How much does a B2B website cost?

For a professionally designed website, the cost ranges from $10,000 for a seed-stage startup that only needs a few core pages to $1M for a large enterprise organization. The large variation in cost is due to several factors, including:

• Status of the visual identity and required changes
• Number of pages and layouts created
• Volume of content migrated
• Website information architecture
• Buyer journey design
• Difficulty of technical feature design and development
• Degree of flexibility needed from features
• Custom integrations
• Messaging, strategy, and content development – which is considered out of scope for most website development agencies

Note that this cost estimate doesn’t include maintenance and recurring costs for the CMS, hosting, integrations, and ongoing support. We have listed those prices here.

Like many things in life, the adage, “you get what you pay for,” certainly applies here. A seed-stage startup founder could build their website for little to no cost (outside of the time they spend slapping things on a page), but this approach is ill-advised. Visitors develop an opinion of your company and brand within .05 seconds of visiting your website according to research published in Behaviour & Information Technology. 

We advise that companies avoid giving the impression that they aren’t a legitimate or professional organization through a website with poor buyer journey design, messaging, and look and feel.

Standard B2B website design and development costs

Given the original range we stated ($10,000 to $1M), there’s obviously a great deal of variation beyond what we’ll list below. Our range will be based on a baseline cost for a typical seed-stage startup with a tiny site schema up to the average growth-stage B2B company with a strong content marketing strategy. 

Enterprise organizations, whether they have many product lines and buyer committees or not, will have different needs and pricing.

Copywriting: $4,000 – $25,000

Copywriting for a website build does not include creating new content pieces like blog posts. Copywriting should be strictly focused on taking the messaging your team would like to have on your website and making it fit with the design. We’re also taking into consideration revision cycles and a skilled professional who can recommend new copy based on their experience with buyer journeys and the needs of a first-time visitor to the page.

Visual Identity: $10,000 – $250,000

Visual identity does not entail developing a new branding kit for your company. A designer who specializes in websites will understand usability, accessibility, and functionality needs that are specific to web design. They should understand which colors from your brand palette will work best and make recommendations on how to restrict your brand palette. They will also make other design recommendations, like typeface, flourishes, icons, and even develop animation and illustration guidelines to balance your brand’s needs with the design.

For a taste of the considerations that must go into something like color palette choices, read our Head of Design’s blog here.

Design: $5,000 – $100,000

When we say design, we’re not talking about visual identity. Design takes into consideration your company’s marketing strategy and goals. The designer will recommend page layouts, elements, and structure for optimal usability and buyer journey outcomes.

Design is all about creating the best user experience. For more on what the design phase of a project should look like, check out our article here.

Development Costs: $5,000 – $150,000

The cost of development varies greatly depending on the platform your website is built upon, whether there are development overlays from a third party on top of that base platform (at Airfleet, we have our own platform that works with WordPress, as an example), and how much specialized functionality your team wants.

The right design should include development to ensure your pages are responsive, as personalized as possible, and integrated with your core marketing technology.

We believe that a best practice is to have internal standards that are well documented and we develop an intensive information architecture plan so that our websites are extremely structured. This doesn’t mean the websites look anything alike across our portfolio (which you can quickly see here). It means we work hard to prevent a lot of the problems you’ll see when a person on your team makes a change to one page and section and it cascades unexpectedly across the website.

Make sure that whichever agency you choose has future-proofing in mind when they make any recommendations. If you think your product offering will expand or that you’ll want to feature multiple items in a single section, your design and development team should anticipate including the work to accommodate these kinds of changes.

Content Migration: $0 – $10,000

The cost of your content migration depends on the volume of content on your website, but it also depends on how structured your existing content is and how much is worth migrating to your new website. Content migration also includes including the correct forms on pages, not forgetting meta tags, and other core elements to retain the right information architecture.

Content migration is simply more difficult if you’re migrating off of a platform that doesn’t have an easy method of exporting content. For example, migrating off or across WordPress is much easier than migrating from HubSpot CMS or Wix.

Content migration includes developing a site schema and recommendations for what should and should not be included in the migration. A great deal of the work often includes setting up redirects for pages that don’t make the cut.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): $5,000 – $30,000

Conversion rate optimization blends industry best practices with the data available from your website. Typically, the bulk of the recommendations prior to go-live will rely on industry best practices. The rest of the work goes into setting up your website analytics infrastructure properly for your team. This should include configuring Google Tag Manager to capture the right events and key events in Google Analytics.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): $2,500 – $25,000

Developing a search engine optimization strategy for your website is critical for more than just traditional Google searches. Other platforms (including AI-driven platforms) use algorithms to serve up relevant content to their users. The agency you work with should be able to guide the content and keywords on your core pages and understand how assets like images, video, animations, and audio should work together.

