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How much does a new website cost? Or why can it sometimes cost so much?

Here we attempt to answer the ultimate 'how long is a piece of string?' question with some actual numbers!

A photo of a woman looking frustrated at her own laptop, which is to symbolise the issue that websites can sometimes cost more to redevelop than you'd expect. The woman is wearing a blue-grey cardigan over a bright white t-shirt, and is sitting in a comfortable home lounge environment with pale tones.

It’s one of our most frequently asked questions, and one that inevitably leads to a fairly predictable answer:

With enough patience or a web developer mate and an off-the-shelf template design, you could probably knock out a new website for under 50 quid plus the price of a bottle of booze as a thank you.

At the other end of the scale, redeveloping your website might cost £100,000 or more. Some of the cost can be expressed in purely cash terms, but other elements might need work from your in-house team which may be more difficult to put a cost on. So let’s go on a trolley dash of the extra bits and pieces you might need, to make sense of such a large range.

Let’s start at the cheap end. What do you get for £50?

Free and low-cost websites

If you’re starting from scratch, day 1, then there are more and more quick site builders out there, such as Wix, WordPress, Web.com and Squarespace. Each have their pros and cons.

You’ll get pretty backdrops, cool buttons, pre-selected fonts, and many of the quick sites help with layout and design too, so what you create looks half decent. You might even have access to a free image library. They might even host your site for free for the first year (see Hosting below).

The drawback is that if the site collateral is all free, it’s also ubiquitous, and it is instantly very hard to make your site look any different from anyone else’s.

If you’re trying to stand out from the crowd, that’s going to be very difficult.

If you want any kind of checkout function, or anything beyond what an old-skool paper brochure would have given you, the likelihood is that that will cost extra in the form of a monthly or annual fee.

The obvious benefit of this kind of solution is that it’s a way to get your basic info up and out there for the world to see, provided, that is, the world knows your url already and where to find you.

That’s because it’s going to take you a while longer to position your new site in search engines so that casual searchers who are unaware of your brand will be able to find you. SEO anyone?

If you’ve already got an existing site, then you’re in a somewhat different position, as hopefully your website is already receiving traffic and is visible to search engines. And if that’s the case, your top priority must be that the new website keeps all of that traffic.

If we had £100 for every time a company switched to a new website and lost almost all of their previous positioning, traffic and online bookings through not managing the transition process, we’d be retired by now.

What are the factors that determine the cost of a new website?

1. Managing the transition

First and foremost, there is a cost attached to managing the transition from your current site to your new one.

The more you rely on your website for brand awareness, traffic, enquiries, calls, bookings and payments, the more careful you need to be when switching from one site to another.

As the website redevelopment decision maker in your organisation, you might be under a fair amount of pressure to deliver the new website on a low budget. But get this wrong, and you’ll be under a whole lot more pressure.

There are some corners you can cut as you’ll see if you keep reading, but it’s imperative that the new website does not leave you with weaker online positioning than the current one.

A number of our new clients have been ones who start the conversation with a variation of “Please can you help us get our traffic back? Since the new site launched, it’s like we’ve vanished from the internet”.

So if a member of your board has a friend in the industry who can knock out a website for a bargainous price, and they can’t understand why it may need to cost more,... point them in this direction.

Managing the transition means having an acute awareness of what role your current site is playing for you, and/or of the time and effort you’ve invested in it so far to get it positioning in search engine results pages. Conducting that research in detail will take someone time and effort. If you have an in-house team that can do it, it’ll cost their time and money and the opportunity cost of them not working on other things. It will also cost to use an external organisation to conduct specific audits (oh wait, we do that).

Managing the transition from the current to the new site is not some box-ticking exercise like a risk assessment checklist. This is about interpreting data and using it to shape your new solution. So you’ll need analysis, not just stats.

2. SEO: Your current search engine positioning

Knowing which keywords your current site ranks for is a way to ensure that in changing the site over, you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The chances are that if your site is of any size or complexity, it will have grown and developed over time into a living organism of valuable content.

The amassed content over different page types and sections will be known to Google and other search engines, and for reasons you can’t always predict, some pages will rank more highly than others when people search online for the kind of thing you offer. So if, during the pandemic, you added a page about your online Spanish courses, you might find that, due to some quirk, that page is now ranking really well when people type “online Spanish courses” into Google. This could be where you’re deriving a lot of your qualified visitor traffic and why you’re doing quite well with your Spanish offering.

