Are you looking for ways to charge your website without chasing away customers?

In this post, we share how you can price your services. Why price them like that. And how you can model their success.

Hopefully, by the end of this article, you won’t be like other web designers. Who follows the myth that you should only charge a couple of hundred dollars for a website. Is it because you’re a beginner? Or you don't believe that businesses are going to pay that much? Trust me they will and they do. 

Whether you are a beginner or not you should definitely be charging more than the myths. Let’s see why and how. Let’s get into it. 

Pricing your services reasonably

How to charge your website

One thing in your head you need to try and separate is that. Business money is very different from personal money.

When you're working with a business. They tend to have much larger budgets to pay for a website than you realize. This is one of their biggest marketing tools.

Pricing website design first and foremost you need to believe in yourself. You also need to believe in the services that you are delivering. 

What to consider when pricing

As soon as you start second-guessing your worth or your capabilities. You're not going to charge your website as high as you should. But you should know there are always

  • small hiccups, 
  • changes, 
  • amends to make as you never really know what the clients like, 
  • how difficult they could be on email, 
  • Many times you have to communicate with them and 
  • ultimately they take up so much time

So if you will overlook all these overheads, you're going to end up selling websites for a small fee. I guarantee you that no matter how exciting it might feel to win a website project at a small fee.

It's going to turn out to be the bane of your life. Because no project ever sorts of runs 100 smoothly or how we would imagine there are always these uncertainties. 

All of those things you kind of need to take into account.

so first off, let's cover the multiple ways that you can charge for website design. I've got here the most popular ways to charge. 

Multiple ways to charge for websites 

1. Hourly rate

One way is an hourly rate. Actually, this works really well if you are a freelancer and you are contracted on a regular basis.

You could just charge an hourly rate and say. This is going to take three hours to do a small website change.

Or something like that and you can just charge them your hourly rate. 

2. Per project 

Next, we've got per project which is actually the most common now. There are a couple of ways that you can work this out. You can just have a fixed cost for a project.

Depending on the size, you could sort of package this up which I'm going to show you. You could package this up based on how many pages the website will have. Also the functionality, and essentially just have multiple pricing brackets depending on the level of complexity of the website.

You can also base this on average, how many hours you think a project is going to take. So take an hourly rate that you have established. Be it you know 50 to 100.

I don't think that's unreasonable for an hourly rate for website design. And then you basically say well I think this project is going to cost me 20 hours in time. Or 30 hours or 40 hours and you would come to a price like that. 

3. Monthly retainers

Finally, you've got monthly retainers. Monthly retainers only really work for let's say hosting. Or if you had an ongoing maintenance package. We'll cover that a little bit more in the next couple of slides.

Here ultimately you've got a few ways that you can charge for website design. And you know you don't have to choose one. You can choose multiple ways. You can combine a fixed cost with hourly. If they want additional development it will be x amount per hour.

If they want ongoing maintenance then you would obviously just chuck that on at the end of the contract.

4. Defined packages

A. Basic Package

Moving on you can have different packages defined within your business and do as a model to work from in your company. You can have a basic package defined for those who have a very small budget that really can't afford the more custom-based services.

What they would get is a template or a theme from the likes of ThemeForest you would install that into a content management system and put together their content in a way that is correct for them in terms of images fonts, colors, and very basically customize it at a basic level.

They will get their domain name and their first year's hosting included and you give them some very minor training like sending them over a 20-minute video on-screen recording showing them how they can update the content of the website themselves and they find that really really useful.

B. Starter Package

Next, we've got the starter package. Basically includes everything from the basic package except this time they are using a fully custom design. This is where you'd go into Adobe XD and design a visual composition. Or visual layout based on their requirements. You would send over one to two-page Designs ready for them to sign off.

This also includes things like contact forms, and basic functionality, so people can send a consultation request or something from the website to their email address most do 800 pounds. Then the starter package is 1 500 pounds. 

One thing you need to bear in mind within your web design business is what overheads you have in order to get the project done.

So you know obviously time is a big one and within my business currently, I still design the websites myself and that takes a fair bit of time you've then got to consider all of the client communication that you have.

Weekly calls, monthly calls, the initial consultation, requirement gathering, and then you've got all of the amends that come on top.

So amends for the design, the visual composition and then you'll have the men's amends for the development. Currently, within my business, I take care of the designs and then send them out to my sort of front-end developer who builds them in Elementor.

That's a cost that I've had to consider and I now sort of charge them to the project. So 1500 pounds for a basic website is not unreasonable and it's actually still very cheap for a lot of businesses. 

