How Much Does It Cost to Build a Website for a Small Business?

Are you a small business owner? Looking to build a website but wondering–how much does it cost to build a website for a small business? Then you are in the right place.

Unlike large and medium-sized businesses, small businesses or start-ups have a limited budget. On average, a small may spend around $2000 to $10000 for a website. Yet some factors affect the overall cost, such as the size, intricacy, or whether you hire an experienced web designer.

In the following section, we’ve described the overall scenario to help you make decisions and clarify the confusion.

Not necessarily all businessmen should have their own business website for thriving in the race at first. There are many examples where they run their business depending on the social media marketing strategies for small businesses, and in some cases, that bring massive results as well.

But as we have mentioned above - sometimes social media channels fail to bring massive results and retain its sustainability. In that case, you may need a website that can boost your business brand value and be a sustainable source for traffic at the same time.

So, before hiring a developer to build your site for your small business, find the answers to the following questions first.

• How big is your business?
• What about the operational cost of your business in a month?
• How many customers do you get in a month on average? And what about its average increasing rate?
• What about your business brand value?
• Do you have any precise plan and cost calculation regarding the further brand value improvement of your business?
• How much value can a website contribute to your business?

This is not the end. You should ask some other relevant questions to yourself and write down the answers on paper. Considering all the important factors, do some brainstorming and get your decision.

The direct answer to the question is - it depends! Developing a small company website typically costs between $2000 and $10,000. This average covers the cost of your domain registration, hosting service, and designing and developing your website for one-time. Your website's size, structure, and functionality will determine how much your firm will have to pay to build it.

Considering the general perspective, we can initially identify 3 factors that may influence your website building cost for small businesses. And these are -

• Factor-1: Website Size
• Factor-2: Design Type
• Factor-3: Technology Type

There exists a proportional relationship between website size and its development cost. Developing more pages for your website will need more budget.

And the reason behind this is - each of the pages needs to be developed, maintaining unique design patterns according to the type of your business that eventually impacts the overall cost.

In your case, considering the size of your business, you may have to develop 20 - 50 pages for your website to showcase your products or services.
Basically, a website size includes the following factors that may impact your overall budget.

• Unique design for each page
• SEO optimization for each page
• Content production
• Development and management

And another mentionable fact is, it doesn’t matter how small your website is - you will always need to keep the following pages.

• Homepage
• About Us
• Terms & Conditions
• Contact Us
• Company Policy, etc.

So, considering the overall size or number of pages and all other factors, your cost may differ.

Learn: Affordable Web Design for Small Business: The Complete Guide

The average website design cost for small businesses may vary depending on multiple factors. As the end goal of your website is to attract your customers and keep them engaged with your business and convert them into leads, design is the vital factor that you should consider in this run.

And depending on that, you can get an approximate idea of how much it costs to build a website for a small business.

And it has been stated multiple times in different resources about 50% of consumers believe that web design is crucial to a business’s overall brand! To impress your customer in first appearance, there is no other alternative except keeping a decent budget on website design.

Web design costs may differ according to the design type or technology. In this regard, you will have the following options to choose your design type for your website.

• Template Based Design
• Custom Design

Template Based Design:

In template-based web design, you will have a rich collection of page layouts, from where you can choose your desired one, considering the type of your small business. Each layout will allow you to customize images, blocks, content, and other stuff without knowing any coding knowledge.

But, there are both pros and cons of template-based design. Let’s get introduced to some of these-

Pros

• Cost-effective
• Super easy to customize
• No coding knowledge required
• A rich collection of prebuilt designs
• Easy management

Cons

• Limited features
• Decreases website loading time
• A little bit challenging to make SEO friendly

Learn: Local Online Advertising Ideas for Small Businesses

Custom design:

Custom designs for websites are made with raw coding. In simple words, you will hire a professional who will prepare the design of your web pages. And then, the web developer will perform coding and make your web pages identical to the designs.

Even though this process is costly compared to the template-based design process, it will allow you to get some added advantages that are handy.

