Understanding Web Design Pricing (Detailed Guide)

my first custom website I charged $150 for the entire WordPress buildout but my fourth client later that year I charged $1,500 then fast forward a few years later and we were charging $4 to $6,000 per custom buildout and if you're thinking the reason I was able to charge so much more was because my skills were just twice as good four times as good you would be incorrect sure I was a little bit better on the development and the design side of things however I started charging more once I realized what these websites actually mean to

our clients once I started understanding why would a local business spend thousands and thousands on a website what benefit is it to them that's when I started charging what I was actually worth now this took me years to understand and I could have charged so much more during those early days so I lost so much money now I'm going to show you how to shorten that learning curve and download everything I have in my brain into yours so you can avoid years of undercharging for your services and actually start making more money and the crazy

thing about this is some people have so much resistance towards this I sometimes see this in the comment section or people believe that no one's going to pay $6,000 for a WordPress website that was downloaded from a template but little do they know I've charged thousands and thousands of dollars for a go high level imported website template I've charged thousands of dollars in the early days for Weebly websites but I think you and I understand that it's about the value it's not about the tools and once you actually understand the different pricing and what it

could do for your clients you'll be able to charge anything you want so let's dive into the actual pricing models here the first one is you could charge per hour of your work I see a lot of people doing this on upwork or on Craigslist or you know all these different freelancer websites and I absolutely hate charging per hour it basically makes you an employee chances are you didn't get into the web design business because you wanted to be someone else's employee and because you wanted to work around the clock you probably wanted to be

creative and you wanted to work on your own time on your own schedule you wanted to work on your laptop but you are not someone else's slave if you want to work per hour go get a job where you have steady hours there's absolutely no reason to be doing this and your incentives and the client's incentives are not aligned when you have this model because you are rewarded for taking a very long time to build this website right the more hours you put into it the more you get paid and the client a lot of

times wants that's done as fast as humanly possible and they'll be pressing you hey are you done yet are we almost done it's not worth it trust me next is a per page rate this one's slightly better but I still don't like it I used to do this I've charged $100 per page $150 per page that you can add to a website but a lot of clients like to cheap out on this and then they'll decrease Pages they'll ask you to combine different pages they'll complain if a page looks a little bit too similar to

another page it's not good the client doesn't win and you don't win there's no reason for this if after you've already built a website and you've charged your client thousands then they want to add a page months later and they're not paying you every single month for hosting and for other services then go ahead and charge them cool you on extra page cool it's $200 whatever price you want to set for yourself I like two different models the flat fee model and then also the monthly subscription model so let's dive into the flat fee first

I like charging between $4 to $6,000 for a custom website again it doesn't matter how you build it web flow WordPress does not matter what matters is the outcome what is your client going to get from this website and by the way if you're doing e-commerce websites you're doing anything with online stores I have friends that charge 10 15,000 20 plus th000 for these massive massive websites where people are selling products and XYZ and there's tons of other niches you can go into like you know building subscription websites and this and that where you can

charge a lot let's focus in on local businesses if you can properly show a business owner how this website is going to be a tool in their business this will Aid them in getting more sales in pre-qualifying their leads they'll be more than happy to pay you let me just show you a quick example here this right here is what most companies do they just have a simple contact form that when it's filled out it goes to a little message box that says your message has been sent now imagine we go to a client and

we tell them hey Mr business owner look we are going to automatically book appointments for you just like this and then we're going to show them a bunch of gallery images and we're going to show them your team photos and we're going to show them your reviews and everyone on your website that submits a form we are going to pre-qualify them and we are going to send them a bunch of proof we're going to put in front of their face why you are the best option to work with not to mention if they faill out

the form but they don't book an appointment we will automatically follow up and confirm hey you didn't book an appointment what happened do you need the link boom automatically text the link oh they did book an appointment okay then we're going to send them a text message hey thanks so much for booking at this time please reply yes to confirm that this time works for you or you can even go in and create something like this where it's a pop up on a website and it actually goes to a form it goes to a survey

