The cost of creating a website obviously depends on many factors that we will examine throughout this article. It mainly depends on the type of site, its technology, the entity producing it, the complexity of the design, and other costs such as hosting.
Whether it is a professional showcase site for a business or an e-commerce site, the price is always at least in the range of thousands of euros. Yet the creation of a site in itself can be very fast. But a working website is in reality much more complex, lengthy and technical.
In any case, the price of a website is calculated primarily by the time required for its creation, beyond all the different criteria that may come into play.
1. The Type of Website.
The type of website here corresponds to your main needs regarding your site — that is to say whether your site is a showcase site that only presents your business, or whether your site must sell products online, an e-learning site, and much more. This is a criterion that will obviously greatly determine the price of your site.
| One-page / landing page | Showcase site (~5 pages) | Portal site | E-commerce site | Custom-built | |
| Minimum price | 300 | 500 | 1500 | 1500 | 5000 |
| Possible price | 30,000 | 50,000 | 60,000 | 60,000+ | 100,000+ |
How Much Does a One-Page Website Cost?
A one-page site is a site that, as its name suggests, has a single page. There are various qualities and drawbacks to this approach but in any case this strategy keeps costs down. A landing page, meanwhile, may be a page within a larger site, but the result is almost identical — the price relates mainly to the creation of a single page.
Overall, the price of a one-page site or landing page ranges between €300 and €30,000.
What Is the Price of a Showcase Website?
A showcase site is a site that presents a business or a service. It is therefore similar to a one-page site but generally has around 5 pages such as:
- Home
- About
- Services / Products
- Achievements
- Contact
Its price ranges between €500 and €50,000.
How Much Does a Portal Site Cost?
A portal site refers to a “showcase site” that presents a business but has additional features such as:
- A member area with login.
- A geolocation system.
- And other complex features requiring more working time and skills.
Its price is obviously difficult to state without a brief, but it ranges between €1,500 and €60,000.
How Much Does an E-Commerce Site Cost?
An e-commerce site is an online shop — it allows you to sell products and sometimes services automatically via the website. The price of an e-commerce site is extremely difficult to determine because a multitude of variables can come into play:
- A member area.
- Automatic management of payment, shipping, accounting, supply and other technical functions.
- Number of products.
- Customisable products such as colours, quantity, size, etc.
- Purchase coupons, discounts, loyalty points.
- […]
The price of a “simple” e-commerce site may start at €1,500 but can very well reach a cost exceeding €60,000.
What Is the Price of a Custom-Built Website?
The principle of a custom-built site is a unique creation for your site from A to Z. The advantage is generally absolute manoeuvrability — creating lines of code one by one by hand. One could compare it to the creation of a new social network or a site for a bank.
It is impossible to list anything, which is precisely the point of a custom build; its price is therefore also impossible to determine, but I will nonetheless give a range of €5,000 to over €100,000.
2. The Technology the Site Uses.
The technology a website supports is generally the 2nd differentiating factor in a website’s price. For example, your site could be hand-coded for a showcase site, but it could just as well use a CMS that automatically generates lines of code. CMSs are still customisable if needed (creating lines of code by hand) but they save an enormous amount of working time. To name a few, the best-known CMSs are WordPress, Drupal, Prestashop, Shopify, Wix… It is also possible to want a site that uses frameworks such as Symfony, Laravel, Vue.js and many others.
| CMS | Hand-coded | Framework | |
| Minimum price | From €300 | From €1,000 | From €2,000 |
The Price of Themes.
If you choose the WordPress CMS, you will need to choose a theme to have a modern site. There are free WordPress themes but they will end up costing more because they are very restrictive.
A theme such as Divi costs around €200 for a lifetime licence, but other themes, like Elementor, cost around €50 per year. There are other cheaper paid themes that are less powerful, priced at around €50 for a lifetime licence.
The Price of Plugins.
CMSs always have plugins that can be added to your website — this allows you to easily add complex additional features. Generally speaking, you will pay a lot for plugins on e-commerce sites. It is also possible to be forced to pay for a plugin, as with an online learning site on WordPress that depends entirely on one, at around €100 per year. It is also very common to have to pay for plugins to increase site loading performance, which are priced at around €50 per year.
