How much does an Ecommerce website cost to make?

Following on from our previous blog post, ‘How much will a website cost?’, we thought it would be a good idea to split the blog post in two, firstly to detail the cost of a standard 5 page website and then to outline how much an Ecommerce website built using WordPress and WooCommerce would cost. There are multiple factors which dictate just how much a website will cost to design and develop.

Use A Premium Theme vs Building A Bespoke Website

We won’t cover this subject to much as we have detailed this previously, which can be read here, ‘When Should I Choose A Bespoke WordPress Website Over Using A Premium Theme?‘.  To quickly recap; If we were to build a bespoke website, then the project takes longer as our design team works on creating the visuals for the website, then our development team works on developing the website from scratch. Because of the bespoke nature of the build, these types of projects often take longer and require a bigger budget.

How many products will you be selling?

Depending how many products you will be selling will influence how much time is required to create the necessary options for you to manage stock and sell online. By having a larger Ecommerce website, it is mor likely you will have more product variables and options for the end customer to choose from. We need to ensure that you can easily manage the backend of the website and users can easily choose between different products in the front end.

How many additional features are required for the Ecommerce website?

WooCommerce is the best extension to turn your WordPress website into an Ecommerce platform. WooCommerce comes with a set of standard features to allow you to begin selling products online immediately. Being completely free to integrate, it is an excellent choice to use to make your website Ecommerce ready.

Unlike other Ecommerce platforms, it does not come with all features included elsewhere. For instance upselling/crosselling, coupon features or the capability to accept direct payments via your website without being redirected to PayPal for example. All these features can be purchased at an addition price, from around $30 to $100 in most cases. Some other plugins are a bit more expensive and billed yearly.

Is this a new website or do you already have an ecommerce website?

Redesiging a new Ecommerce website for an online shop with a website already is a little bit more complicated that building a website from afresh. The reason being is we need to transfer the products from the current system which has a pre-defined way of working to a new system with different functions. All this means is that a little more care is needed when working with established online shops, rather than if we were to set up a new Ecommerce website from scratch.

What are your competitors websites like?

Your closest competitors set a benchmark as to how good your website needs to look. If your industry has a high standard, it would be a detriment to your business to proceed with a website whereby we are restricted to how good we can make it look. Alternatively, for other industries, you do not need a bespoke website and could easily blow your competition out of the water by using a premium theme.

In general, larger business tend to be in more competitive industries, therefore need a bespoke website.

Below we provide a better understanding of ‘How much a website costs?’ and what is included in a standard package for a 5-page website. All our websites are built using WordPress which allows you to easily manage the content of your website.

The following prices are an estimate for a full Ecommerce website. Check out the features below

Additional costs; Hosting and Monthly Maintenance explained

There are two costs which could be additional and they all depend whether you decide to host the website with ourselves. Hosting is a server which stores all the files which make up your website. When a user wants to view your website, they are viewing the files on the server. It is basically where your website lives 🙂 All websites built by Cude Design are hosted on our own, managed dedicated server. Hosting is charged on a yearly basis of £345 excl VAT.

We also offer a monthly maintenance package, the reason we do this is as follows: WordPress and the plugins which make up your website need to be updated regurarly. If they are not, this can lead to the website being vulnerable to attacks, if one gets attacked then it could effect our other clients websites on the same server. The following items are provided on a monthly basis at £40 p.m excl VAT.

•  WordPress and the plugins updated within the first week of each month. This means your website stays up to-date and any improvements to security by either WordPress or the plugins will be implemented.
•  WordPress security will be activated to secure the website against attacks and hacks. Anything on the internet is vulnerable to such attacks, by doing this, your website is regurarly scanned for malware.
•  Weekly backups are made of the website database and full backups are made on a monthly basis. This ensures that if something does happen from an attack, we should be able to restore to a previous time.