If you didn’t know that, you possibly wouldn’t think twice about culling that page post-pandemic, but to do so would have a significant impact on your business.

But knowing how well optimised your content is for search engines goes further.

A good SEO Audit will map out all the most popular keywords for your line of business, and inform you what content and what keywords you should be applying to each and every page so that your new site will be much more visible than before to those potential clients of yours.

An extended audit will prescribe new content and new pages you’re ‘missing’ which would widen the net and have you appear in front of even more qualified users. It might even list the articles you need to write, ready for your team to pick up.

COST: This kind of audit might cost anything from £500 to £5,000 depending on the size of your site, and the competitiveness of your market. The range will depend on how automated versus how human-powered the audit will be.

3. Site architecture: Corralling your content

If you only have a handful of pages, you’re laughing, and all this will be a cinch.

If you have several hundred or even thousands of pages, you might need to embark on some kind of content cull or at least a bit of a refresh. If your site has expanded organically and all of the new content is relevant (and appearing on search engines), then it will be worth remapping all of that content to create a new site architecture.

In conjunction with the SEO audit, you’ll be able to re-arrange the hierarchy of pages, create new sections and generally reorganise your url structure, so that there is a logical flow, both for users and search engine bots.

A huge part of this work will be to remap those urls, and plan your redirects. This is not one to get wrong and deserves specialist attention. You need to make sure that all of the old urls are redirected to the new ones, so that search engines don’t lose sight of your content, and so that people don’t end up clicking on broken links only to get a “404 error: page not found” message.

There’s nothing more off-putting.

COST: Redrafting the site architecture of a large, established website, and planning the redirects could easily take 2 to 5 days to complete, so with an external agency, that may add a further £1,500 - £3,000 onto the costs.

4. Channel role: The part the website plays in your overall strategy

You may get most of your business through other channels, such as retail outlets, third party agents and distributors, word of mouth or other collaborations. It’s vital before you embark on a website update that you reflect on the role the website plays in your channel mix.

The chances are, many alternative channels will still involve a potential client checking out your website. You can go through a channel mapping exercise where you consider all the reasons people visit your site.

You can use Google Analytics or heatmapping apps such as Hotjar or Crazy Egg to help build out that picture, as well as taking a look at your internal customer relationship management software, or even focus groups.

The role your website plays in actually selling your offering will also be a dynamic thing, in that it may not be quite where you want it yet, but you have objectives and ambitions around the role the website plays. If you want more direct bookers, then best to put your money where your mouth is, and think about how to improve your positioning and the user flow through the site.

Analysis of how users behave will give you clear indicators of what should change in the next iteration. If you do want conversion and sales to improve, then you’ll need to scrutinise those pages, understand where people ‘drop off’ and quit, which pages are most popular and ensure that all pages on the site lead your customers through and down the funnel, closer to a buying outcome.

5. Ambition: Knowing why you’re changing the site

As you see the costs mounting up, possibly now’s a good time to check why you’re wanting to change the site.

Some of the good reasons are:

  • The design is so very off-brand that you shudder at the thought of every visitor seeing it.
  • Key functions do not work properly or send users on a circular journey that prevents sales and enquiries.
  • Technical features of the site are causing the site to perform badly according to Google’s Core Web Vitals, resulting in a sub-optimal positioning.

You being bored with the site because you see it every day is not a reason to change it!

6. Technical: what may currently be tripping you up

There are more than 100 different elements of a website which, if implemented in a less than ideal way, can cause your site to be penalised by Google.

Some of the most common include broken links, slow page load speed, heavy and unwieldy code base (often from an off-the-shelf website template), faulty or incompatible plug-ins, accidentally duplicated pages and page content, missing or repeated meta data.

A new website is a good opportunity to straighten out issues like this. A brand new site could mean a fresh start and new opportunity to get it right.

You’re more likely to have this positive outcome if you lay down specifications to your web developers from the outset, particularly around things like page load speed (see Discovery & Specification below).

7. Same content or different?

If you’re happy with what you’ve got on the pages of your site, and you’re not looking for better SEO performance, then you can happily skip this point.

That said, if you’re looking to change the design of the site, it could be you need to rearrange the content to fit in with the new boxes, bullet points, feature panels, etc.

More likely is that you'll see a website rebuild as the perfect opportunity for a rewrite. As mentioned in point 2 about SEO, a good keyword and technical audit of the site will reveal opportunities for fresh content which will plug the keyword gaps and help you reach more of your ideal audience.

In addition, it may well be time to re-write tired pages where maybe the messaging is a little off.

