name I'll keep to myself. After 10 months, in the middle of September, the site became blacklisted by Google.
Result: 80% decrease in leads during my client’s peak season.
Everyone's fingers were pointed at us.
After 15 hours of analysis and testing, we were able to determine that the site was not infected and that the problem was actually with the server that was shared with several other websites...
If we calculate the financial losses for my client, our billable time, that of the marketing agency, etc., it comes to around $30,000. All this for putting a site on a “cheap” shared server.
It’s not my client’s fault; he absolutely knew nothing about this...
Moral of the story: cheap is bad, especially for hosting.
Conclusion
So, how much does a website cost? As you can see, creating a high-performing website aiming to be profitable and to create value for your business requires expertise in several different areas:
Conversion
Design
SEO
Programming
Marketing
Marketing Automation
Hosting
The more experts included in your project, the higher the chances of success. The costs related to your project will increase too!
#Technology, Powered by Gro!
Gro Agency 2025 - All rights reserved
#Technology, Powered by Gro!
Gro Agency 2025 - All rights reserved
#Technology, Powered by Gro!
Gro Agency 2025 - All rights reserved