New Website – How Much Does It Cost?

Tonight is pizza night at our house. I can barely wait for the delivery driver to show up with those fragrant pizzas. When the bill arrives, I always notice how wildly the price varies depending on the toppings and how it's made. It's exactly the same with a new website. To help you estimate the costs for your new website, I've put together all the individual line items and factors in this article.

Costs for Building a Website

As you may have already gathered, costs can vary enormously – both for a pizza and for a website. Some people order a Margherita from the delivery app; others opt for Parma ham and truffle at a proper Italian restaurant. Websites have an equally enormous range, depending on your requirements.

Are you looking to build a small website for an SME, or a large, feature-rich website – perhaps with an online shop – for a bigger company? To get straight to the point: there is no flat-rate budget for new web design. That said, I'd like to give you an overview of the individual components along with rough price ranges, so you have a starting point for your planning.

When ordering a pizza, you consider: which pizzeria, order online or by phone, pick-up or delivery …
For a website, the key elements are: analysis and strategy, planning, creation and design, content and SEO, technical implementation, and finally the website launch.

1. Costs for Analysis and Strategy

At the start of any website project, you should take stock of where your company currently stands. Are you building a completely new website or doing a website relaunch? Is it just a design refresh or are structural changes involved as well? The goal of the website should always be the central focus throughout. What specific objective should the website achieve? Do you want to generate leads, receive more enquiries, raise brand awareness, attract new customers, or recruit new staff? The purpose of the site directly influences the costs.

You'll also need to think about which customers the website is meant to address. Define your buyer persona(s) so you can tailor both the content and the design precisely to your target audience. If you haven't yet created personas or buyer personas for your business, now is exactly the right time to do so.

Your goals will often determine technical requirements as well: Are there special technical features the site needs to include? Would you like to integrate your website with other software systems and tools? These technical components must be factored in from the very beginning.

One important piece of information for estimating the scope and technical possibilities of the website is the available budget.
As you can see, a new web design raises many questions that should be answered early on in order to develop a sound strategy.

Analysis and strategy work best when all stakeholders are at the table together, working through all the answers in a workshop. This ensures nothing gets overlooked. Ideally, the workshop is facilitated by an agency.

For the Analysis & Strategy module, you should budget for the following components:

• Establishing the current status quo
• Defining the website's goals
  
• Defining buyer personas
• Defining technical requirements
• Summary of outcomes or creation of a functional specification document

Depending on the scope of the website, plan for one or more full workshop days.

Cost summary for Analysis & Strategy: If you have the workshop run by an agency that also creates the summary or specification document, you should budget around €1,500 for smaller websites. For more extensive websites with multiple personas and complex technical or content requirements, budget up to €10,000 or more.

2. Costs for Conceptualising a New Web Design

Now we get into the details. Who wants what on their pizza and what size are they choosing? Has anyone added extras? Are there drinks? Is there a minimum order value for delivery?

For website conception, you need to account for the following steps:
Define your sitemap to establish the navigation structure. As a rule, aim for no more than six to eight top-level items. Structure your topics and determine how many levels deep the hierarchy should go. Should individual components such as a blog or a shop be included? Should inbound marketing elements – for example for lead generation – be planned in?

A more detailed page plan and layout can be developed using wireframes. These are useful for sketching out the exact design and content elements without the need for full visual execution – a conceptual task that should ideally be handled by the agency.

A clickable prototype of the wireframe helps with planning and reviewing complex internal page links. This is particularly recommended when page sequences require thorough testing.

• Definition of the sitemap and navigation structure

• Wireframes (for individual requirements such as shop, blog / lead generation elements)

• Clickable prototype, if needed

   

   

What matters most in the basic conception phase is whether you're starting from a clean slate – without many features – or whether extensive requirements are needed from the outset. Custom components like a blog or special modules can account for a significant portion of the budget.

Assuming a mid-sized company is planning a new web design, an average corporate website comes in at around 20 pages with three to four different page types. For this "model website," the following budget is a reasonable estimate: the average price is around €3,000, with a range of €2,000 to €5,000.

Next comes the second part – creating the design and content, and carrying out technical implementation. This is typically handled by the "pizza baker and delivery service" of the web world: designers, copywriters, and developers.

3. Cost Planning for Creation and Design

This section covers the development of screen design and the overall look and feel. Web design must of course be aligned with the company's corporate design – that goes without saying. However, in the web space, trends move fast and are often coupled with new functionalities that are must-haves in any implementation, yet also need to be considered within the CI design. Only by doing so can truly contemporary design be achieved. Agencies are always up to date on these trends and can advise you competently.

Visual effects can also be developed as design elements, if desired. But even here: form follows function. Don't use effects for their own sake – only where they serve a concrete purpose.
User-friendliness is equally essential. The web design must be developed in such a way that the site can be navigated intuitively and is self-explanatory through its design.

In addition to the design, modules such as forms and calls to action need to be developed and integrated into the website.

The components of the creation & design module at a glance:

• Look & feel: design and user interface
• Development of modules (CTAs, forms, graphics, etc.)
• Visual effects

The effort involved depends on how many design concepts are developed and how quickly a final version can be reached during the review process. Typically, our proposals are presented using several example pages.

