How Much Should You Spend on a New Website?

How much should you spend on a website? This is a question most business owners probably ask themselves at some point in their quest to grow sales.  Of course, the answer to this question really depends on where you are at as a business and what the goal of the website is. So there is no real clear-cut answer but this blog should help you understand the price ranges of types of websites that most businesses will encounter at some point in their life cycle.

The New Business (Revenue 0 – $500,000)

If you are a new business you are probably looking for a simpler option in order to get a website up rather than having nothing. WordPress is a great option for a new business because you can manage it yourself and edit content without paying a web developer/designer and it is relatively inexpensive compared to other platforms to develop on. WordPress is also a free software so you never have to pay for it’s licensing.
You should be able to pay a web designer/developer anywhere from 500-5000 dollars to get a relatively basic WordPress site up that should hold you over while you are new and dont have the resources to build a high end website.  The other advantage of WordPress is that it is relatively scalable so that if you grow you should be able to keep improving the website rather than having to move to an entirely new platform all together.
Squarespace is also a great option because it is even less expensive than hiring a developer to build a WordPress website costing only 8, 16, or 24 dollars a month depending on the package you choose. You will be limited to the Squarespace platform so keep in mind as your business grows you may need to graduate from the platform to build a more complex website.

Best Options:

WordPress: scalable, opensource, easy to use and develop on
Square Space: inexpensive but can provide a nice design for low cost
Opencart: quick and easy if you need to get an fast eCommerce website up with the capabilities of open source technology
Shopify: is also easy to use and setup for a new eCommerce store
Godaddy: Cheap dirty and quick
If you are generating more than 500,000 dollars in revenue it is most likely time to go with a more advanced and complex option for your businesses growing needs. I will cover some of the most popular web Content Management Systems so that you can get an idea for how much a typical web project may cost.

WordPress

Basic/Theme

Cost: $1000-$10,000
A really basic site with 5 or so pages and no special features can run as low as 500 dollars for development. If you need more pages, a higher end theme/more sleek responsive design with a few more advanced features it may run as high as 5,000 dollars.  Most WordPress websites fall into this basic range and cost around 2-5 thousand dollars to build.

Custom/Advanced

$10,000-$50,000
If you need a custom design that needs development beyond what most WordPress themes can support your site will most likely run above 5,000 dollars.  A custom design may have a custom theme, custom page templates, custom post types, eCommerce functionality, custom plugins, a login, or other advanced features making the site more expensive than your typical WordPress website. If your website is over 25 not including the blog pages you will likely need a custom design to support the growing complexity of your website content.

Enterprise

$50,000+
Wordpress can be used to manage and build an enterprise website and there are some relatively large companies using WordPress. Enterprise WordPress sites are generally over 10,000 dollars and can be as high 50,000 dollars if they require advanced functionality like API calls or web applications development and integration to manage a complex array of data and pages. When you are looking to spend more than 50,000 dollars for a website you may want to look into other options that are more in depth than the WordPress platform.

Joomla:

We personally do not like working with Joomla and do not see it as useful to our company because most things in Joomla can be accomplished with WordPress, Magento or a framework like Ruby on Rails if high level customization is required but keep in mind we are biased.  However if you, for whatever reason, need a Joomla website it is likely going to be more expensive than WordPress development by anywhere from 20-100% more for a similar build.
Joomla is a more complex CMS than WordPress, which explains the higher cost for development.  It is, however, less complex than Drupal so it should be less expensive than a Drupal site for the same build. Most Joomla sites will likely range from about 4,000 to 25,000 dollars.
Cost: > 20% more than WordPress website cost for same functionality and design.

Drupal

Drupal development should be much more expensive than WordPress so expect the prices to be a lot higher than what you see with WordPress and Joomla.  Drupal is a more complex CMS so you really should only be using it if you need to manage a complex and large amount of web pages such as something a University or relatively large corporation would need.
Most Drupal sites will be above 10,000 dollars and will most likely fall into the 20,000 to 40,000 dollars range because the software is far more complex than WordPress and requires a longer development life cycle to configure properly.   You can see that a reputable Drupal development company Seguetech states on their blog that most of their Drupal projects range in the 30,000-40,000 dollar range.
Cost:  > 100% more than WordPress website cost for same functionality and design.

Magento:

Basic/Theme

$10,000-$50,000
Magento is by far the most robust and powerful eCommerce platform you can use as a small business but it does come with higher costs.  If you have graduated from a simpler platform like Opencart or Shopify and need a more robust platform to increase sales, Magento is the platform for you. You could probably hire a developer to slap on a theme and setup a Magento site for around 10,000 dollars or even less but if you need stronger emphasis on design, extension integration, and more complex features your costs will grow fast.

Custom/Advanced

$50,000-$100,000
A custom Magento website will cost a good deal of money.  If you need your website to be integrated with your ERP and CRM system, login with Facebook, have multi-store capabilities, integrate with Mailchimp, have gift registry, or other complex features your site will run above 50,000 dollars and can quickly approach the 100,000 dollar mark.

Enterprise

$100,000 +

Magento powers websites as large as Vizio and Fiji Water, so paying over 100,000 dollars for a Magento website is not as crazy as it may seem.  Once your generating millions of dollars a year off your website you will want the development skill and team to back up the website that has generated the customer base you have developed online. Sites like this will need multiple stores for different countries within one site, wholesale functionality, a large amount of SKU’s, and relatively complex features that will cause the price to balloon well over the 100k mark.

So how much should you spend?

That really depends on where your business is, what your needs are, and how valuable a website or web presence is to your business. If you need an eCommerce website you are most likely going to be spending far more than a company that needs an information website because your website can directly impact your sales.
I personally believe that spending more upfront for a better website that can be adjusted and improved over time is the way to go. Going with Squarespace or another cheap platform may be a great at first but as your business grows you will have to rebuild to support a more complex website which will end up costing you more time and money than doing it the right way from the beginning. Keep in mind though, that if you do want to spend more, you should budget a good amount of time and money to market the website, because simply building a website is not enough to attract a lot of customers from the web.
This link from about.com provides some good insight into web design costs. It shows that when you need things like mobile design, multimedia functionality, custom graphics, content, and more advanced features the price can go up fast.  At the end of the day if you want your website to stand out your going to have to spend some good money. Being cheap could end up costing you money by having customers contact a competitor based off of having a better website, which is often their first impression of your business and your competitors.