If you were limited by an old template, now might be the time to expand that content out to answer more of your frequently asked questions online (and save staff time doing so manually). If your old site was conceived to avoid the need for scrolling, don't forget that as more of us use our fingers to swoosh through content instead of reaching for a mouse, we're less and less perturbed by long pages of content.

COST: If you expect the new site to perform better and appear more highly in search engines, it is highly unlikely that you are going to want to simply transpose the content and collateral on each page into the new design. There will be some rearranging to do. You might want to allow a couple of hours per page, so if you have 100 pages, that’s 25 days of someone’s time.

8. Integration: Functionality & Automation

Building automation into the website is the biggest departure from that free or cheap off-the-shelf kit website. And it’s the aspect that can have the biggest positive impact on your business.

In the service sector, one sought-after piece of automation is the ability to deliver confirmed bookings into the heart of your customer relationship management (CRM) system or other operations/delivery system.

So if your customers can only book over the phone, the next level of automation is to create a checkout function. If you already have a checkout but the bookings are delivered to you as simple, static emails, the next level of automation is to route those bookings straight into your main system.

For some clients, you might need an accept/reject gateway so the booking is held in limbo until you approve it, but the act of approving moves the client through to the next stage in the process.

For other clients, they might need specific info sent to them or actions taken automatically, based on country of origin, visa status or age.

If your aim is to cut staff costs, or simply not need to increase staffing as you grow, then automation is a route to consider. It just takes some careful scoping and planning with your developers, so you get the functionality you need.

You'll be more streamlined and efficient as an organisation if you can cut the time-consuming task of transposing data manually (and the risk of manual input errors). And a cost saving is as valuable as a sales increase.

COST: Application programming interfaces (APIs) are key here, to get one system talking seamlessly to another. It can be really heavy on programming time just to work with an existing API. One such integration might take 5 to 10 days to design, build, test and implement.

So depending on your agency, that might add £2,500 - £7,500 onto the price. As long as you can see the financial benefit from better integration, it's likely to remain a good option.

9. Content management system: Ease of use & team accessibility

One of the lowest-priority considerations when using an off-the-shelf website solution is how easy it will be for you and your team to make changes to the new website once it has been built.

There are plenty of low-cost solutions to making even the nicest-looking pages work effectively at the front-end, user interface. But one key way to get that low cost is to ‘hard-code’ the pages. That means when you look at the page, even through an interface like WordPress, what you see around the back in the content management system (CMS) will be a wall of gobbledygook that makes no sense to you unless you’re a programmer.

That creates an instant dependency on your agency whom you’ll need to contact for the slightest change. So you buy cheap upfront but pay the price over the next couple of years. Every time you need a new page or amend, you’ll need to book in time with the developer and hope they’ve not moved on to bigger and more lucrative contracts with other clients.

At Disquiet Dog, we believe in empowering you to do as much as possible on your own. We need the backend - the content management system - to be as effortless to use as the front end of the site.

That will generally mean designing a sort of drag and drop interface which allows you to place page elements in any permutation on the website. Within those elements, it will be apparent where the editable fields are, where you make your edits and additions.

You'll also be able to add any number of new pages, or re-arrange existing ones ad infinitum.

If you're the in-house web person (or the person making the decisions), this stuff really matters. A site that is effortless to update might only require a few hours a week of a multi-tasking, non-specialist member of staff who is willing to learn a few WordPress basics.

In contrast, a website that is hard-coded with a poor user interface will require a dedicated developer as your staff member, and the likelihood is they won't necessarily be up for answering the phone and chatting to clients.

COST: Depending on its complexity, a typical site might have 10 – 15 custom blocks and each might take 2-5 days to code up, test and implement. So that’s £10,000 - £45,000 right there.

As an alternative you might be tempted to just dig out an off-the-shelf template website from something like Themeforest. Have a look at what we think about themes, next.

10. Extent of design: Off-the-shelf or custom-designed template?

We’re advocates of a custom approach and that’s for a number of important reasons:

Templates made for imaginary companies won’t match your business model

When you browse the example website templates, it’s easy to dream yourself into how amazing your organisation will look, how smooth.

The problem is, you’re not that imaginary company. You have your own rules, procedures, exceptions. For an organisation with any complexity, you’re likely to run into a situation very quickly where you’re having to change the way you offer your product, compromise on the info you display or oversimplify the process just in order to fit your business model into the template. That's clearly the wrong way round, and a bad start for a site you might live with for the next 3-4 years.

