Web design
Pricing
All of our websites are built to order, so our prices are always bespoke to you. However, you can discover our website range below to give you an idea of pricing.
OVERVIEW OF COSTING
Summary of web design costs in 2023
SIMPLIFIED
Pricing Breakdown
Interactive Websites.
- Includes all features of small business website.
- Includes a researched and optimised user journey.
- Usually for unique or luxury brands or those aiming for unique web presences.
- Creates a ‘wow’ factor, better user engagement, and a memorable online experience.
- Features interactive/animated effects that react when the user loads or interacts with the site, scroll effects, mouse parallax, custom video animate elements etc.
Ecommerce.
- Includes all features of small business website.
- A range of shipping models (including drop shipping).
- Can list up to 10,000 products/categories.
- Can support a range of online payment solutions including subscriptions, credit/debit cards, and Apple/Android pay.
- Built on ecommerce management system (CMS) with complete control of your store and products.
Approx £8,000 +VAT | Project timeline of 8-12 weeks
Interactive Websites.
- Includes all features of small business website.
- Includes a researched and optimised user journey.
- Usually for unique or luxury brands or those aiming for unique web presences.
- Creates a ‘wow’ factor, better user engagement, and a memorable online experience.
- Features interactive/animated effects that react when the user loads or interacts with the site, scroll effects, mouse parallax, custom video animate elements etc.
Ecommerce.
- Includes all features of small business website.
- A range of shipping models (including drop shipping).
- Can list up to 10,000 products/categories.
- Can support a range of online payment solutions including subscriptions, credit/debit cards, and Apple/Android pay.
- Built on ecommerce management system (CMS) with complete control of your store and products.
Approx £8,000 +VAT | Project timeline of 8-12 weeks
SEO Plan 1
- 10 Keyword Phrases
- 1 x Key-worded blog post per month
- On and off site optimisation
- Landing page creation
- Google Search Console set up and integration
- Basic reporting and analytics data
- Track all phone calls and form leads
- Lead call recording
- SEO Copywriting
- Google My Business optimisation
- Extended citation submissions
- Competitor Analysis
12 month plan: £750 p/m, 6 month plan: £850 p/m
SEO Plan 2
- 20 Keyword Phrases
- 2 x Key-worded blog post per month
- On and off site optimisation
- Landing page creation
- Google Search Console set up and integration
- Enhanced reporting and analytics data
- Track all phone calls and form leads
- Lead call recording
- SEO Copywriting
- Google My Business optimisation
- Extended citation submissions
- Competitor Analysis
12 month plan: £1050 p/m, 6 month plan: £1150 p/m
PPC Plan 1
- Ad Creation
- Bid Management & Optimisation
- Advanced Targeting
- Monthly Campaign Reporting
- On-going ad refinement
- Ad spend: £1,000 – £2,000 p/m
- Landing Page Creation
12 month plan: £350 p/m, 6 month plan: £450 p/m.
Includes a one time setup fee of £500 + VAT
PPC Plan 2
- Ad Creation
- Bid Management & Optimisation
- Advanced Targeting
- Monthly Reporting and face-to-face consultation
- On-going ad refinement
- Ad spend: £2,000 – £10,000 p/m
- Landing Page Creation
12 month plan: £450 p/m, 6 month plan: £550 p/m
Includes a one time setup fee of £600 + VAT
PHASE ONE
The Preparation
YOUR IDENTITY
Purchase Your Domain Name
PLAN IT OUT
Create Your Design Brief
COPY READY
Gather Your Website Content
BRAND IDENTITY
Finalise Your Logo and Branding
PHASE TWO
Weigh up the Options
WAYS TO GET IT DONE
Overview
When designing and developing a website, there are multiple options available. Each of them varies in terms of the cost, the quality of the design, and the degree of engagement required throughout the process. The easiest way to explain this is the higher the price, the better the quality and the less time it will take the client, and vice versa.
A website builder, which is at the lower end of the spectrum, is a template-based tool that needs the user to build the entire site themselves without being required to do the manual coding. Ideal for a beginner with little to no experience in website design, who can devote the necessary time, and who needs to keep costs low. However, you might not necessarily end up with a bespoke, high-quality website. Those with larger budgets can consider employing a freelancer, either in the UK or abroad, who would design and create the site for them in exchange for an hourly rate. Due to currency rates, freelancers from abroad typically charge less than those from the UK.
Moving up the spectrum, established design firms that design and build your website tailored to your specifications. Because they have a wide range of specialists, such as project managers, content writers, designers, developers, and so on, they use considerably less of your time but charge more for their service. This choice may be more appropriate for people for whom developing a website themselves would not be a good use of their time.
