How much did you spend on website?

[bryceQ]

If you've ever paid for a website to be created, how much did you pay and are you happy with it?

I'm trying to benchmark a new small business I have. I realise it's not a straightforward question as depends on many areas of what they delivered but still valuable.

Thank you

When I started out self employed, I built my own, small, simple website, which cost basically nothing but a few hours of my time to research. It generated a lot of new clients. Not because it was flash/fancy, but because few businesses had websites back then (1999/2000).

I decided to upgrade and had a professional one created for around £150 per month. Very professional looking, but a massive drop in visitor numbers and new clients generated from it, so I pulled the plug after a couple of years. Heaven knows what they did wrong, it all looked OK, and I checked the "meta's" etc which seemed fine, but it tanked in the google rankings.

Then I did my own again, and managed to google for all kinds of tricks to get it back towards the top of Google searches. Again, cost nothing but a few hours of my time.

For the past decade or so, I've been using a small local one man band who charges £299 per year to include hosting, occasional tweaks to the pages, etc., and have been generally happy with google rankings, viewings and new business generated.

I think it depends more on the quality/abilities of the web designer rather than price. As above, the most expensive one I paid for produced very poor results despite it looking good and apparently fully functional.

£3k in 2017. Was qtd £4k for wordpress customized + tweeks

Depends what you want to use it for. I did my own as well qnd change it occasionally. I mostly have it as a 'hygiene factor'. I don't use it to generate work. I do have my blog on it.

Thanks everyone. A lot of my work at the moment is fixing sites that people have built themselves and improving them, fixing SEO and better structure etc. Just not sure what to quote for a whole site, it's so tricky pricing!!

It depends where you are and how complicated the site is.

£20k + in London isn't unusual

Crikey I don't know any small businesses who paid £20k! That's what I pay for corporate complex webites in my saas job.

Well thats what a professional consultant building a bespoke website from scratch would charge you round here.

We started the company about 5 years ago. Website quotes were hugely varied from £1k to £20K- we paid £5k for the website and our branding.
Website was simple, no commerce - just a fancy business card but looked good.

The web designer got a bit bored with the updates we required or maybe got greedy, assigned junior staff with no design skills and no people skills to manage our account. We definitely felt like we had moved down their priority list. So we moved to Squarespace and I do it myself now - cheaper and so easy to make edits - we have since received very positive reviews on it - I'd be very reluctant to go back to being professionally managed - too slow and too expensive, a website needs constant updating - blogs, portfolios, case studies, team members moving on, getting promoted etc- we just needed to take back control.

Yes you can can pay less - but you'll get what you pay for!

Do make sure you know how to update the site yourself after it's built!

tow businesses here

1. a shop we built our own on Shopify works well and yes I’m sure we will get it redone at some point but bringing in far more revenue than expected.
2. complex website based on a Wordpress shop we don for £3k
3. a corporate website for same business we built for under a grand.

quotes for all of the above varied massively.

I would research the best platform (eg Shopify, Squarespace etc) for the type of website & functionality you want ( E-commerce? Service business? Do you need a checkout? Booking calendar? Etc etc) and then choose a template /theme for that platform.

Unless you are looking for some specialised complicated functionality for the website, I would recommend against any bespoke built website as it will be a pain & potentially costly to update.

Website platforms are amazing these days and are surprisingly easy to use. You could do it yourself (even with no experience) or if you don’t have time, find a web designer who is specialised in the platform to do the work for you. But the first step is to choose the platform (by doing lots of research), not the web designer as they will often just use the platform they are mostly experienced with, (which may or may not be the best for your type of functionality) or a bespoke solution as you are then tied to them for future updates.

I paid £3k for basics and then have paid more for add ins etc as needed