How Much To Charge For A Website And Its Earning Potential?

If you’re a website designer, you must know how much to charge for a website. Whether building a complete website or adding more website features, your professional fees should be reasonable and just right for your clients.

On average, a website designer can charge a client as much as $6,000 upfront for a website. However, if the website’s size is big or classified as a business website such as eCommerce, you can charge as much as $10,000 or more. Your service does not stop just creating a website since you can also offer website maintenance services to your clients to keep their websites updated, costing as much as $5,000 per year.

Why do clients need website design services?

Any client such as business owners, institutions, companies, or even individuals needs a website. Therefore website design services exist. Although many free or paid website builders offer easy DIY website creation, most people, such as business owners, do not have the luxury of time to do it themselves.

Because in reality, no matter how easy to use these DIY website builders are, building a website can still consume time. And most busy people find it difficult to squeeze in the time to build their website that they would rather use to get some much-needed rest.

How fast someone can build a website also depends on their ability to learn the website builder’s controls quickly. Each person has a different learning curve. Not everyone is techy as well. Since it is quite common that people to encounter different problems while creating their websites. And sometimes, it requires some time with enough website coding skills to get the issues fixed.

Below are the typical costs of service fees per website feature. Depending on your client’s agreement or payment schemes, these fees can be charged upfront or by installment.

Website Creation

Price: From $1,000 up to $10,000 per website

Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment or installment

Website creation includes everything from the website domain name, hosting service, website design and layout, and other things that a client would require for their website. You can charge based on the website’s size or complexity.

For example, a basic website can cost around $1,000. The website is considered small if it has one or a few pages, typical for personal use or small businesses. However, if it’s for an eCommerce online store or a large company, it can be as expensive as $10,000.

Website Domain

• Price: From $12 up to $60 per website
• Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment

Website domains provide instant credibility to the client’s website. If the client’s website is an online store, having a domain allows them to be in the same marketplace as the other online website stores.

While there are plenty of domain marketplaces, scouring through the long list of providers is time-consuming. That’s why offering this service gets rid of that hassle from the clients. But they can still opt to register the domain of their website on their own.

Website Hosting

• Price: From $35 up to $600+
• Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment or monthly

Another service you can offer is website hosting. Best of all, hosting services can generate monthly revenue for you. As the number of your clients increases, your revenue from hosting services also increases.

Offering hosting services does not require you to purchase and manage the servers. You can purchase a reseller account where you can offer hosting services to your clients. Ensure to find a reliable website hosting provider to take care of this for you.

Website Theme

• Price: $0 up to $1,000+
• Payment scheme: Free, one-time payment (lifetime access), monthly, or yearly.

There are hundreds of website themes online. Clients may find it difficult to find the most suitable theme that will best represent their business. You can offer this service to them and present them with several of your top choices. Website themes are also a substantial source of residual income since you can charge for monthly or yearly subscriptions.

SSL Certificate

• Price: $0 up to $200+
• Payment scheme: Free or yearly

SSL Certificates are sometimes included in the website hosting service, but you can offer this as a separate service to your clients as well. This service can basically sell itself because of the protection it can offer to the client’s website.

SSL Certificates verify the ownership of the website, keep their data secure, and prevent hackers from creating a fake version of the website. This is also a renewable yearly service where you can create a yearly income for yourself.

Ecommerce Functionalities

• Price: $20 up to $30,000+
• Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment, monthly, or yearly

Perhaps the most expensive service you can offer to your clients. This can cost anywhere from $20 and can go up as high as $30,000, depending on the quantity and complexities of eCommerce functionalities required by your client.

ECommerce functionalities are promotion or discount code tools, easy check-out tools, and multiple payment options. This can be expensive, especially when the client requests custom eCommerce functionality.

Apps and Integrations

• Price: $0 up to $100+
• Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment, monthly, or yearly.

Apps and integrations add more functionalities or features to the client’s website. They can improve the website’s appearance, and they can also help provide a better user experience. There are tons of free and paid apps online that you can offer to your clients. For example, a client that owns a company with several employees needs a website that they can use for work.

They may require a website where they can share files, conduct meetings such as video or voice calls, chat with each other, and so on. You can offer to integrate the apps that will meet their requirements on their website. You can also charge per integration or offer a fixed rate.

SEO and Marketing Services

• Price: $750 up to $30,000+
• Payment scheme: One-time upfront payment, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

SEO and marketing services can be offered as additional services or package inclusions. SEO services have three different types: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. If your client requires all of those three SEO services, you can charge a one-time project payment anywhere between $5,000 to $30,000.

Marketing services can include email marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and more. You can charge per service or per package. For example, you can charge email marketing anywhere between $300 to $5,000. Or social media marketing services can be anywhere from $250 up to $10,000 per month.

Website Content

• Price: $15 up to $5,000+
• Payment scheme: One-time project payment, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Website content writing services can include landing page copywriting, press releases, link bait, and so on. This depends on the type of content, word count, free images, graphics, videos, and other visuals to enhance the quality of the content. For example, it can cost around $1,500 or more for a professional website copywriting service. You can offer these services per project or on an ongoing basis.

Website Maintenance

• Price: $5 up to $5,000+
• Payment scheme: One-time, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Website maintenance includes general website upkeep, domain name, SSL certificate, website hosting, CMS, tech support, website analytics reports, eCommerce system maintenance, etc.

You can charge per service or based on the size and type of the website. For example, you can charge from $35 to $75 per month to conduct m small business website. Maintenance At the same time, a custom eCommerce website can cost your clients from $2,000 up to $5,000 per month.

Website training

• Price: $600+
• Payment scheme: One-time or as needed

After creating the website for your client, of course, you need to train them on how to use it. You can charge per hour, or you can charge a fixed price. You can teach clients how they can make changes such as uploading content, updating images, etc.

Or walk them through their online store from purchasing a product up to payment processing just like their customer would. In the future, your client can also ask you to train another employee on how to use the website if they like.

final thoughts

So how much can you charge for a website exactly? Certainly, there are plenty of factors that can affect your fees, such as your specialization or expertise, years of experience, quality of your work, portfolios, positive customer feedback, high ratings, and many more.

As you can see, the possible services that you can offer to your clients may be quite expensive, but they are not easy jobs. Most people know that settling for a lower price can be risky as they could end up with a poorly built website or, worse, a non-working website.

If you have all of the qualities of a professional website designer or developer, you will not have any problem setting your own price. You can utilize your talent and skills to create steady multiple streams of income that can support you and your family for many years to come.

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