We’ll now elaborate on each of the previously listed possibilities.
Pros:
- The least expensive choice is this. The only other expense outside the cost of the tool you select is your time because you are the only one who is creating and developing the website. As a result, start-up expenses for businesses are significantly reduced, which is crucial for some as not everyone has a sizeable budget to spend when starting out.
- Agile – If you need to amend your content or make changes, you can simply do this yourself without paying any additional fees, you have immediate access to your site, and there is no need to go via a design firm or other agency to do these changes.
- The calibre and quality of website builders have improved, and users can now choose from a far larger selection of templates in terms of layout, fonts, colours, and other elements. This makes it feasible to build an attractive website these days relatively rapidly using something like Squarespace, for example.
- Simplicity. The majority of tools make use of ‘drag-and-drop’ technology, allowing users to easily click and drag their mouse to upload images and change text. This is a highly “hands-on” approach, which is ideal for people who demand complete control and involvement. Because there is no need to write the actual code, this simple user interface eliminates the technical aspects of web design. The advantage of using a template is that all the coding is already done.
Cons:
- Building a website from scratch can be very time consuming. No one else can provide you advice, make changes, edit your content, or manage your business simultaneously. It’s important to weigh the opportunity cost: Would it be better to spend your time managing your company or attempting to create a website for it?
- Rigidity – Site builders rely on templates, and templates have restrictions. When trying to make a change, layout, or style that you want but can’t because of a template layout, those who don’t know HTML or CSS coding may run into a brick wall. This may imply that users must work with an agency or freelancer to make the alteration they initially desired, partially undermining the financial benefits.
- Hidden Costs – These are often monthly costs. For instance, a website builder may offer the first two pages of your site for free, but after that you’d have to pay per page, pay a monthly charge to host your site for a set number of sessions, or pay a monthly subscription to access a particular feature. As a result, something that first seems free or inexpensive may end up costing more in the long run than other options.
- SEO optimisation – Due to the rigid functionality, it might be significantly more difficult to optimise a website builder for SEO. Less space is available to add things like schema, amend and edit meta and perform technical optimisation where necessary to speed up the site and optimise the code. The less opportunity to SEO optimise it the more rigid it is.
- Lack of ownership – You never truly own the website. This is frequently disregarded because of the appealing pricing. However, in reality, you are renting the ability to utilise the website you are creating. This may be justified as acceptable because you can keep it for as long as you need to, but you are foregoing the chance to develop a useful asset for your company. A business that hires a freelancer or agency to create its website ultimately owns the website’s source code, which is a valuable tangible asset that increases the value of your business. As a result, this might be considered an asset or investment should the time ever come for you to sell.
Compared to utilising a website builder and doing everything manually, this is a step up. It involves paying someone in another country, such as Poland or India, to construct your website at a significantly lower cost.
Pros:
- One of the primary benefits of this choice is that it could provide excellent value for money. You can potentially get a high-quality website for a reasonable price if you can locate a professional developer at a reasonable rate. You are able to save money without compromising on quality.
- The time it saves you is still another benefit. Utilizing a website builder places the whole responsibility and level of involvement on your shoulders. When you hire an offshore freelancer, your time commitment is significantly reduced because they are handling the bulk of the job. Additionally, it is far less expensive than using a freelancer in the UK.
Cons:
- Communication barriers and language difficulties are the biggest disadvantages. It may not always be easy to express exactly what you want for your website, and you can end up receiving something that isn’t exactly what you wanted. In order to meet your specifications, things must be repeated and reworked several times. This adds time to the project and, as a result, raises your costs, which would be frustrating. Working with someone from another country necessarily involves a time difference, which can cause delays in both waiting for their reply and vice versa.
- Risk is also present in this circumstance because you can never fully assess a freelancer’s quality of work before hiring them. Because they are working on multiple sites in addition to yours and want to earn more money, they may occasionally take shortcuts and carry out tasks improperly. If you can, have a look at their portfolio to get a sense of the quality of their design and development as well as to confirm that they are who they claim to be and are not trying to scam people of their money. In conclusion, hiring freelancers from abroad can save you money, but there are risks to be aware of.
Pros:
- Cost. This approach is less expensive than using an agency.
- Availability. Freelancers frequently have a high level of availability, and utilising one of the various freelancer websites, you can frequently connect with a freelancer in a couple of hours.
- Relationship. Freelancers are extremely involved and hands-on with the project since they work ‘one on one’ with you, so you may develop an excellent working connection with them.
- They usually put in genuine effort since they depend on the work and want to maintain client satisfaction. Since you have a direct channel to them, responses are frequently received more quickly.
Cons:
- Limited skill set: For instance, a designer frequently lacks backend development expertise, or, their skill set may be less extensive than that of a specialist. You’ll often need to employ both a designer and a developer. When this happens, your role might change to project management, clients frequently go to agencies for this reason so that everything is managed effectively.
- Some UK freelancers are expensive; for the more “boutique” freelancers, hourly charges are sometimes equal to or even more than agency prices.
- Risk – It might be difficult to find the ideal freelancer. As previously mentioned, you can’t really tell the quality of their work unless you use them. It’s easy to waste both time and money. To maximise revenue, freelancers sometimes oversubscribe their jobs. As a result, they struggle with time management and meeting deadlines and the quality of their work frequently suffers.
- Availability has pros and cons. It is both a positive and a negative. There is no assurance that the freelancer you have chosen will be accessible when you need them, even if you employ them frequently. Regardless of the work you provide, they are their own bosses and can take time off whenever it suits them. Finding someone else to take over the position puts you right back where you started.
- Workload – when hiring a freelancer to build your website, you’ll likely have to create most of the content yourself. This can be a daunting task, and something that consumes a lot of your time. You may have to hire other freelancers to help you with this, which you may find leads to your project costing the same as using a single agency to create everything for you.
Between agencies and offshore, freelancers fill the gap. Some of the offshore concerns are eliminated, and you can meet with them in person to discuss specifications locally. However, you continue to face some of the same dangers associated with employing offshore. If you are unable to proceed with hiring an agency, this is a decent compromise.
Pros:
- A broad range of skills in each field. You’ll have a project manager to deal with you directly and manage your project, designers who are familiar with the best trends and designs for your target audience, developers to write clean, lightweight, and fast code, an SEO expert to apply the SEO optimisation of your site, and copywriters to proof the content.
- Saving you time: After the agency has completed the initial research, your involvement in the project might consist only of giving your approval on essential designs and elements.
- High-quality results – An agency’s skill set and resources almost likely provide a high standard of service and outcomes. Look through their portfolios to choose one that has the ideal design aesthetic for you.
- After a project is finished, most agencies will provide a warranty or continuing care. They will continue to offer guidance and assistance to help with problems and to carry out updates as needed.
- A huge workforce and team allows agencies to virtually always accept business, guaranteeing that you can complete the project before the deadline.
- Reassurance: Agencies will have security procedures in place to safeguard the information you or your clients provide, including ISO and GDPR compliance. You must perform due diligence if you manage a website like an e-commerce website, which is frequently guaranteed by an agency.
- Round-the-clock support: most agencies have teams in place, allowing them to offer 365 day out of hour support in the event of a technical issue or emergency.
Cons:
- The main disadvantage of using an agency is that employing a team costs more than employing a freelancer. There is a cost associated with bringing together highly trained professionals across a multitude of disciplines, e.g. web development, graphic design, copywriting, SEO, and PPC. Do take into account the excellent quality, lower risk, 365 day support, and the substantial time savings of having all of your content created for you. A project manager will oversee your project for an agency, assuring a high-quality final product with a number of team members striving to reduce risk and deliver within predetermined deadlines.
PHASE THREE
Associated Costs
- Hosting: Your website must be “hosted” on a server in order to be available online. Dependant on the provider Hosting can be available from free to £500 per month. While a more upmarket ‘managed’ service would often cost upwards of £200, you can anticipate paying between £10-30 per month for an effective ‘unmanaged’ hosting solution. If you’re using a website builder, this will be covered by your monthly subscription.
- SEO: Once you’ve created a website, you’ll want to promote it as much as possible. This is where SEO comes in. You’re going to require an SEO strategy if you want your website to rank well in search engines or if you want to make the most of social media by running things like Facebook or LinkedIn advertisements.
- Newsletters: Mailchimp, for instance, is free up to a point but thereafter charges a monthly fee to use.
- Plugins: A monthly subscription may be associated with some premium plugins.
- Retainers and Care Packages: You need to account for this if you need ongoing website updates or technical support.
- Social Media Marketing: Depending on how much time you have to spend on it, you may need someone to handle the management and updating of your social media profiles as well as the integration of these with your website.
- Licenses: Some materials, such as fonts and stock photos/videos etc, require licences, which might be costly on a monthly basis. You might save money by using a service like Pixelo to avoid paying continuous monthly costs for things like typefaces and for photography and videography, Unsplash.
- Domain: A domain is required for the creation of a website and is charged on an annual basis. It should cost you £45 to register a domain for a minimum of one year. A premium domain can also be available for purchase directly from the owner. Depending on the interested domain, this may cost considerably more.
