Asking how much does a website cost is a little like asking what a car costs or a house costs. It depends.

But let me try to answer the question within certain parameters that may give you a relative idea of the investment you’ll make when hiring someone to build you a new website.

1. How big a website do you want?

Like houses, the cost of building your site depends on how many rooms (pages) you’ll want. A basic site containing Home, About, Blog, and Contact will cost less than a site selling music, CDs, lessons, or merchandise. Additional pages for photos, music samples, video, and other content will also add to the cost of your website.

2. What is the underlying technology?

Websites range from simple static sites that display text, images, and video to sites that require custom coding, Ecommerce with shopping carts and pricing options, and sites that require third party integration. 

An example of third-party integration is a mail service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or ActiveCampaign. If you want to collect names and email addresses from your site’s visitors, those email services will need to be integrated into your site. 

Additionally, if you plan on offering some sort of ebook or other attachment in exchange for people leaving you their name and email, that takes more time and money. The attachment must be sent through a separate email that is part of an automation needing to be set up within the email provider. It’s all very doable, it just requires more time from your web developer to set it all up and properly test it.

3. Ecommerce

I mentioned Ecommerce above, but there are different ways of selling books, music, CDs, and merchandise on your site – and each contributes to the time it takes and therefore, the cost of your website.

At the most basic level, you could have buyers send you a check, and after the check clears, you could then go to the post office mail them the product. But this is the 21st Century after all, and there are much better ways to sell and ship your stuff.

A relatively simple way is to attach a Paypal button to each product on a web page. Payment is then handled by Paypal. Another way is to use a third party like Shopify or Woo Commerce to handle payment. Using those services, you have access to a “back end” where you can see all your orders, you can create discount codes, you can have your buttons and shopping cart customized, and make the look of your store more integrated with your site.

Setting up Woo Commerce or Shopify will add to the development costs. You will also incur the time it will take you to learn those platforms, so money will not be the only investment you will make in adding a store to your website.

4. Hosting and domain

Your website needs a name, and if you don’t yet have one, you’ll have to pay for one. That can range from twenty dollars a year to several thousands in one lump payment. With each passing year, finding good names gets harder and more expensive. Go to GoDaddy and take a look at what is available at this moment.

Your website needs to sit on a computer called a server. The cost of that will be approximately $100 per year after the initial sale or deal that entices you to use their service.

5. Getting found and recommended by Google

After your site has been built, how will you attract people to it? Google is the primary way strangers will find your site. And for Google to know you exist and to send people to you, some things will need to be done. This is called Search Engine optimization (SEO).

An entire industry exists to provide this service, and make no mistake, it is complicated and time-consuming over the long run if you do it well. But your web developer should at least provide you with some basic things that Google needs in order to find your site.

If you really want to jump start your ability to rise to the top of search engines for your topic, that requires an additional cost that starts around $250 – $500 per month. And it is true that setting up SEO properly will take a few months – longer the quicker you wish to see results. By the way, writing regularly in a blog is a big component of SEO, and yes, those specialists will write for you, but what’s the fun in that!

So what is the cost of a website?

After all that, you’re still wondering how much a website costs. Well, let me add another factor: who will build it? You can build one yourself with a tool like Wix or Squarespace for a couple hundred dollars each year.

You will get something much more customized to your needs by using a small shop like mine at JazzDigitalMarketing.com. If you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, you could hire a web design company or a full service agency. With the bigger development companies, you will get more resources, but you will pay for them. If you are a musician simply looking to upgrade or to display your first website, you don’t need all those expensive people.

For a basic Home, About, Blog, Contact site with no third-party integrations or fancy bells and whistles, you are looking at somewhere between $500 -$1,000.

Adding a signup form for delivery of something like an eBook and integrating that to an email provider will add another $250 or so.

Adding pages like video, photos, or music will up the cost by around another couple hundred dollars.

Selling products on your site will add another $500 to $1,000 depending on how many products and the integrations required. For a fairly robust store with lots of products, you could be looking at a couple thousand dollars or more for the cost of the website.

In the end, any website developer should deliver to you more value than you expect to get for your money. Because websites integrate functionality and technology with style, a general estimate of cost is impossible to make without mapping out everything you want in your site. 

Compounding the difficulty in providing an estimate, even when knowing everything to be included, most clients end up adding to the project mid-way through as they think of little things they want their site to have or do. 

So, answering the question, how much does a website cost, is difficult. So make it easier by being clear on what all your new website should accomplish.