The design and creation costs for our "model website" of around 20 pages average approximately €8,000, with a price range of €5,000 to €12,000.

4. Costs for Text and Image Content, and SEO

Real pizza makers are masters of their craft. They toss the dough through the air like magicians.

Designers and copywriters are exactly the same kind of masters. They fill your website with beautiful things. The texts on your website – and any supplementary content offers such as whitepapers or e-books – must be written with target-audience-specific language and genuinely valuable content. Ideas for copy can often be developed internally, as sales and product management teams typically know very well what keeps customers up at night. Only content that captures the attention of your buyer persona can convert them into a customer.

A thorough keyword research is indispensable in this context. Only by placing the right keywords in your content can your articles and website actually be found in search engine results. SEO optimisation is genuinely important!

Choose images and graphics that speak to your buyer persona. An agency typically has access to a large pool of imagery and can advise you on the best options.

The costs for content creation and SEO at a glance:

• Copywriting
• Graphics and images: research and creation
• Keyword research
• In-text SEO

Depending on whether copy is written in-house or by a professional copywriter, and whether image material already exists or needs to be created from scratch, costs for text and image content range from €1,000 to €10,000. This is, of course, a wide range. In our experience, the average is around €4,000 when text and imagery need to be produced for approximately 20 pages.

5. Cost Planning for Technical Implementation

There are many considerations involved in the technical implementation – i.e. the programming – of your website. During the Analysis & Strategy module, you will already have chosen a content management system. The various systems offer different possibilities. WordPress, for example, combined with appropriate page builders, allows for more cost-effective custom websites than a powerful CMS like TYPO3.

Generally speaking, the more demanding the design and functionality requirements are, the more specialist knowledge is required, and this can only be delivered by experienced professionals. A higher investment in implementation quality pays off in the long run – at the very latest, the first update will reveal whether the website was planned with sufficient foresight and can be extended easily and cost-effectively.

Individuality clearly comes at a price: the more freely and independently a website is built in all its components, the more expensive it becomes.

On the topic of security: WordPress-based sites are far more frequently targeted by hacker attacks, due to the platform's widespread use. Appropriate precautions must be taken, requiring regular maintenance and ongoing updates. TYPO3 sites carry a lower security risk.

Responsive web design is no longer an optional feature in web development. Statistics continue to show a growing share of mobile device usage. Neglecting responsive design would mean ignoring a growing target audience, making this an investment that is always worthwhile. Alongside responsive design, accessibility has become equally important today. While implementing a fully accessible website used to require considerable investment, there are now various cost-effective options available, particularly in the WordPress space.

Page load speed also falls under technical implementation. Google penalises slow websites with poorer search rankings, which is often the result of poor website performance.

GDPR compliance is now an obligatory consideration in any website project. For technical implementation, there are well-established extension tool plug-ins that are now standard. In the event of a legal change, making adjustments is far quicker and more cost-effective with these in place.

The technical implementation module at a glance:

• Development/programming
• Responsive web design
• Security
• Accessibility
• Page load speed
• Integration with analytics tools (Google Analytics, etc.)
• Data protection / GDPR
• Testing and quality assurance

If, like me, you reach the limits of your expertise when it comes to programming and development and prefer to hand it over to professionals, here is what you should budget for the Technical Implementation module:

In our experience, the average cost for technical implementation is approximately €5,000, though it can range from €3,000 to €10,000.

6. Costs for the Website Launch

Hurray, the pizza has arrived. Mouths are watering, everyone is happy. When your website goes live, it'll feel much the same. It's ideal to have someone by your side for support during this phase. At the end, there should be a complete specification document in which everything is documented.

The launch module at a glance:

• Going live
• Accompaniment and support
• Final documentation

Costs for the Launch module: On average, this module costs around €1,000.

7. Reporting, Maintenance, Monthly Costs, and Hosting

EA website is not a fixed object carved in stone – it should be a dynamic, evolving project. Over time, it will need to be updated to reflect new trends, new products, new hires, and additional communication elements. The shelf life of technical applications is getting shorter and shorter, and new standards are constantly being established. It's well worth keeping pace with these changes – both in terms of web design and technical updates.

We therefore recommend regular reporting to our clients, in order to measure the success of the website and monitor technical performance indicators such as load times. This can be tracked using various tools:

• Ongoing analysis and reporting
• Continuous design updates

For the Reporting & Maintenance module, you should budget a monthly fee, plus costs for hosting, maintenance, and licences. In our experience, plan for approximately 12 hours per month for reporting and maintenance.

Conclusion

So, Margherita or pepperoni? The choice is yours. As you can see, the price range within a project like this is wide and cannot be given as a flat rate without knowing the specific circumstances. If you add up all the line items listed above, you arrive at a range of approximately €15,000 to €50,000. That is indeed a broad spectrum. Even so, I hope it gives you and your business a useful framework for rough cost planning.

We are also very happy to advise you in detail on your "New Website" project – just give us a call.