Web design prices, short version
tldr; version: From £300 a year, with a special, all-inclusive offer for £599 a year.
The base price covers the set cost of domain registration and hosting; the rest are recommended and optional extras, mostly relating to secure, spam-resilient forms. I may waive/cover some costs (e.g. hosting) for registered charities.
So, let’s talk features!
I’m a big believer in value for money. Offering solutions that meet people’s actual ideal requirements and budget.
Mate’s rates apply but if I wanted I can offer you a site for less than 2p a day! How epic is that!?
(To be precise, £11.99 plus vat for the first 2 years (to cover registration fees)). To be clear, that’s not the ‘budget’ offering; that’s of a scope you’d expect to pay in the region of £500 to £5,000+ a year. And yes, friends, family, and some charities already do or will get it at that rate!
More realistically, churning them out, if I wanted, I could offer a site similar to this (i.e Ackadia) with domain fees, hosting, email, design and support all for about £60 or so a year, though double that is more sensible for the low-end. No hidden costs.
At a level that I’d be comfortable working with (in terms of what I can provide rather than profits), £500 to £1,000 would be closer to the mark, but would have a range of features that would add a couple of zeroes to the price with an agency. eCommerce, card transactions, mass mailings. Economies of scale aside, depending on options, that’s cost price.
Oh yes, almost forgot, all the other ‘extras’ like padlock (HTTPS/SSL/TLS 1.3), mobile-friendly and responsive, accessible design, CDN set-up, proof-reading, contact forms, basic SEO, basic social media advice and setup… *stops for breath* Jetpack, Google analytics help on request, security, backups …
“You want fries with that?”
In my opinion, those are not “extras”; they are standard features. The web developer is not doing their job if they are not included as standard at all levels! Instead, they use a cookie cutter and squeeze you for money to bake the biscuit you ordered.
That said, SEO beyond basics is involved, and contact forms are just a sod. Coding forms is easy, but WordPress and CMS generally haven’t got their act together in 20 years, while spammers and bots most assuredly have. Forms (and slow servers) are the reason I hate the lower end of the market! If you want a website for peanuts, you can deal with the shells!
Let’s talk price!
Forgot all the standard ‘extras’; I’m not playing that game. If it’s reasonable or expected, you can assume that box is ticked, and they are included in the price.
However, there can be exceptions, like professional email. If an upgrade option costs me £72 a year, it’s getting added to your bill! Conversely, if you want to push your luck with ‘feature creep’, there’s often wiggle room. Something like a live web chat feature can be added for free, but if you want it with whistles and bells, it scales.
Same again with domain names: yourbusiness.co.uk is about £15 a year, but yourbusiness.store is over £80 a year. If you want designer labels, you can pay the surcharge.
| Feature: |
Brass: |
Silver: |
Gold: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain name (.co.uk): | included | ||
| Storage: | 2Gb | 2Gb | 2Gb (overage £30 a year/Gb) |
| Traffic / visitors: | 200,000/month | ||
| Data transfer / bandwidth: | Fair use, 20Gb/month | ||
| email: | No | No, but redirection | Yes, Professional email (1 address) |
| CDN: | Cloudflare Enterprise (via host) | ||
| Security: | Cloudflare Enterprise | ||
| Contact forms: | Basic | WP Forms lite (Pro +£100) | WP Forms Pro |
| SMTP (plugin) | No | WP SMTP lite (Elite +£100) | WP SMTP Elite |
| SMTP | No | up to 10,000/month (via Postmark) | |
| SEO | No | Yoast lite (All-in-One SEO Pro +£100) |
All-in-One SEO Pro |
| Hosting by: | Rocket.net | ||
| Recommended theme: | WP Astra Pro | ||
| Akismet anti-spam: | No | No | Yes |
| iStock premium access | No | Price on asking * | |
| eCommerce: | No | No | WOO Commerce is an option |
| Guide price/year: | £299 | £599 | £1,199 |
THE SMALL PRINT
* Subject to interest (or use your own account)
If enough people are interested I can sign up the iStock premium access, which can amount to a huge saving.
For instance:
A 50 a iStock month plan would set you back £119 a month, but a 750 a month split between 10 sites is 75 a month for £20. Between 20 sites it is around 40 a month for a tenner, which could be subsidised. Just need to check their T&C at the time.
Fair pricing
As you can see, nothing is hidden. Also, if you already have arrangements in place, I have no problem with people taking the Silver plan and adding their own extras (e.g. Mailchimp, Google Workspace for email, so forth).
The plug-in options are guidelines and present substantial discounts compared to single license subscriptions.
The monthly option is there if wanted, but paying yearly gets you 2 months free. Extras for the silver and gold plan would have to be billed differently, depending on options, but Gold is essentially Silver with all the toppings.
What about the number of pages?
If you are looking around, what may stand out is the omission of pages allowed. Within reason, as long as I have something solid to use or work with, I don’t care. My pricing structure is based on fixed costs, not time, e.g. jumping from 3 to 12 pages will not affect the price.
Using Pool of Life as an example, they supply minutes from meetings in (Word), and text copy with image attachments for events and news stories, and I put them together into posts and pages for them. It doesn’t take long.
What if I need more space?
Available for silver and gold plans only. Overage charges for storage, bandwidth or traffic are £2 or so a month (depending on the exchange rate). (e.g. Needing an extra 10Gb of disk space pushes up the price by £25 a month, or £240 a year).
(For reference, this site uses about 0.3Gb, my main site (with some 600 pages and 1,750 media) is about 3Gb. Unless you are uploading video or ridiculously large images, 2Gb should be fine for most sites)
Anything else I need to know?
At present, I’m more playing with ideas than setting this up as a business, so VAT’s not a thing. (Have to pay it, but can’t claim it back). If that changes, I’ll let you know. Either way, the prices will stay the same!
Also, I’m not doing this for profit; cumulative benefits will be shared. For instance, if even people choose the gold plan, it will allow an upgrade to enhanced versions, such as WPForms Elite, with premium integration
As a reminder, increasing the number of features you plug in impacts page load times and increases the potential risk of bugs or exploits.
It’s not just obscure products; for instance, a recent Jetpack update crashed a large number of sites. Elsewhere, it was reported that serious vulnerabilities were found in five WooCommerce plugins. A missed zero-day exploit by a major provider puts millions of sites at risk. I monitor my logs, the number of people I see trying to hack into my sites is annoying. I’ve been in IT for a very long time. I’ve seen or had viruses on install disks direct from companies as big as Microsoft, Adobe and Future Domains (now owned by Seagate). Suffice it to say I take security seriously.
Anyway, those are the prices. If you think you can do or find better, have at it. Otherwise, keep reading the site and contact me when you are ready.
~ Ack 
P.S.
I hand code; I neither need nor want Gutenberg or block builders to drop tables and panels in!
However, Spectra, Elementor, Nimble, and Beaver are considered the best if you want to use them.
Business investment feature image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay.