B2B Website Development Cost in 2023

The B2B website development cost lie between 10,000€ and 300,000€, depending on the number of pages and languages. Here are some more specific price ranges.

These are the framework conditions we used to determine the benchmarks in this article:

The website is implemented by an external agency and not by in-house employees. Most companies with fewer than 10,000 employees do not employ their own web developers. (We will be talking about the transfer of individual tasks from content creation to the in-house team later).

The website’s content management system does not use a modular system such as Wix, Jimdo, or Squarespace. While these are cost-efficient, as they offer a ready-made website layout, they lack flexibility – individual designs, page layouts, the use of multiple languages, and special functions with external plugins are highly limited. These website template services are not recommended for B2B websites with an individual corporate design, more than 50 pages, and 3 languages.

Here is an overview of the external costs for a website project. The most important factors here are the website’s size (number of pages + translations) and technical implementation through the agency – especially non-standard services not usually carried out by the CMS.

Important notice: the costs for content creation in this graphic are calculated with all texts being written in-house. They only cover image and video production. If the texts were to be written externally, their costs would be 3x as high.

In the following, we will look at each cost in detail.

Content creation is comprised of three parts: texts, images and videos.

Due to their high costs, texts are often created in-house for most websites. One text is equal to about 16 hours of work. This consists of research, writing and internal clearance. The external hourly rate for content marketing is roughly 120€. That puts the costs of an externally created text for a page at 1,920€. For 100 pages, that would be a total of 192,000€ for text creation.

You should budget between 4,000 and 8,000€ for the creation of new photos. One day of shooting, including post-processing costs around 2,000€. 2 to 4 days of shooting in your company and with clients should give you enough photo material to work with.

Nowadays, stock photos are hardly a good alternative. They are very affordable, but make the company appear inauthentic, and instead you will pay with the trust of your website’s visitors. You can use them sparingly (about 5%) for news articles. On the important pages for products and applications, however, you should only use real pictures.

Videos enhance the perceived quality of a website enormously. We recommend at least 1 corporate image video, 1 product video and 2 case studies. Each video will set you back about 2,500€. The wider your product range is, the more videos you should include.

Translations are one of the largest drivers of cost for a new website. Each page and language will generate costs of about 250€.

How are these translation costs calculated?

• Let’s take 1,200 words as an average text per page.
• 1,200 words per page are 8,700 characters.
• Translation agencies charge per standard line (=55 characters)
• 8,700 characters divided by 55 = 158 standard lines
• One standard line costs about 1.60€ to translate

158 x 1.60€ = 253€ to translate one page into another language

Professional SEO consultation helps you find out what sort of content your project team should focus to achieve good rankings on Google. Depending on your website’s size, SEO support can cost between 4,000€ and 15,000€.

What does that include:

• Research the most important keywords
• Research of competitors per keyword: the extent and quality of competitor’s content dictate how much you need to invest in your own content creation
• Determining the website’s structure: number and hierarchy of pages, internal linking between pages
• Suggestions of contents per page: headlines and key words per paragraph, links to other pages
• Suggestions for implementing structured data: highlighting specific things for search engines such as company addresses, logos, FAQs
• Fixing guidelines for technical SEO for external web developers: determining SEO panels, metadata, loading time

The web design’s technical implementation is the largest cost factor, at around 40% of the total cost of any website project. So, with a total project sum of 200,000€, that would put the costs of implementation at 80,000€.

Here are the steps of web development:

• Implementation of the content management system
• Creation and connection of all databases (images, translations, product information)
• Installation of user administration
• Configuration of page layouts based on the new design
• Installation of all interfaces (forms, shops, e-mail services, etc.)
• Bug fixing
• Coordination workshops, if not budgeted separately

For a legitimate B2B shop with up to 100 products you should budget between 30,000€ and 60,000€. The large price range is due to the necessary functions. There is a huge difference in expense if you need things such as ERP implementation, product comparison, product configuration systems and e-mail marketing connectivity tools.

For shops that offer a wide range of products (1,000€+), the costs are quite a bit higher. In this case, you will need to pre-emptively assess the costs and compare different service providers.

Project meetings, authorisation cycles with management and agency workshops are time-intense but necessary. Many of these are shown as internal efforts within the project team. External agencies either list these time investments as separate costs or include them in Technical Implementation / Web Development.

For a medium-sized website with costs of around 200,000€, the internal time needed for meetings will be around 60 hours per employee in the core team.

The time needed for workshops, calls and e-mails, including all preparations and rectifications for a website of this size will be around 150 hours for the external agency. With an hourly rate of 120€ that would equate to 18,000€ of external costs.

Apart from project management and coordination of external agencies, text creation offers the highest potential to save B2B website development costs. Legitimate content marketing agencies take about 1,900€ per content page. For 60 pages, that would generate costs of 108,000€. Internal content creation will therefore save you a lot of money. Additionally, the in-house team has more knowledge of your products than an external agency.

In text creation, a combination of in-house writers and either internal or external SEO advisors has been proven to be effective. The SEO expert will contribute key words and headlines for every page. This will give the copywriters a good structure to arrange the contents and also ensures high-quality search engine optimisation.

You should under no circumstances use cheap copywriters or text brokers for content creation. They will only charge between 300 and 600€ per page, but the texts’ quality is insufficient. The difference in costs to external agencies comes from the comprehensive research (analysis of competitors + SEO) which content agencies carry out. Without these efforts, your pages would not generate good Google rankings.

Tip when uploading the text

Instead of entering foreign-language texts manually, many translation agencies offer an automatic text import service. This is something you need to check with your web developers first. For CMS such as Typo3 or Wordpress, the agency can develop interfaces for importing texts.

The creation of images and videos can also be assigned to in-house teams. Through a content producer, you can convert 80% of external costs into hourly rates. 20% of costs will still go towards things such as travel expenses when shooting case studies with clients.

Here is a sample calculation of B2B website development cost with 100 individual pages in 4 languages (DE, EN, FR, ES). Internal expenses for meetings and text creation are not included.

• Design: 10,000€
• Content creation for images, videos: 25,000€
• Translation costs: 80,000€
• SEO: 10,000€
• Web development, excl. shop: 100,000€

TOTAL: 225,000€

Website hosting consists of the website’s provision on an external server, as well as the delivery in a content delivery network (=worldwide servers). The costs for this are between 100 and 400€ per month.

Compared to the other costs, hosting costs are less relevant. However, hosting should nevertheless be given special attention, as availability and loading times of your website are important factors in ranking.

THOMAS WEINBERGER

Founder and CEO

Thomas‘ agency Webwings supports mid-size B2B companies with lead generation services. They specialize in interconnected paid ads campaigns on Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads while tracking interactions from the first click to the signed sales contract. The one question they focus on is, „how can we improve the ads campaigns’ ROI?”