How much will it cost me to build a website myself?

With many businesses now understanding the need for having an online presence, the demand of having their website designed and launched has increased.

But one does wonder, what is the cost to build a website? There are many ways to do this. In fact, all three options have different pricing points and of course, their advantages AND disadvantages.

1. Building a website yourself
2. Hire a freelance web designer & developer
3. Hire a web design agency

For this article, we will focus solely on building the website yourself particularly in Singapore.

Cost of building a website yourself

We did some research and it seems that a lot of users are much more familiar with Wordpress than Webflow. Therefore, in this case, we are going to compare prices between the two.

But let's go through some of the other costs that you might have to pay before embarking on your website design journey.

Domain pricing

We personally use GoDaddy simply because it is simple to connect to Google and getting everything done up for you with a simple click of a button. But of course you are free to choose whichever service provider that you are familiar with.

Be mindful of the fact that if you choose to have a (.sg) domain, it would be a bit more expensive.

1. GoDaddy
2. Vodien
3. Namecheap
4. Exabytes

Most of these pricing are about the same price, between S$10-S$20/year for a (.com) domain and S$50-S$70/year for a (.sg) domain.

Web Hosting

Since we are comparing Wordpress and Webflow, we have researched on some of the common service providers that do provide a managed Wordpress hosting. This is a dedicated hosting for only Wordpress websites.

1. GoDaddy - S$263.88/year
2. Vodien - S$180.72/year
3. Webflow - S$372/year

Only GoDaddy and Webflow provides free SSL certificate for their hosting.

Website Design Framework

For most Wordpress users or designers, they are inclined to stick to a Wordpress builder. And currently, Divi Builder tops the charts being one of the most used Wordpress builder by web design freelancers and agencies in Singapore.

This will set us back to about S$120/year.

Website Plugins

Honestly, Wordpress requires lots of plugins if you decide to create a website that has lots of features. The only thing that I would compare it for now would be the e-commerce aspect.

1. WooCommerce - Free plugin with limited functionalities
2. Webflow E-Commerce - S$480/year

Design Cost

While both have templates that are free, you might want to get a premium template which you can edit the visuals yourself.

Most templates can cost up to about S$50-S$120 depending on the type of templates you chose.

Time and Effort

Currently, the average income for a Singaporean graduate would be around S$3500 - S$5000 monthly. Let's just say you know how to use Wordpress or Webflow, and building your own website is going to take you about 3-4 weeks.

So based on this calculation, S$3500 would be the cost for your time and effort to create a website.

Maintaining the website

Keeping your website secure and functioning requires some time and effort. But with Wordpress plugins, you can save some time while allowing automated tasks to be done directly on your Wordpress server.

This could be anything from S$100 - S$150 per month.

Webflow does your automatic backups for you and keeps your website secure due to their AWS servers.

Conclusion

Total Costs Incurred: From S$5000 - S$6000 with a yearly maintenance cost of about between S$2500 - S$2800

In conclusion, designing a website takes a lot of patience and understanding how the tools provided can help you to further enhance your presence online. It requires proper planning and research and it is not something that you or your business can take likely.

Of course, the cost that is listed above can be further reduced depending on what you really need. If you are a seasoned designer or developer, you can easily remove any templates or plugins that might increase your costs.

Hopefully, this article helps you in terms of calculating your budget.

In any case, if you do need help, you can simply talk to us. The least we can do is to give you good advice.