How Much Does it Cost to Make a Website?

by Vishal Sanjay November 4, 2013, 1:03 am 1.9k Views

It is no secret that in our Internet era where the online presence is sometimes more important than the real one, websites are a powerful instrument – not only to make business, but also to claim who you are and what your goal in life is.

So it is now wonder that the creation of websites is so popular and there are so many people and even whole companies who offer it.

But how much does it cost to make a website? The most correct answer is – it depends. You can follow the below steps to find out the cost for making a website.

First step – Find how much does a domain name cost

The domain name is a very important part of your website because a great number of you visitors will consider it your websites name and this is what they will need to find your website.

So, the domain needs to be something easy to remember and related directly to your website. The problem is that a lot of domains are already registered and you can’t use because someone already uses them for their website.

However, you can try the same name with other domain ending. The most popular are:

.com
.net
.org
.info
.edu
domain names showing the location of the website – .us, .co.uk, .ru etc.

Some domains are more expensive than the others. The cheapest domain you can find will cost you $1-2 per year, while there are domains bought and being resold by someone, and their price is hundreds of thousands of dollars. The normal price, however, is $8-10, so that’s what we will use when answering the question how much does it cost to make a website.

Second step – Cost of Hosting and other things to make a website

Simply laid, the hosting is where your website is stored. It can be free if you don’t need much storage place and your website won’t have much traffic or it may cost you at least $1-2 a month. For bigger websites with a lot of traffic the hosting may reach several thousand dollars per month. What to consider when choosing a hosting:

How many websites you can host on it?
Is there a limit of the bandwidth?
What is the available disk space?
How many MySQL/Ms SQL databases are allowed?
What is the type of the control panel?
Is there a reliable tech support?

For the purposes of our ‘How much does it Cost to Make a Website’ guide we will assume the average price of $4-5 a month for a hosting for a small website.

Third step – The Design and its impact on the cost to make a website

Now here is something quite relatively as the cost of the design. Why? Because it may be absolutely free or it may cost you thousands of dollars.

If you don’t have a budget for a website, you can try a free blog platform:

WordPress
Blogger
Blog.com, etc.

Of course, there are free templates related to these platforms, and there are designer templates you need to buy if you want to use.

On the other hand, if you want to go for a professional web developer, the cost to make a website varies again – you may find a professional to create your website for $200-500 or for $20,000-50,000 – it all depends on your budget and needs.

We will add to our final cost $1000 as this is a sensible and good price for an original professional website.

Fourth step – The content and its share of the cost to make a website

The content is perhaps the most important part of your website as that is what the visitors are there for. However, your content may be absolutely free, if you are creating it cost yourself, or it may cost something if you outsource it.

So if you decide to hire a SEO company, they will take care not only for your content, but also for the popularization of your website. They will make sure you are ranking well in the result pages of the search engines and will create original SEO content for you.

The SEO companies will do this for a price of $100-200 a month, or, if your website is bigger and needs more work, or depending on the SEO company, the price may reach a few thousand dollars per month.

In our case, let’s assume that you go for the standard choice – average SEO with content creation – about $300 per month. So let’s sum it up and see the outcome.

So, after all, how much does it cost to make a website?

The answer is the following:

You may have a website for $2 a year if you pay the cheapest domain and go for all the free options.
You may have a decent website for an initial price of $1000-1500 and then about $300 every month for content and SEO.
You may have a really advanced website for more than $20-30,000.

So, to cut a long story short, there is no easy and short answer to the question we asked – how much does it cost to make a website?

It is a relative matter, depending on various factors like hosting, domain, design, content, SEO optimization – and all these can be very cheap or even free, or very very expensive. In other words, the cost to make a website depends on you – on your budgets, your needs and what you want.

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