SEO is about more than labeling graphics and choosing headings. Technical SEO for a new site should include a markup scheme, URL structure, and server-side optimization. At Airfleet, we include technical SEO in our platform because it’s such a core aspect of having a successful website.

What’s typically considered out of scope for website design and development agencies?

Messaging & Positioning

Market research and messaging development should go hand-in-hand and inform your overall go-to-market strategy. These mission-critical aspects of any good marketing program should also heavily influence how your team thinks about and leverages your website.

Messaging and positioning costs vary between $5,000 to $50,000. For high-end consultants and research agencies, these services can easily exceed $500,000 and take a year to complete.

Most early-stage to mid-market companies can achieve a strong messaging playbook in less than three months for under $15,000. The more work you’ll do in-house to interview existing customers and prospects and leverage insights from your sales organization, the faster this process will be.

Website Strategy

A website strategy can cost between $3,000 to $10,000 to develop for a mid-size website. The first website for a startup exiting stealth mode may not need the same degree of strategy development, particularly if you know your company is still in the process of understanding product-market fit.

The website strategy should include analyzing buyer personas, understanding what worked and what didn’t about your last website, who your competitors are, how your product solves pains in the market, and how your product is different from other competitive solutions. This information will drive buyer journey optimization, your website information architecture, and other design choices. 

Your website strategy will be used to inform the initial wireframe designed by your website agency. Check out our process for the wireframing phase of a website design here.

Ongoing Maintenance

Once your new website is launched, you may need the help of an agency to keep it running smoothly. This often depends on your in-house talent and bandwidth. You’ll need someone with experience in website optimization to keep your page speed down and usability up. You’ll also need to have a resource who understands the basics of SEO optimization, and another who is available to support design updates. These are typically handled on a retainer (you can learn more about agency pricing here).

There will be times that you run into a new situation that requires design and development specialist work. These resources are typically contracted on a per-project basis.

You can check out our pricing for these types of services here.

Marketing automation system administration

Most website development and design agencies don’t work with a CRM or marketing automation systems. At Airfleet, we do because if your website doesn’t work seamlessly with your lead routing processes, what’s the point of having a website at all?

There are also several code additions that should be implemented in Google Tag Manager to have a fully integrated and operational analytics infrastructure. If you’re a startup and need an impressive website with stunning design and help with your marketing automation setup, check out our options here.

Most website design and development agencies will recommend you work with a different agency or contracted specialist to ensure everything is set up correctly and working smoothly together. 

GDPR Compliance

Most website developers and designers won’t know much about GDPR and other PII policies – or how to ensure compliance. It’s critical to correctly configure current pixels, and 3rd party cookies. You’ll also need to develop an analytics and data capture strategy that is compliant by looping in your legal team and adhering to your company’s privacy policy. Without this type of due-diligence, you expose your brand to lawsuits.

Security

Some platforms have more vulnerabilities than others, and a few will require your web developers to incorporate best practices that strengthen your website’s security. Not following security best practices such as OWASP, and not knowing the platform’s best practices for hardening against known vulnerabilities will leave your brand open to a breach.

Other marketing support

Typically, the same agency that sets up your website will not be the agency that runs your social media, paid advertising, and content marketing. However, we tend to come into contact with many stellar freelancers and agencies. We’re happy to help, and you can let us know what you’d like to learn more about by contacting us here.

A detailed breakdown of the cost of a B2B website

The upfront price ranges for a new B2B website are:

Service	Range
Copywriting	$4,000 – $25,000
Visual Identity	$10,000 – $250,000
Design	$5,000 – $100,000
Development Costs	$5,000 – $150,000
Content Migration	$0 – $10,000
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)	$5,000 – $30,000
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)	$2,500 – $25,000

There are recurring SaaS costs that will add up any time you implement a website in B2B. The typical setup of a brand new website includes choosing the underlying platform, hosting provider, security add-ons, and other third-party tools. We’ve included some of the basics below: 

Service	Range
Web Hosting	$30 – $10,000 per year
Domain	$1 – $1,500 per year
SSL Certificate	$0 – $1,500 per year
Content Management System (CMS)	$3,000 – $25,000 per year

The price range for web hosting is huge because companies can choose to save money by using shared hosting providers or purchase dedicated services to ensure uptime and speed. The platform costs (design overlay plus CMS) vary widely as well, but the lower price points can come with less responsiveness, less flexibility, and increased page load speeds. 
If you ever have questions about which tools and providers, let us know. We’ve worked with well over two hundred technology partners with our clients, and we’re happy to share what we’ve learned.