C. Professional Package

Moving on we've got the professional package. This includes everything from starters but this time there are slightly more pages. We've got five to ten pages, and two to four-page template design. So I will put together two to four visual templates that will give them a real good sort of feel as to how the site will look like when it's built.

It kind of gives them that sense that okay this is the color scheme, this is sort of the layout, this is the brand or the business brand that's sort of been encompassed into the design.

You can utilize and manage to achieve that with just a couple of page templates you don't need to design a page template for every single page within the website. It's just a waste of time.

And then included in the professional package you've got things like custom content blog or portfolio and then finally the biggest package is e-commerce. 

So this gets everything on the other three packages and 10 plus pages because an online store tends to be a lot more than just a blog or a couple of home about and contact pages. You've got all of the product pages that you need to consider as well. Plus you've got e-commerce functionality.

You've got the purchase process that you probably need to do on a basic level design just to show them what that would look like. And then you need to know how to build it. 

On top of that, you've got all of the customer emails that come with e-com. So actually 3600 pounds is sort of like the entry-level for me and depending on how big their store is will depend on how much that figure increases, 

Hopefully, this has given you a pretty sort of good insight as to what you can be charging within your web design business. Do consider all of your overheads and other additional costs that may come in. Whether it is software plug-ins, resources, additional development contractors, or all of that stuff. 

5. Value-based pricing

so here we've got a base rate of sort of the pricing model that I tend to utilize in my business but one thing that you might want to consider is taking a more value-based pricing approach.

Value-based pricing is basically, pricing for a website based on how much value you think that website is going to bring a business.

So for example, what I tend to say is if you are working with a business and you think that this website is going to generate an extra 100 000 per year, based on the work that you've done for the website.

Then I don't think it's unreasonable to charge 5k for a website. You'll probably start thinking about who is going to pay that. For a business that's generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, a 5k website is going to be absolutely nothing for them.

So the bigger businesses you target, the more budget they tend to have, and the more you can actually sell web design services for the businesses. The smaller end of the scale tends to have a less budget so that's why these lower-end packages will probably be more beneficial for them. 

Additional extras: 

So you might think well, what do I do when the requirements are not as specific as we have in the packages. What I tend to do here is. If they have requirements that don't fit my packages, I will choose the best package that does fit them. Then I ask them. Will you have additional development on top or custom content?

And that is going to cost you an extra 250 pounds on top. It might be that you've got a portfolio as well as a blog. Or they've got something quite unique like a gallery.

Or just some very specific custom calculator or anything that's going to require either additional plug-ins or additional development time. 

Then you basically just bolt on blocks of additional development time. So block I bought this on as additional 250-pound blocks depending on how many additional extras they have.

It could be an extra 250 pounds, 500 pounds, or 750 pounds on top of that initial website package that I've chosen for them.

On the right-hand side, here we've got website maintenance and support and website hosting so this kind of touches back onto the ongoing retainer, and actually what I discharge is 50 pounds per month for ongoing maintenance.

And this covers one to two hours of support each month. Anything on top of that they will get charged an extra 50 pounds for that month.

So they can buy bolts or blocks of time. If they wanted two to four hours a month. That would be a hundred pounds and that kind of increments up into 50-pound blocks.

Now I'm not suggesting here that you pull together packages and you make the customer choose.

Because I believe that we are delivering a Custom service. We need to make sure that the websites that we are delivering are fit for our purpose. And are going to help the business meet its needs and meet its goals.

So this is why I tend to keep the packages fairly loose. I always make sure that there is a way for them to get the website that they need. In order to start generating the revenue that they are looking for.

Conclusion: Best Ways How To Charge Your Website Correctly

So guys get going and have a look at your pricing. If there are two things I want you to take away from this is. One, don't have any limits and beliefs in what you're capable of charging or what you believe or perceive that a business will pay for a website.

Because pricing websites even from fifteen hundred pounds or two thousand dollars is not unnecessary. You know websites are a fundamental marketing tool for a business and they tend to have a shelf life of like two to three years.

Two thousand dollars is not much of an investment and the second thing I want you to take away here is understanding that web design packages are not an exact science by all means put together basic packages that you can reference within your business.

Every time that you have a customer on a call and you need to give them a price, you kind of have this package that you can sort of highlight. As well as the additional code blocks and you can send them over a price.

Please do not have limited thinking, the only way that you're going to be able to build a successful business is having the confidence to charge more and you should absolutely have the confidence to be charging at 

least you know 1 000 or two thousand dollars for your website. 

hopefully, you found it useful. Please, if you've got any questions ask me and I'll get back to you. Leave a comment down below, I'd love to know how your pricing is going within your web design business.

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