Pros

• Huge customizing facility
• Enriched features
• Easy to make your pages SEO friendly
• Significantly improves website loading time
• Improves security

Cons

• Comparatively expensive
• Coding knowledge is required
• Time-consuming

Depending on the technology you will use to LIVE your site, it can be estimated how much a website costs. Mainly you will have two options to build any website -

• CMS Based Website (Web 2.0)
• Custom Developed Website

CMS Based Website

You will find many CMS (Content Management System) platforms that allow you to create your own website for free with limited features.

By investing a little, you can get the premium functionalities and create your website considering your business type, the features you need, and some other parameters.

WordPress, Squarespace, etc., are popular examples of such platforms where you will need no coding knowledge to build your business website.

Advantages

• Affordable
• No coding knowledge required
• Built-in database management system
• Thousands of free themes and plugins
• Enhanced security

Disadvantages

• Loading speed increases due to heavy themes and plugins
• Limited features in free version
• They don’t rank well on Google

Learn: Affordable Local SEO Services for Small Businesses

Custom Developed Website

It’s an open reality that, if you have enough budget, you should go for developing your website by custom coding. Even though this project will take way more cost than a CMS-based project, it will get you great benefits in multiple ways in the long run.

And the major advantage of custom web development is - custom web development offers vast design customization opportunities without sacrificing site loading time.

Advantages

• Vast design customizing opportunity
• Search engine friendly and easily gets ranked on Google
• It enables you to keep your site lightweight
• Plenty of custom functionalities
• Web security improving convenience

Disadvantages

• Requires a significant amount of budget
• Comparatively time-consuming to develop
• Requires enhanced maintenance and support

Depending on the website size, design, and technology, your website maintenance cost may vary. Considering your business size, you have options to choose the convenient one to save your valuable money.

But there are some mandatory costs that you should keep in all cases. Let’s know some of these.

1. Domain ($0.95 - $20/Year):

A domain name is the primary step of branding your business and the online street address at the same time. Depending on your business type or your company name, you should pick up your domain name for your business.

For instance, amazon.com is the domain name of the world’s biggest e-commerce business organization Amazon. Similarly, apple.com, google.com represent the domain names of Apple and Google, respectively.

After choosing your domain name, you may need $0.95 to $20 per Year to spend, depending on the domain extension and domain type.

Popular Places To Buy Domain: Namecheap, Hostgator, GoDaddy, etc.

2. Hosting ($24 - $120/Year)

Hosting is basically the cloud storage system where all the files and contents of your website stay. When a visitor visits your website domain, it fetches the content of your website from the hosting that should be shown to the visitor or your potential customer!

Depending on the average traffic (total number of visitors) that you get in a month, you should choose your appropriate hosting plan for your small business. There are basically 5 types of hosting plans.

• Shared Hosting
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
• Dedicated Server Hosting
• Cloud Hosting
• Managed Hosting
• Colocation

From all of these, Shared Hosting is the most cost effective package to choose for your small business.

3. SSL Certificate ($0 - $1500/Year)

To protect your website and your visitors’ data, an SSL certificate is one of the most convenient options to choose. Initially, it may cost no money considering the hosting plan you choose.

Because sometimes, hosting providers provide SSL certificates for free for One Year with their hosting plans. After One Year, you have to pay the money considering the price tag of SSL.

Some tech enthusiasts think SSL certificates are worthless investments, which is not true at all! Rather, an SSL certificate allows you to get the following benefits-

• Reduces the chances of getting hacked
• Helps to protect from spamming
• Makes your site trustworthy to search engines

Learn: Affordable SEO Services for Small Business

In the discussion above, we have discussed the overall cost that will give you an approximate idea regarding how much investment you need initially for your small business.

And following the discussion, you also got to know that there are basically two options that will allow you to develop your website.

• Go for CMS (DIY)
• Hire a Developer

But which option should you choose? The straightforward answer is - If you have a low budget and a dedicated traffic source who are actually your loyal customer base, you can consider going DIY!

 We want to put some other points in this regard, considering what you can choose to develop your site yourself.

