The website development cost depends on dozens of factors and it’s impossible to say for sure how much a website will cost without having any project details. To calculate the price developers have to know at least such project’s requirements as a technology stack (if a customer has any preferences regarding this), features, and deadline.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to calculate the approximate cost based on the average amount of time required to build one or another website type or development phase.
Website development cost by their types
We’ve divided the development cost by popular website categories. For the sake of convenience, we express the number of development hours rather than the dollar equivalent. That’s because various software development companies may have different per hour rates.
Business websites
As a rule, business websites serve as a company’s business card on the internet. In other words, they are created in order customer could reach the company online and typically don’t contain any complicated features.
Business websites consist of several pages among which most commonly are such pages as Services, About, Contacts, Blog. As we’ve already mentioned, such websites rarely have complicated back-end logic and use simple features like the support of downloadable content or signing up for a newsletter.
Respectively, the average amount of time developers need to create a business website from scratch may range from 190 to 260 hours of development. The time fully depends on the number of features as well as the complexity of design and animation.
E-commerce websites
E-commerce websites vary from small to large online stores. It’s hard to predict even approximate features since everything depends on specific business needs and requirements. The average time developers need to build an e-commerce website may vary from 350 to 750 hours.
Landing page
It’s a website that consists of one single page. Typically, websites of this type are created to motivate customers to certain actions like buying some goods or participating in a conference. Such websites are quite minimalists and haven’t many features in order not to distract visitors from the main goal.
It usually takes from 20 to 40 development hours to build a landing page. The number of development hours also depends on animation complexity.
Website development cost by stages
If you want to build a website from scratch, you should be ready to go through (and pay for) multiple development phases we talk about below.
Design
Developers can write code from nothing, and so they need a visualisation of the future product before starting web development. UI/UX designers stand for a design of a website, and they may need from 15 to 80 hours to create one. The more complex the website is, the more time they may require.
Client-side development
The client-side of your website is everything your users can see and click on. Roughly saying, client-side is a UI/UX sketch that was recreated in code so that browsers can read and display it. This stage depends on a number of pages on your website, responsive or adaptive website, animation complexity. Respectively, this phase may take from 20 to 250 hours for developers.
Server-side development
This phase covers all the features that require a connection with the server. For instance, a registration happens on the server-side. You enter your login and password, press the login button and the input data is sent to the server in order to check whether such login and password exist in the database or not.
As you understand, most features are developed on the server side and their complexity directly influences the time developers will need. It may take from 80 to 250 hours and more.
CMS
You also need a content management system to work with your website, manage orders, add content, etc. There are a lot of ready-made solutions like WordPress and Shopify so you don’t have to develop the entire system from scratch. It’s enough to customise for your website. It may take up to 80 hours depending on your needs.