It can be tricky to estimate website development costs. There are too many factors influencing the final price. Pages, features, tech stack, design. Without knowing those details it’s impossible to define an exact cost to build a website.
For example, our business analysts ask dozens of questions just to find out how much time an authorization can take. And the scope may range from 10 to 100 hours depending on those answers.
Still, it’s possible to figure out the average cost to build a website. This estimate can’t be very accurate but at least will inform you about approximate prices.
So, how much does a website creation cost? Let’s find it out.
Average Cost to Build a Website
I’ve prepared a breakdown showing phases that make up a website development price. In a nutshell, custom website development costs can start at $8,750 and go up to $38,000 and over.
It can be tricky to estimate website development costs. There are too many factors influencing the final price. Pages, features, tech stack, design. Without knowing those details it’s impossible to define an exact cost to build a website.
For example, our business analysts ask dozens of questions just to find out how much time an authorization can take. And the scope may range from 10 to 100 hours depending on those answers.
Still, it’s possible to figure out the average cost to build a website. This estimate can’t be very accurate but at least will inform you about approximate prices.
So, how much does a website creation cost? Let’s find it out.
Average Cost to Build a Website
I’ve prepared a breakdown showing phases that make up a website development price. In a nutshell, custom website development costs can start at $8,750 and go up to $38,000 and over.!
Note: The prices below are based on a $50/h rate. It’s an average software development rate for our region (Ukraine).
UI/UX Design
Tools that can be used: Sketch, InVision, Zepplin, Adobe Creative Cloud
You’ll barely find a poorly designed yet successful product. Most users are visuals. Good design is what captures their attention and calls to action. Bad design is what makes them leave and never come back.
In other words, UI/UX design services are as essential as engineering. That means expenses on design are one of the key points answering how much it costs to build a website.
There are three main stages defining custom website design cost:
- Research. Defining the target audience, their preferences, and analyzing competitors.
- Wireframe. Creating wireframes to show a schematic placement of elements and agree on it with a client.
- Prototype. Crafting the final user interface to show how the app will look like on devices.
The breakdown above allows us to reach the best efficiency and settle down every project detail.
So, what is the average cost to build a website’s design? It can vary from $750 to $4,000 and over.
Again, the time and cost to create UI/UX design depend on your requirements. They are a number of pages, animation complexity, and so on.
Front-End Development
Some technologies that can be used: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, TypeScript, SASS, LESS, Angular, React
Imagine a registration page with three standard fields: name, login, password. You can see shades they throw, shapes of the input fields, and a red Register button below. You click that red button and see its animation. That’s the front end.
The front end is everything your visitors can see and interact with on the website. It typically starts once the UI/UX design is ready. So what you saw on prototypes before, developers would turn into a working product running on any browser.
QA engineers are starting to participate in the project from this stage and continue working on it till release.
The main factors that influence website creation cost on this stage are:
- Website responsiveness or adaptiveness
- The complexity of animations (yes, again)
Front-end development costs can vary from $1,000 to $12,500 and over.
Back-End Development
Some technologies that can be used: Node.js, Express.js, Nest.js, .NET
Let’s get back to that registration example. Without the back end, nothing would ever happen after you click the red Register button. The back end is what makes input data travel to the server and register you as a new user.
If something is wrong, it returns an error saying you’ve already been registered or another message. In other words, the page alone is just a bunch of code visualized by browsers. It can’t fulfill its end purpose — register users.
Back end is at the heart of every website powering all its features. That means the back-end development makes up a considerable part of the website creation cost.
The main factors influencing total development time and the average website cost are:
- Integration with third-party services
- Non-standard data processing (for example audio)
- Complex queries
- etc.
Back-end development costs can vary from $4,000 to $12,500 and over.
Admin Panel Development
Content management system (aka admin panel) is a solution that allows us to create, manage, and edit website content. So if you want to change a word in a paragraph somewhere on the website, you won’t need to ask developers to do that.
There are a plethora of ready-made CMS engines like Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, and others. They are designed to cut on development hours and reduce the cost to build a website.
But as any out-of-the-box solutions, they can be limited in functionality and security. The latter is because malicious software is generally written to target popular systems rather than custom-built ones.
Expenses on custom CMS development can vary from $3,000 to $9,000 and over.
Final Development Cost of All Stages
Summing up the development time and cost of every stage described, you’ll get an approximate website development price.
| Stage | Time | Min price | Max price |
| UI/UX design | 15-80h | $750 | $4,000 |
| Front end | 20-250h | $1,000 | $12,500 |
| Back end | 80-250h | $4,000 | $12,500 |
| Admin panel | 60-180h | $3,000 | $9,000 |
| Total | 175-760h | $8,750 | $38,000 |
The final website development cost also depends a lot on the region where you outsource web development or form an in-house team.
Accordingly, you can calculate the average website development cost in those regions simply multiplying time range from the table above by rates from the picture.
Note that those numbers may differ from project to project. It’s better to contact a Business Analyst and get a custom estimate.