- SSL Certificate: You must have a SSL certificate in order for your website to display as HTTPS. All websites now need to use HTTPS; without this certificate Google will actually punish your site’s ranking and browser security alerts will appear. You must, at the very least, have a domain validation SSL Certificate in order to enable this feature. This costs roughly £120 a year.
- Images and videos must be licensed for usage, they cannot be taken from any website at will. If you don’t have your own photography, you must purchase stock photos. Depending on the image and where you find it, a stock image might cost anywhere from £1-250. You should be prepared to spend at least £50 for a video licence.
- Copywriting: The amount of written content that will be needed is one of the main factors to take into account while developing a website. We strongly advise hiring a company or freelancer to create the copy on your behalf if you lack the required literacy, verbal skills or don’t have a lot of free time. A 5-page website should contain a minimum of 2,500 words of completely proofed, thoughtful content. This is a crucial element to take into account as content is important for SEO and rankings.
- Plugin Licenses: Using a plugin can often be quicker and easier than incorporating a particular capability into a website’s code. These could contain elements such as image sliders, booking systems, and payment gateways.
- Payment processing fees: If you operate an ecommerce website, you must take payment processing costs into account. For instance, PayPal will take 3% of all purchases completed via your account if you choose to use it at the checkout. If someone spends £100 on goods you will actually receive £97, and Paypal will get £3.
A domain name can cost anything from £5-30 per year, per domain. You can either buy a top level .com domain, which is more expensive and is not region-specific, or a location-based domain, such as .co.uk, depending on your specific needs.
Although you may register a domain for a year, we generally advise doing so for at least 2-3 years or even longer if you can. It is best to register for extended periods, such as 4-5 years as Google will recognise that the domain will likely be active for a considerable amount of time.
Additionally, you have the option of purchasing a premium domain from organisations or individuals who have already done so. These will often cost more than £100. After purchasing a premium domain you will only need to pay the renewal charge, which represents a very tiny portion of the initial cost.
Be wary of organisations who try to offer you needless extras like “domain name protection” or “who-is opt out” when you buy your domain. Your bill can very soon increase from £6 to £60.
Basically, keep it simple. Your domain name should always be a relatively low annual cost, unless you’re buying premium.
PHASE FOUR
Enterprise Cloud Hosting
Standard Hosting
- Our standard, unlimited hosting is designed for businesses looking for a fast and reliable hosting solution for the typical small-business website, where high-traffic numbers are unlikely and a top performance is not necessary.
£50 + VAT per month
Enterprise Cloud Hosting.
- Our Enterprise Cloud Hosting is the preferred solution for businesses wanting the ultimate website performance. Guaranteed 99.99% uptime, 24/7 uptime monitoring, advanced security solutions and a powerful CDN for a top load-speed.
£100 + VAT per month
PHASE 5
Content Population
PHASE SIX
Promoting Your New Website
Although it’s uncommon to see SEO or online marketing included as an associated expense in most articles regarding the price of a website, it’s a crucial factor to take into account. After all, if a website doesn’t have an online presence, what good is it?
You probably aren’t ready to develop a website if you have no idea what SEO is. Although technically SEO is not required for website development, without any SEO your website will have little to no visibility online.
If you’re going to rely on people finding your brand name on Google (if it’s unique) or handing out business cards or brochures with your website URL, then you don’t need to worry about SEO. If this isn’t the case, you’ll probably have to rely on people finding you online by using search terms. “Build it and they will come” just doesn’t apply nowadays; if you’re serious about your online presence, you need to take SEO into account.
Typically, SEO is not taken into account until after the website has been developed. This is not ideal since it implies that your website won’t be ready to rank in search results, or worse, the structure you have chosen can be detrimental. As a result, you must be ready and willing to consider SEO as a significant associated investment of a new website.
If you’re thinking about using a website builder, it’s possible that it’s already properly optimised in terms of technical optimisation (loading speed, etc). However, you will need to take SEO into account while planning your site’s layout, on-page content, and keywords. The majority of the time, website builders will include tools within the website that will enable you to perform very basic SEO. These rely on an existing understanding of SEO, which takes years to master.
On the other side, freelancers and agencies are more equipped to handle your SEO. Consider hiring an SEO business, an SEO freelancer, or a website agency that offers SEO, like Red Giraffe, if you’re serious about your rankings.
The most well-known types of paid ads are Google Ads and Social Ads, include including ads on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Spend time figuring out which platform will work best for you, for example, should you advertise on Instagram or LinkedIn (or both) to reach your target market. You should also take into account the cost of the advertisement’s graphics and creatives as well as the advertising platform’s separate charges for each click and each impression.
TAKE YOUR NEXT STEP
Website Design Cost Calculator
Get a free estimate or proposal for your website design project from our Milton Keynes-based team by using our interactive web design cost calculator tool.