An off-the-shelf product for $40 simply can’t bend to everyone’s need.

Worse though, it may prove impossible to hack the template to make the small changes you do need because the codebase is complex and intentionally impenetrable:

The weight of the code will hamper your SEO objectives

We spend a lot of time helping organisations to improve the technical make-up of their website so the site loads faster and pleases the Google gods (you can check the load speed of your own site here).

The code required to ensure you can’t break a pre-fabricated template - the extra scaffolding – makes the site extremely heavy, as all the kit and kaboodle required to make every page design in the template work gets loaded into the page.

This makes it almost impossible to fully optimise these pages, so you’ll never appear as highly up Google’s rankings as you’d like. If you don’t care about that, and your product is totally generic, well maybe a template is the way to go. But there's one big but still to come:

Design is not unique

The remaining issue with a template over a custom design is that anyone else can buy the same template and use it. Templates these days tend to be segmented into certain industry types meaning that e.g. for a school, the world may be choosing from the same handful of templates.

Having a site that looks practically identical to a competitor makes it that bit harder for you to claim differentiation, and homogenises what you’re hoping to have stand out from the crowd.

11. Audio visual: Do you have the images and footage you need?

What will always help your website to stand out is if it contains authentic imagery which is unique to you. High quality photography and videography is definitely worth having.

Generally the younger you are, the more hyper-aware you are of whether a people shot is from this year, last year or five years ago based on clothing and hair trends. Out-of-date photos say as much about your brand, so it’s worth revising these regularly.

We’ve written an entire article on getting the best photos for your new website.

It also definitely helps to get a professional photographer in, using professional equipment which, in spite of the ongoing improvements to smart phones, will always yield noticeably superior results.

You can save a lot of time and money by building out shotlists for your photographer ahead of time, and you can even work with the website designers who can start with library shots which themselves can be the basis of your shotlist (see that article for more advice).

COST: A good photographer will not only take the shots on the day but also clean up photos in post-production and send you a huge drive full of images you can use as you like in the future. The day rate might be up to £1,000/day.

12. Evidence of satisfaction: Testimonials & Case studies

This needn’t cost anything, but high-quality testimonials need to be carefully accumulated over time. It takes a lot to nurture and nudge clients into giving the right kind of feedback, so this at least requires a strategy, and people on the ground who have the procurement of feedback, testimonials and case studies as a part of their job description.

COST: If you want to capture quality video footage, you might easily be looking at the same kind of rates as with photography. Whilst £1,000/day might seem high, in reality, it probably takes that videographer 3 - 4 days between planning, shooting, post-production and liaison with you. If you do it in-house, allow at least that much time for your co-workers.

13. Content: Repopulating the new website with words and images

This is the elephant in the room of website redevelopment. Nine times out of ten, your web agency won’t raise the issue of who is going to move all the content across. And they'll definitely keep very quiet about it when they send you your quotation!

This means that quite often, you’ll approve the new design, the agency will go off and build the site and come back with – ta-dah! – an empty shell. They deliver it on time, but by the time you’ve spent 12 weeks of scraped-together team time filling out all the pages, you’re running late and you’ve missed the peak season.

At Disquiet Dog, we do raise the issue of content management. For us, content is the key to ensuring your site positions well in Google search results. The content is therefore one of the most critical factors. We’ve written an article on the importance of content marketing.

When we take care of the content for you, we’ll be specifying the exact page title, H1 tag, subtitles, meta description and keywords to be used on each page.

If you don’t have the staff in house to write out that new content, we can support you with that.

Then, there is the task of moving the content to the new site. Whilst there are ‘scraping’ tools which lift and drop content for you, these tend to work approximately for predictable things like blog articles, and much less well for product and service pages, or anything with a bit of a unique layout.

We can assign someone to do the whole thing and leave you clear to run the business, or we can help to project manage your people so they work systematically through to the end of the content mountain.

COST: It may take anything from 5 to 20 days of agency time to repopulate the new site with content, depending on the extent of the involvement and what you can do for yourselves. Five days would be to project manage the process. 20 days might be to do all the doing for you. That could therefore add £2,500 - £10,000.

14. Translation or geolocation

There are all sorts of other ways you can get clever with your website. If you’re facing an international audience, you might want to consider translation which for the next few years will still be a very good way of getting straight to a target audience in another country.

Over a ten-year period, advances in Google’s AI might render the need for translation redundant but we’re not there yet.

Another consideration is using geolocation tags on your content and pages. This allows you to spot where a user is based, and present content to them differently based on the unique characteristics of their nationality or country of origin.