The price of plugins can start at a few tens of euros, and others can cost over €200. On average, being very broad, I would say around a hundred euros per year for plugins.
3. Hiring a Freelancer or an Agency.
The 3rd criterion on which the price of your future site depends is the entity or person who will create it. Hiring a freelancer allows you to save a lot of money because the person working on your site is working alone — you therefore do not have to pay an entire team. Conversely, a web agency will charge you considerably more. On the other hand, the project will generally be much better built, conceived and professional than if you use a single person.
The price of an experienced freelancer for a website is a minimum of €500, while an agency is predominantly priced above €1,500.
Note: The freelancer price is inclusive of tax as VAT is not applicable. The agency price is exclusive of tax — you must therefore add an additional 20%.
The Cost Also Depends on Experience.
The price can easily vary from one quote to another, particularly depending on the experience of the entity creating your site. For example, agencies or freelancers who have won awards for their web creation work will generally charge more.
More broadly, it depends on years of experience. A daily rate for a WordPress freelancer is €300 for 1 to 3 years of experience and can go up to over €1,000 for several decades of experience.
Note: it is not always beneficial to hire someone who charges less, as they may take longer due to their lack of experience, make mistakes, and be much less capable of creating a website that converts and makes you money.
What Is the Cost of Site Creation at createur2site?
At createur2site.fr, the price of a showcase site starts from €1,299 and €1,599 including tax for an e-commerce site. As for other possible types of sites, these must be examined beforehand to determine the correct price — this is essential. It is also important to mention that the price can be broadly adjusted and can exceed €10,000 for a showcase site from the moment it is necessary to devote more time to it, such as for the design and animation aspect, and many other things that you will see further on in this article.
Building the Site Yourself.
If you create your site yourself you can forego the prices mentioned so far, except for those of plugins and themes if you choose a CMS. Even though your time costs money. Discover the time required to create a website.
4. Domain Name & Hosting.
A website must necessarily have a domain name and hosting. The domain name is the unique name your site will carry (here createur2site.fr) and hosting is needed to store all the website’s data. The price of hosting depends on many things. Depending on the type of site, it will need more capacity for an e-commerce site than for a showcase site. It also depends on its own quality criteria. If you have shared hosting you will share a server with others to limit costs, resulting in appalling loading times. But you can also use a cloud server for a very fast site. There are also other parameters, such as “managed” hosting — that is to say a hosting provider that handles everything, such as security, automatic backups, customer service and many other things to make your life easier.
“Standard” hosting providers mostly start at €35 per year and this can go up to €1,000 per year for good managed hosting of an e-commerce site. It can also be more expensive depending on the monthly visits your website receives as well as other factors such as disk space, CDN usage, etc.
5. Site Design.
It depends on the site creators, but design is one of the criteria that most influences the price of a site. “Standard” freelancers and agencies often have basic design and graphic conception criteria and always propose the same rate. In reality it is possible to add any price range in order to spend more time on the graphic identity, including design and animations. The benefit of investing a lot of money in design is to offer a unique experience to your visitors and have a perfect brand identity in order to retain visitors. A site that offers a unique experience through its design and animations can dispense with trust factors, copywriting and everything else used to optimise conversion — though obviously it is better to combine all possible strategies.
Estimate: €500 to €30,000 per page
Images & Videos.
Your site may need a presentation video to explain your services or your application, adding to the site creation budget. More concretely, images are indispensable and represent a real additional cost:
- For any site you would probably want graphic illustrations to illustrate your content, whether drawn or real.
- For an e-commerce site you will also need professional photos of your products for your website.
The cost of images is already factored in when going through a professional, but they may adjust their quote depending on the quantity and complexity. It is also possible to purchase photos, such as on Adobe Stock, for around ten euros excluding tax per image. Unfortunately your site will look like everyone else’s and that is not how you will retain your visitors.
Do You Already Have a Visual Identity?