• When you just have started your business and have a low budget
• When you are expert enough in DIY
• When you have enough time to maintain your site without sacrificing the hours for your business
• When you can run your business with limited features
• When you are not solely dependent on search engines for grabbing traffic

But remember one thing, if your budget is decent, it’s always recommended to hire a professional or hire website maintenance agency to make your work done! At the end of the day, search engines like Google love custom websites to rank.

Last of all, thanks for showing your extreme patience in reading the discussion regarding how much does it cost to build a website for a small business. But the mentionable fact is - in the discussion, we have covered only the major parts where investing money is mandatory.
There are other important parts, such as technical SEO, content production, image optimization, etc., where you will need investment. To know about these with proper guidance, you may contact the VISER X support completely free of cost. They are 24/7/365 active to respond to you!

So, get your website ready considering your business size and bring an extra boost in your business to thrive more!

Well! We hope you have got a clear understanding of how much does it cost to build a website for a small business. And throughout the discussion, some queries have definitely appeared in your mind.

Before wrapping up, let’s find the answers to these questions.

• Q- How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost?

Well! As you have read the whole discussion, you already know that we have covered this topic. Depending on the multiple factors, the price may differ. But initially, you have to keep a budget for the following things when your business is small.

• Domain cost
• Hosting cost
• Small business web design cost
• Development cost

Here the domain and hosting cost is near to constant. Design and development cost may vary considering the method you choose. To know in detail about the cost of building a website, reread the section where we have discussed in detail.

• Q- Can I Build My Own Website?

Of course you can! But that will be time consuming especially if you decide to complete the whole project alone. Content Management Systems (CMS) can be your worthy solution in such a case. Following some simple procedures, you can easily build and launch your site.

For instance, if you choose to LIVE your site with WordPress CMS, you can follow the following procedure by considering a nominal wordpress website cost.

• Step - 1: Buy a domain and hosting plan
• Step - 2: Connect your domain with the hosting using the nameserver addresses (to know in details, consult with the provider)
• Step - 3: Login to your hosting CPanel and install WordPress
• Step - 4: Visit “yourdomain.com/wp-admin” and login with your login credentials
• Step - 5: Install an e-commerce theme for your small business
• Step - 6: Boom! Your site is primarily ready to LIVE. Now your task is to complete the further tasks for decorating your site

NB: Making sites with CMS may seem easy to prepare without any coding knowledge. But be informed - CMS based sites are tough to rank on search engines as they can’t offer swift loading speed!

• Q - Do You Have to Pay Monthly for Websites?

It depends! If you hire someone to develop your site completely at once, you’ll have to pay for one time including. But when you need to handle the increasing workload of your site, you may hire a professional to do all the tasks on behalf of you. In that case, you will have to consider paying a certain amount a month.

But there are some other costs that you should pay monthly. And these are

• Domain
• Hosting
• SSL Certificate
• Premium Theme (Applicable for CMS based sites)

• Q - How Much is a Domain Name?

You can get your domain for your business at nominal price from almost all the domain and hosting service providers. Depending on the extension of your domain, the price slightly may vary. For “.com” extension you can get your domain between $0.95 to $20 price range.

• Q- How Much to Pay Someone to Build a Website?

Depending on the skill of that professional and the sizes of your website the price may vary. But on an average a freelancer takes $8000 for completing the whole project. Depending on the project type and some other parameters the amount can vary.

• Q - How Long Does It Take to Build a Website?

The honest answer is - it depends! If you hire a professional freelancer to make your work done, he will complete the project within the time limit as per the contract. But hiring a freelancer is less reliable than hiring an agency.

VISER X is one of the finest agencies in the world where they provide Web Development Services within cost effective packages. The website design prices and developing costs are also affordable. And one of the most surprising facts about this agency is - you can monitor the overall progress of your work without any question! After all, this solution will save both your money and time.

They also provide some other website related services such as-

• Web Application Development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Writing and Development
• Digital Marketing Services

And all the services you can enjoy with a cost effective price range.