COST: It might cost £2,000 - £4,000 to build in translation or geolocation capability (excluding the cost of any translation).

15. Behind-the-scenes tasks

Many website agencies will assume you’re running the project and you know what you want from your new website.

We tend not to do that, and that’s where Disquiet Dog being a consultancy as much as an agency comes into its own. We'll sit at your side of the table, and act as if we're the ones on a limited budget, to specify the project carefully and ensure the essential gets in the brief, and the frivolous possibly waits a bit longer.

Discovery and Specification

You can see already from the extent of this article that there is a lot to consider with a new website.

At Disquiet Dog, we’ll take the time to put together a robust specification document which details what is in and out of scope. Often we’ll challenge you to consider how best to phase a project over time so you get what you need first, and the all-singing, all-dancing version later.

We tend to favour the practical sales improvers and cost reducers over the fancy stuff which is nice to have but possibly more of a vanity than a necessity.

This step alone can save thousands of unnecessary expenditure throughout the project, and is also the best way to avoid scope creep. It’s also an excellent way to ensure we’ve genuinely thought of as much as possible up front.

Even if the cost of the website build is higher than you anticipated, you’ll avoid that classic web agency trick of quoting about half the final price up front to lure you in.

COST: Discovery and specification may cost between £4,000 and £8,000 depending on the size of the organisation, but will nearly always save at least double that amount later on.

Project management

The main reason most bosses shudder at the thought of redeveloping the website is the memory of the last time! If that’s you, we predict it’s because:

  • the budget overrun was excruciating, and you still didn’t really get what you wanted
  • the time overrun made the whole thing drag out and feel interminable
  • the weight of the project management of the website conflicted with so many other operational priorities and no one allowed for this in advance
  • you ended up doing most of the content writing or checking yourself, as everyone else was tied up with everyday work.

With Disquiet Dog, we pick up the project management, and it’s free of charge over the predicted duration of the build. That means we’re coordinating all moving parts and guiding your team through the process.

Hosting

A new or existing website needs to be hosted, i.e. stored, somewhere. That’s where your actual files are kept. You need to pay for this storage. There are plenty of hosting companies out there from A – Z, Amazon to Xilo (well almost).

The cost of hosting depends on the size of that storage, and the capacity of your hosting to be able to receive a lot of traffic, or serve people with the content they need quickly.

The laggier the connection, and the slower your website pages are to load, the more people will click off to a competitor website. Google also rewards those sites whose mobile versions load quickly and effortlessly. The reward is better positioning in the search engine results pages, which may (or may not) have a significant effect on your business.

The other thing to think about with hosting is the amount of customer support you get. Many cheap hosting providers don’t offer customer service. The better ones have ticketing systems where you can raise an issue which will be replied to in a couple of days via email. The best ones give you access to a real person the instant you need it.

Before choosing your hosting option, estimate the cost to you of your website being unavailable for a couple of hours, or a couple of days or a week.

COST: For hosting, count anything from £2 per month to £50 per month for a single site.

So how much does a new website cost?

Well it could cost £50!

We hope this has given you some ideas - not of exactly how much your next website is going to cost, but rather what variables you need to consider.

As you may have gathered, we won't build you a tin-pot website.

As a minimum, a Disquiet Dog website will be one that:

  • follows best practice approaches that load the site quickly
  • picks up the project management element so you can rest easy
  • supports you with content development and content migration
  • ensures you carry over all the bits of the current site that are successfully driving sales
  • enhances the areas where the site is deficient
  • introduces a design which not only looks good but which also improves user experience and conversion
  • uniquely reflects your brand and your values
  • integrates with your existing CRM
  • allows for new photography and videography
  • ensures you appear in better positions in search engine results pages
  • connects the role of your website to your wider channel strategy, therefore aligning with your overall business mission and objectives
  • generates an uplift in sales and conversion.

Based on the example price ranges above, the cost might potentially be in the range of £25,000 to £85,000.

That’s probably about right, but your needs are genuinely unique, so if you’d like to explore what your next website might actually cost, let’s have an initial video conversation, to see if we think we can help you. Contact us for that, if you like.

The first formal step would be to conduct audits and a discovery and scoping exercise, but let’s get to know each other first, eh?

Disquiet Dog is a specialist digital marketing consultancy and agency with a worldwide client base, predominantly in the education, leisure and tourism sectors, but we have been known to help other industries too.

You can find out more about the services we offer or just drop us a line.