Again, the price may vary if the site creation also needs to take into account the visual creation of your brand / the site as a whole. This is mainly covered by the creation of the logo and therefore the graphic charter.
The price of a logo ranges between €50 and €3,000, although the recommended minimum is around €500. The graphic charter is automatically created when the logo is created.
Maintenance / Updates & Evolution.
Site maintenance and updates are essential for a good website. This keeps everything up to date — such as the PHP version for your site’s speed — but also for security, such as updating plugins and themes.
However, many people enjoy updates but this only requires checking once a year at most, and generally for a cost below €50, though again this depends on the site.
On the other hand, you must budget for the evolution of your site, which must be kept up to date in line with your business developments, and must invest increasingly in both the design and technical side. The advantage of CMSs is having a back office that allows easy modification of texts and images to limit the cost of evolving your site.
Do You Need Specific Services?
Like a portal site, you will undoubtedly need additional services even if it does not involve a member area, for example. Here is a list, though not exhaustive, of elements that can increase the price:
- ChatBots: Online messaging → €0 – €100+ per month
- Copywriting, content optimisation for conversion → €250 to €5,000
- Integration of specific tools on your site such as your CRM
- […]
6. A Site Is Fine, but If It Is Not Visible It Is Pointless.
Creating the site is just part of the work — now you need to generate traffic to your website and attract your prospects. This obviously involves optimising natural search engine ranking to be visible on search engines, called SEO. But also paid advertising / digital marketing with Google Ads, Facebook Ads and others, as well as managing one or more social media accounts to be visible everywhere.
h3 SEO: Natural Search Engine Optimisation.
SEO, the optimisation of natural search engine ranking, is an essential practice for any success on the web. There are enormous amounts of best practices to consider on both the on-site, off-site and technical aspects. You can find our complete natural search engine guide, but here are the main criteria for good search engine ranking:
- Analyse keywords
- Work on your content
- Optimise your internal linking
- Netlinking / Link building strategy
Natural search engine ranking is “free” but it is strongly advisable to call on a specialist, because even if you knew every best practice off by heart, you still need to practise. Just as you were told at school: after reading the course you must do exercises. And doing the exercises on your own site can generate a lot of wrong answers, and without someone to tell you, you will never be visible on search engines. At createur2site, we adapt to any budget because it is always possible to make optimisations whether for a few hundred euros or several tens of thousands.
SEA: Google Ads / Facebook Ads…
Digital marketing is very effective for finding prospects quickly but also for raising awareness of your services in general. Moreover, unlike SEO which is a long-term process, this technique allows you to have immediate returns. The most widely used are Google Ads, which allows you to appear on Google’s first page by paying, and Facebook Ads — probably the most effective for return on investment of advertising on social networks.
Advertising services are very expensive, although it is possible to spend just €1 since you manage your budget however you wish. However it is very often not profitable without a perfect mastery of the tools, which unfortunately seem very accessible but do not allow you to generate profits. Moreover, if your site is not sufficiently optimised for conversion, you will never obtain customers.
SMO: Social Networks.
SMO describes having a presence on social networks and optimising it — similar to SEO. The principle, like SEO, is a long-term technique. It should be used as a broadcast channel to attract new prospects and retain your most loyal customers.
Ideally it is necessary to call on a community manager for this task: you can expect to pay €300 to €3,000 per month.
Summary of Website Pricing:
The price of a website depends on a multitude of factors and also on your needs. Ultimately, the price of a site is mainly whatever you want to invest in it. If I have one piece of advice to give, especially if you are contacting a freelancer, it is not to try to lower the price on their quote. There is nothing better for discouraging someone. The price reflects the time required relative to your requirements and there is no secret: if you give them a lower budget they will spend less time on it even though they need more. There are also many websites that are created for a few thousand euros but do not work because the design does not convert and they are never visible on Google. What you need to understand here is that creating a website in itself, for your expectations, is not enough. Ultimately the best advice I can give you is to invest at minimum several thousand euros in your website. Investing €500 is pointless. In that case it is better to save your money, especially since the purpose of a site is to showcase you, not the opposite.