Your website’s actual cost can be difficult to pin down, and, in today’s economic environment, efficiencies are in all departments is a must.
So how do we look for efficiencies at budget time, when we don’t know how much our website costs us?
Direct costs are pretty easy to tabulate, but indirect and ‘time-spent’ costs are a little trickier to nail down during budget times.
Working with some of our small org clients, we’ve put the work in to demystify this elusive cost and present it so that you can adjust the figures for your team.
Annual Cost analysis
Direct costs
| Domain name purchase/renewals | $50 |
| Website hosting & technical support | $600 |
| SSL certificate | $125 |
| Design & Development: 5-year average cost ($7,000 initial, $750 per following year in upgrades/changes) | $2,000 |
| Apps, features and upgrade fees | $250 |
| Average direct costs an organization pays for their website each year | $3,025 |
Time-spent costs for your team to manage the website
| Communications/Marketing Manager (2 hours per week)* – Updating website core content – Updating homepage layout or design – Making changes to internal pages or navigation – Adding new pages to the website – Adding news stories, events or photos – Updating website branding or logos – Adding new features to the website – Connecting website to different apps Website performance reporting*assuming a $45,000 annual salary @ 40/hrs per week | $2,250 |
| IT Manager (1 hour per week)* – Website Hosting – Website security updates – SSL certificate installation and renewals – DNS updates and management – Domain name registration, management and renewal – Website Hosting account management – Website Backups – Website platform updates – Website performance benchmarking – User technical support – User access management *assuming a $55,000 annual salary @ 40/hours per week | $1,375 |
| Executive Director & Board members (1 hour per week each)* – Website cost budgeting and forecasting – Role definition and website task assignment – Website-related resource planning – Website provider evaluation and selection – Communication planning *assuming a $75,000 annual salary @ 40/hours per week for ED and Board member is a volunteer | $1,875 |
| Cost for outlier administration tasks assigned to admin or operations team | $250 |
| Average time-spent costs an organization pays for their website each year | $5,500 |
On average, a proper website can cost organizations like yours $8,525 in time spent and direct costs.
I have two additional notes to add to this quick analysis:
- The average figures above are assuming normal website operating conditions are maintained for the length of the timeframe, which in this case is five years. They do not include any remediation fees for hacked websites, downtime due to backup restoration, or major platform technical issues. It’s assuming all goes as planned, which, in our 20+ years of experience, rarely is that case, and we wanted to present a “base case scenario.”
- Our time estimate assumes that the people in the roles have an average level of proficiency with the tasks they are responsible for (i.e. branding, communications, website server maintenance, etc.). The time-spent estimates will need to be adjusted based on your organization’s team’s proficiency in completing their assigned tasks.
To be more realistic with these numbers, we should assume that $8,500 is the minimum annual cost for your organization’s website and will increase depending on your team’s capabilities and your forecasting approach (cautious vs. aggressive).