How much does it cost to develop a website in 2022?

According to Statista, the total number of global internet users is 4.66 billion which is 59% of the global population and it’s still growing very fast – over the past 12 months equating to year-on-year growth of more than 8 percent. 81% of those people search online for a product or service. For years the website has been treated as a business card of the company and with so many users using the internet it’s important to make sure your website meets your requirements. But how much does it actually cost to develop a good website which will boost your business?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that question, and the fact it’s one of the most frequently searched queries on the Internet, with a global volume of searches over 2.3K monthly (source: Semrush) only proves that. But don’t worry – after answering a few questions and a workshop session we’re pretty sure we can come up with an estimate that will fit into your budget and design a website that meets your business needs. If you want to know more about iOS, Flutter, or Android app development costs, see our previous blog posts. And know, let’s focus on websites and the budget you need to develop one!

What does a website development process look like? 

We start our cooperation with every client with a brief. It is a document where we ask questions, allowing us to know your idea, expectations, and business goals. Based on this document, we can estimate the initial cost of the project. After that, we move on to the workshop process, which involves the development team, designers, and representatives of the client’s team. The time and form of the workshops depend on the project type and size. In some cases, for very small projects like a simple website or a landing page, a well-filled brief and a project kick-off might be enough. The workshop session let us better understand your idea and effectively start our work. In the next stages of website development, our designers come up with UX and UI propositions, which we discuss with a client, apply changes to the mockups, and when everything is approved we start development. With our experienced team, you can be sure that your website is in good hands. 

At Applover, each software development project is based on a proven and standardized process. You’ll find more information about it in our Process Book.

How to prepare for developing a new website with a software development team?

While preparing for the website development, you need to answer questions like:

• What are the company’s main business goals?
• How will the website help achieve the company’s business goals? 
• What languages should the website be designed for?
• What makes your product/offer stand out against the competition?
• What do you like best on competitors’ websites? Which solutions do they use are not the best? Which ones do you like best? 

Carefully consider which functions are a must-have and which you categorize as worth having. We appreciate getting the benchmarks that the clients like and would also like to implement on their website. Our team will guide you through the whole process and evaluate your project based on several factors. You will be able to decide whether your budget allows you to introduce all the features at once or whether you want to implement them later.

What website is proper for your business?

Creating a website is based on the goals it has to meet. Each of them requires a different approach and a particular type of website to invite a potential customer. Most websites have specific business goals that are behind their creation and the activities of their creators. Take, for example, an online store that aims to sell products online. The user experience of such a portal might be completely different from a blog or business card website.

However, it’s very important to make such a website user-friendly so your clients move freely and easily find information and get what they are looking for. Your website can be mostly static or more dynamic depending on the business you are running – sometimes it’s enough to just show necessary information for clients, but sometimes it’s a bit more complex like making appointments, shopping or just manipulating or playing with the data on the page (e.g. calculators, maps, contact forms, etc.). 

What is more, to fully take advantage of your website, it is important to apply tracking scripts, which will allow you to analyze the traffic on your website. Only by doing this, you can promote your business online in a smart way and optimize all of your advertising campaigns. We are experienced in implementing many various analytics tools and scripts, so worry not, you can be sure, that every tag will be working correctly.

The simplest form – Landing page

Landing pages are single web pages but they also might be a part of something bigger – you can create a landing page just for your new campaign, promotion, or new product. Due to its simple structure, the landing page is intended to convey information in a concrete and precise way. In most cases, when landing pages are supplementary to existing websites or in an early stage of development of a product fill in an empty space so you can start your advertising campaign, etc. 

Because landing pages are rather simple the costs are much lower and it might be a very good point to start and make the first steps in promoting your business online, showcasing small companies, or offering early products to potential customers.

WordPress 

WordPress is a great way to boost your website and gives you much more possibilities without much effort. Everything that a good website needs is there and more so you don’t have to implement everything from a scratch, it’s more about using ready-made elements and customizing them for your business – so instead of reinventing the wheel you can focus on what’s really important and save a lot of money. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP with plenty of plugins available you can transform a WordPress website into a store (WooCommerce) or booking system without a need to implement everything from scratch.

To see what WordPress website development can look like, you can read our case study on creating a website for Czysta3.vc. You can also visit this website to see how the booking options we developed work: https://wiezyczki.pl/.

Multisite

The WordPress Multisite option allows to the creation and manages multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard, which can share the same plugins and themes. It’s also possible to create accounts and let other users create websites within the network, but all of them are controlled by the superadmin. The multisite option works great in case your company has multiple different branches in different cities and you need their website to be a bit different from each other but you still want to manage all of them from a single instance or you just need your website to be available in a few different languages and website translation plugins do not meet your needs. This can be also applied to WooCommerce stores, where you can have multiple stores but manage the inventory from a single instance.

Headless CMS

WordPress websites are usually monoliths which means they combine the content and presentation layers of a website in one system – this is fine in most cases but it has some downsides. First of all, the backend is tightly coupled with the frontend which may cause difficulties and gives less freedom – you are tight to what your CMS offers, and often more modern approaches are difficult to implement, it’s not possible to transform a website to a Single Page Application or PWA, it’s also difficult to move code to the other CMS if needed. Separating the presentation layer from its backend via API gives more freedom when it comes to technology, improves performance, scalability, and security, and can improve development speed. This approach is getting more and more popular and the use of frameworks like Gatsby makes development easier and more performant.

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are something between mobile and web applications. Simply speaking, it’s just a well-adjusted website for mobile devices with some of the capabilities of mobile applications like accessing the app directly from the home screen and running it in standalone windows instead of a browser, splash screen, working offline, or push notifications just like native mobile apps. Although some limitations, progressive web apps might be a great way to boost your business and improve your website’s results and mobile conversion rate without a need for native mobile apps. If you want to learn more about developing PWA – read our case study on how we have created a digital product for Prismade. Moreover, numerous PWA case studies and their impact on business are available here: https://www.pwastats.com/. 

What affects website development costs?

It is your website concept that influences development costs. However, cost estimation can be confusing, as the factors that make it up can be very complex and depend on the experience of the company you choose. The duration of the project over the website and the overall cost have an impact: 

• the complexity, number of functions, and features your website will have
• the level of UI and design sophistication
• the infrastructure needed for your website to run 
• the size of the development team.

How much does the website development cost?

The cost of developing a website consists of many different factors. Apart from the complexity of the website and its functionalities, major factors are hourly rates and the experience of your development team. At Applover we always do our best to deliver the best value possible on time and within the budget, while maintaining the highest quality. Our experienced, business-oriented specialists and location are our advantages – simply speaking outsourcing development to Eastern Europe will significantly reduce your costs while keeping high-quality products and clean, maintainable code. By choosing Applover you make sure to get the best quality at a reasonable price. Our developers’ average labor rates per person day, and the final cost depends on the project’s requirements and advancement level.

If you’re wondering what budget you should prepare when planning to develop your website you should be prepared to spend about 2 500 to 10 000 euros. However, in some more complex products development costs may rise to over 30 000 euros. To learn more about web development costs, visit our pricing site or contact us!

The most popular technology for making websites is WordPress, however, if you are interested in more custom development, you can read about application development here.

Website development at Applover 

We approach each project individually – you will know and feel that your business needs are met. Our work is based on a proven process, which you will read more about in Applover’s Process Book. Our clients can expect high-quality products, which is why we work with a highly qualified team. Regardless of the chosen technology, we make sure that the projects we develop bring high value to their originators and meet their business goals.