that can automatically give them a price now not every client is going to be a good fit for this this is an example in the Landscaping Niche but let's just say they choose residential they hit next then they choose okay I have one tree or I have uh two large trees and then they keep going through all of this and once they do this it actually shows them on a page like this hey this client has all of these properties we generated this rough estimate and then the website visitor by the way sees this page

if they need to correct the information they can do that here if everything looks good boom they can hit submit and then guess what it goes into the calendar and they can actually book the appointment now not every client is going to bite on this but you can see how this is a much more complete solution for what this potential client of yours needs inside their business and what I have found is that even business owners that don't actually utilize this and they don't use it to its full capacity just the fact that you can

show this to them and you can show how far in depth you have thought about this website and about their business they are way more likely to move forward with you even if they get a price from some other WordPress developer webflow developer and they're showing them hey I'm going to put the hero image this way and we're going to have buttons that look like this and things are going to move in the background they don't care okay they don't care what they care about is results if you can show that you understand their business

they are way more likely to move forward with you this is how you can charge High ticket prices this is our slide deck here this is how we convert uh cold leads people that have never heard of us into high paying customers let me show you one of our plans here that you can use so we have the custom website and then we have the custom software the custom software um so so we use go high level with this you can you can find a link in the description if you want but this is how

we actually follow up with all the leads this is how we build all the calculators and how we build all that stuff so we sell it like this we have the $6,000 onetime website then $300 a month we automatically enroll them into a $300 a month both hosting plan and with the software even if you're not using high level as your downsell and offering these appointments and surveys and all this kind of stuff you can still offer hosting I always always recommend that everyone offers hosting you want to build a long-term business even if you're

charging $100 a month for you hosting their website on HostGator and it cost you $9 a month on HostGator right to have way more clients than you can possibly have and on that $9 a month you can have a ton of clients why do they pay for this you also might be wondering well no one's going to pay me $100 a month for hosting yes they will they absolutely will they just spent $6,000 with you $5,000 for you they do not want their website to get hacked they do not want their website to go down

they do not want their plugins to be outdated all of these things are a reality what happens when a website doesn't look good on tablet cuz something breaks or the theme gets updated or this gets outdated they need you in their back burner most of these businesses don't care about the internet that much they would much rather have what they call is like an IT guy which you and I both know we're not it guys we don't set up like you know internet and stuff but anyway anyways as a web designer you are there for

them you there managing their backend presence and even you can go further and even talk about their reviews right they have a bunch of reviews and you can even show them look your competitors are responding to all their reviews we have an AI tool this is built inside high levels so you don't actually have to go and set this up individually for each client but we tell the clients look you have a bunch of reviews let's automatically respond to all those reviews we'll do it all for you we'll use AI messages so it's fully custom

to each client but long story short these businesses want someone like you that they can just text or call and you are in their pocket and you also have to understand that $100 a month dude they spend more than $100 a month on freaking lunch they buy a couple of their staff lunch and they just spent $120 $130 they don't care about this money their utility bill their payments on all the other stuff that they have is way higher $100 a month is nothing to these local business owners I don't care if it's an electrician

that has two people working with him or some giant roofing company and they have 20 trucks they spend a lot of money on random that you don't even realize next up is the website in a day so the way this looks and the way this works is it's just a templated website that you have like here's an example of three that we offer our clients here are a couple High con converting clients they just choose one we put their logo at the very top we match it to their colors we change the about us page

and that's it for a lot of clients they're more than happy to have just something online if they want SEO and they want organic content and that kind of thing that's a separate price all this content is copy and paste it's linked to their Google page we have their phone number they look like a high-end customer and we have clients all over the US that have these website templates they don't care we are not the only company that does this I learned this from a large corporation I used to work at full time and they

did exactly this they charged $500 a month for these copy paste like website builder it's I forget the name of the website builder but it was like Weebly it was things they just imported this template there was no customization and they gave it to clients at a 12month contract oneye contract you have to pay $500 per month this is a steal $150 now we do have a six-month contract with this and then we also even give them 20% off if they pay for the full 6 months upfront and that gives you a nice chunk of

change that you can get upfront and then of course if they do want to use high level and they want to use all the automations and everything that we just talked about like the estimate calculator and and anything else that you might build for your industry for your Niche then they have to pay $300 and then they get the website with that