Tips and Cost of Web Development for Small Businesses

Whether you own plumbing services, real estate business, salon, restaurant, hotel, consulting services, or wish to open an e-commerce store, you need a prominent online presence. And your business website becomes the true face of your business online.

You might be fascinated to learn that almost 34% of US consumers use the internet to search for a local business daily. And 28% of the total local searches in the US convert into sales within 24 hours.

These stats certainly hint at the importance of a website for small businesses. As a one-stop web development agency, we have already built 400+ websites for businesses in multiple domains. And we have curated this article to offer you authentic advice on small business website development. 

So, if you plan to multiply your sales & revenue with a new website, we will discuss the cost of web development for small businesses and the key considerations here. 

What is the Cost of Website Development for Small Businesses?

The web development cost for small businesses spans $150 to $4500 depending upon your project scope (or feature list), the number of web pages, the choice of CMS, and the web development company. 

However, various factors help you reduce the cost of web development for your startup or small business. These include:

a) Choosing an Offshore Web Agency:
You can reduce your website development cost by up to 50% without compromising on the quality of your site by hiring a web agency in India. And this is one main reason why 80% of IT-based Fortune 500 companies have their web development teams in India. 

b) Leveraging Dedicated Developers Instead of Freelancers: 
One expensive mistake many small businesses make is relying on freelancers for their business website. This choice has demerits like- Increased risk of project failure, Faded website quality, and Increased website maintenance cost, which might take a toll on your website performance.

The right alternative is to hire a dedicated developer from a web agency. The agency holds the developer’s accountability and the quality of work he delivers. Further, reputed web agencies are committed to following web development best practices, which ensures lower maintenance costs and better site performance.

8 Tips to Successful Web Development for Small Businesses

    1.  Choose a Web Development Partner cum ‘Consultant’

As a small business owner, you must be highly particular about your official business presence online. However, small businesses often invest in freelancers to save on development costs, and they fail to gauge the importance of a web consultant. 

A good web development partner will most likely wear that web consultant’s hat for your business. They can guide you through the right project scope, the latest web development trends, and even choosing the right hosting provider to assist you with coining a unique brand presence. 

    2.  Choose Custom Site Design to Boost Brand Familiarity

Saving a few hundred dollars by choosing a free or common web design template steals your chance to create a unique brand identity. And therefore, you must give a much-needed push to your branding strategy by opting for a customized website design. 

Your web development partner must help you design a custom-tailored site that exudes trust and builds brand familiarity. These branding guidelines travel deeper across your social media creatives and marketing collaterals.  

    3.  Reduce the Website Management and Maintenance Costs

Small businesses often incur frequent website management and maintenance costs. And these costs bloats up the total budget you spend on hosting your site online. 

However, you can plan to trim these site management and maintenance costs smartly by choosing a trusted web development company. 

The right partner suggests and helps you develop scalable and low-maintenance sites with minimal 3rd party plugins. Moreover, they are likely to follow coding best practices that eliminate the need for frequent maintenance. 

Further, a trusted partner allows you to take the driving seat on your site with a guided backend panel. This minimizes your dependency on your tech team, and you can easily manage your site. 

    4.  Build Custom Coded Websites that Delivers High-Performance

Who doesn’t want a high-performance website? Google loves it, and so do the site visitors. 

Therefore, whether you wish to start your e-commerce store, grow your local business, draw leads from your site, or sell services online, you need a site that offers an impressive user experience. 

However, many freelancers succeed in hypnotizing small business owners with beautiful web aesthetics. And jam-pack their websites with 3rd party plugins, which takes a heavy toll on their site performance. 

Thus, it is recommended to hire trusted firms that leverage manual coding practices for superior site performance. 

    5.  Invest in SEO-semantic Websites

Fresh domains or new websites can be the hardest to rank. And that’s a crucial reason to summon SEO best practices early into play while you are developing your site. 

At Webytude, we follow the practice of designing SEO-semantic sites by taking care of the header tags, alt texts, meta tags, speed optimization, image compression, etc., during the development phase itself. This gives your site a decent SEO push up the search engine ladder. 

    6.  Make Site Security & Data Privacy a Priority

Is your website development partner following the right security protocols for your site? Or is he just waiting for the check clearance by delivering you a ‘rough and ready’ website? 

Website security is one important reason why businesses must trust professional web development companies. A trusted company ensures robust data encryption, secure authorization, SSL, and safeguarded payment gateways for your website. 

    7. Prioritize Resourceful Web Development for Small Businesses

One undervalued yet crucial factor that many businesses fail to gauge is the importance of resourceful development. An experienced and established web agency is most likely to lead with plentiful web development tools. 

These tools generally include:

• Design tools like Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator;    
• IDEs, repositories like GitHub.
• Visual code editors 
• Foundation front-end framework
• JavaScript Task Runner 
• Chrome DevTools

Working with an established agency gives you access to these tools for your web projects. 

    8. Lead Confidently with Collaborative Website Development Practices

One crucial reason why small businesses fail to gauge the risk associated with their web projects and the quality of their websites is the lack of transparent web development practices. 

Your partner must follow well-defined onboarding and collaborative development processes. This helps you get a transparent look at your project’s development cycle and mitigates the chances of project failure. 

Some web agencies also help you with iteration-based or MVP (minimum viable product) websites. This approach allows small businesses to reduce their initial development cost and injects flexibility into their overall project scope. 

Moreover, the use of project management tools like Jira, Trello, Basecamp, Asana, etc., make it easier for you to collaborate with the development partner and record your communication.  

However, many small businesses still hire freelancers and compromise the quality of their projects. And this significantly soars the risk of project failure. 

Summing Up

Suppose you are a small or medium-sized business or a startup that wishes to draw a substantial part of their business (or customers) from your online presence. In that case, you must re-check your website development scope for any possible leaks. 

That said, start your quest for a web development partner cum consultant. And tick-off important considerations like custom web design, high website speed, robust security, intuitive backend, and resourceful development.