Website Design Cost
The most asked question we hear is “what does website design cost?” The truth about website design cost is that it varies a lot depending on what you want. You should speak with us about your particular needs to get firm website development cost numbers but here is some information you can use to budget with. You need to be familiar with all the website design cost that go into designing and supporting a modern website.
Website Design Cost Explained
There are three (3) major groupings or categories of website design cost.
- Website Design is the one-time website design cost to custom design and build your website.
- Website Hosting is the cost to have your website hosted on our commercial dedicated business server.
- Website Maintenance covers the ongoing licensing costs, technical maintenance, monitoring, and client requested changes or additions.
Each of these three website design cost components are detailed below.
1. Website Design Cost
Website design is the one-time website design cost to design, develop, build and optimize your website. The cost can vary depending on the number of hours it takes to develop the new website and the complexity. The design cost for a basic starter website is less than $800. The design cost for a small business website with 6 pages averages around $1500. Website design cost is hogher for sites with more pages and/or more complexity.
Recommendation – Contact us and give us an idea of what you want. We will prepare a free no obligation website development quote in writing. No sales pressure and no hassle. Why not find out exactly what it would cost? IT’S FREE!
Besides our competitive website development costs, here are some important reasons to choose WizardsWebs Design to design, build and maintain your business website:
- No Outsourcing – We don’t outsource to cheap labor overseas. The person you speak with is the person building your website and we know our business.
- SEO is Included – The On-Page SEO (search engine optimization) is included in the web design cost. Most design firms charge extra for this work (a lot extra).
- No Templates – We don’t use prebuilt themes or templates. Every website that we build is unique and tailored to our clients needs and preferences.
- We are Experienced – Besides over 40 years in marketing, we have been designing websites since the beginning of the Internet. We utilize cutting edge design tools and SEO software.
2. Website Hosting Cost
WizardsWebs was until recently was a Diamond Reseller for HostGator Shared Hosting. In January 2025 we completed the move from shared hosting to dedicated hosting. Our new server is actually a Bluehost server. HostGator and Bluehost were both acquired by Newfold Digital. While they still operate like separate companies, they are combining resources behind the scenes. That’s good for us because Bluehost has some of the best servers available.
Dedicated hosting provides the highest level of guaranteed resources, privacy, security, and control. Our new server is much more powerful than the shared server we were using:
- 8 Processors – AMD EPYC 9354 32-Core Processors 3250 MHz – More than twice as powerful as before.
- 32GB DDR5 RAM – Faster RAM and more of it than before.
- Ultrafast NVMe storage – NVMe SSDs are a type of solid state drive (SSD) that are faster and more expensive than traditional SSDs. NVMe SSDs are designed for high-performance applications. NVMe SSDs can achieve transfer speeds of up to 20 gigabytes per second (Gbps). We also have 4 times the storage than we had before.
- RAID 6 storage configuration – If a drive fails it can be easily replaced with no data loss.
Unmetered bandwidth – Faster connectivity using 10 Gbps port speed with unmetered data transfer (bandwidth). - Daily and weekly server backups. Full website exports monthly and after any significant changes. Exports are stored on a local drive, copied to a backup local drive, and copied to a 2 TB Google Drive in the cloud. Exports are safer and more reliable than conventional backup methods.
Hosting Cost – If you Google what Bluehost charges for dedicated hosting you will find that hosting starts at $90 per month. WizardsWebs provides this same hosting for only $30 per month for websites up to 5GB disk space. Larger websites are a bit more. You will also enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
WizardsWebs requires that our clients utilize our hosting so that we can assure the performance of their website. Viewing all of our website on a single control panel lets us manage PHP version, maintain backups, maintain security updates, and avoid technical conflicts. Uptime is maximized and any problems can be quickly identified and resolved.
3. Website Licensing, Support & Maintenance
Many people seem to think that once their website is live the work is over. The truth is that websites need attention every week. While other agencies can charge hundreds per month or more for this level of services, our regular website maintenance is only $80 per month.
Website Maintenance is an important and necessary service that takes care of 3 critical requirements:
(1) Your Annual Licensing costs – If you had to purchase the premium plugin licenses, SSL Certificate and other services we pay for and provide you, your cost would typically be more than $600 per year or $50 per month. Most licenses are annual licenses and have to be re-purchased every year.
WizardsWebs is purchasing licensing for over 70 websites and is able to purchase multiple site or unlimited site licensing. Our per website cost is much lower than you if you had to purchase them. Our Website Licensing, Support & Maintenance Plan gives you our purchasing power.
(2) Your Technical Maintenance – The list of all the things we do as part of technical maintenance is extensive. The list includes services such as performing weekly plugin updates, weekly site backups / restorations, periodic full site exports, monitoring 404 logs and maintaining redirects, monitoring local search ranking, site security hardening, improvements to on-page SEO / Local SEO, and much more.
(3) Client Requested Work – Need pictures added, a new project added, prices changed, or another mailbox set up? Most requests are completed the day we receive the request. By the way, Google like fresh content. In our experience, updating old content results in 2X as many pageviews in a year.
By far, the biggest complaint we hear is from folks that had some guy build their websites and now when they need changes, they either can’t find him or he is unresponsive to their requests for changes to their website.
WizardsWebs provides up to 2 hours of developer time per month for technical maintenance and client requested work.
Other agencies charge over $1000 per month for this level of website maintenance.
Summary
Website Maintenance is an important factor in website development. We take care of our client’s licensing costs. We take care of their Technical Maintenance. We take care of their Client Requested Work. Beyond that, our clients benefit from additional services we pay for including bulk image optimization, Vimeo video streaming services, the many Gravity Forms Add-Ons that come with Elite membership, Keyword Research services, BrightLocal SEO, RankMath Premium SEO tools, and more.
We have a long-standing reputation for making our small business clients successful at the lowest possible website development cost. We have clients that have been with us for over 20 years.
WizardsWebs Design only designs and builds websites for clients that use our hosting and maintenance.
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Would You Like to Learn More?
If you would like to learn more or to discuss your project just give us a shout to get started. There is no obligation.
Tomball, Texas 77375
Tel: (713) 817-3880
Email: steve@houston-webs.com
Office Hours: M-F 9AM-5PM
