How Much Does It Cost To Build A Business Website In Dubai?

Considering 90% of product and service searches start online – and on Google, a website is your first point of contact with your potential customers. It is not only a marketing tool – but a sales asset, a representative that brings in visitors, engages and retains them, converts them and sells while you sleep. And while these websites are worth the investment, the smartest business move is to check how much website development costs in Dubai and if there are ways to optimize the cost based on your business journey. 

Quick Estimates of Website Development Cost in Dubai 

• Basic WordPress website in Dubai will cost you around AED 2500. With advanced plugins and premium themes, the cost can go up to AED 3500. 
• Basic custom website with 6 pages, let’s say 2 to 3 simple features will cost AED 4000 – AED 5500. 
• Small business website, which has mid-level UI and UX, is multi-featured with ecommerce integration and brand customizations start from AED 6000 and can go up to AED 8000. 
• Enterprise-grade websites with advanced features like online payment integration, real-time delivery status and internal messaging and chat feature will cost you anywhere between AED 9,000 – 18,000.  

Note that these are ballpark figures, but also close to what a typical website development company in Dubai will offer. Read the next section of this article as I have broken down more than 12 factors that increase or decrease web development cost and how you as a startup or solopreneur can optimize and reduce the cost. 

Factors That Impact the Cost of Website Development   

• Domain and hosting 

Domain is the name of your website and hosting saves all of your website’s data. In Dubai, you can buy domain and hosting from several reputable providers – but as per my experience, generic domain names with .com and .net are slightly more economical than .ae domains.

While the cost savings with the former aren’t great, it is ideal to get a .ae domain especially if you are building a UAE-centric brand, want to get foot traffic to your store and attract local search traffic.

As a business, you must have plans to scale your business – and if geographical expansion and new market penetration are part of your plan shortly, then consider buying a .com domain. 

As for hosting, it starts from AED23 per month with a lot of hosting providers. These are fixed costs and will contribute around AED350 per annum to your overall website costs. 

• Scope of website development 

Scope is all the work developers will do on your website to bring it to the shape and form your users want – that’s why, the scope document shows the level of effort required for coding and the depth of your objectives. It is a guiding document for web developers – in simplest terms. Because it is the visual representation of your website’s capabilities, it has a direct impact on the cost. 

Here are 7 aspects we cover when creating the scope for a business website. Let’s discuss all of them to understand how the cost increases or decreases. 

• Features

More features mean more development work. If you want a multi-featured website that can handle online payments and interactive maps, for example, it’s going to take more time and effort from the developers. That usually means a higher cost.

• User Experience (UX)

A good user experience makes sure visitors can find what they’re looking for without pulling their hair out. But making sure everything flows smoothly takes careful planning and design work, which can add to the cost. You need to look into website loading speed, bugs and crashes, and the entire look and feel of a website to make it engaging and then converting – and so you need a better user experience than at least 70% of the websites on Google and this increases the cost of website development. 

• Custom Design

More design customizations mean higher website development costs. 

There are two options for website development in terms of design and customization. You can ask your developer to build a template-based website, which typically works with WordPress and Wix; or, your web developer can create a custom design – which is highly recommended if you are making an eccomerce business website.

If you want your website to stand out and reflect your brand, you should opt for a custom design. But remember that this brand-centric touch comes with a price tag.

• Content Management System (CMS)

You’ll have to make a careful choice when choosing a content management system, no matter if you have a website that caters to B2C or B2B audiences. You’d want to publish research, blog articles, blueprints and downloadables, and a CMS makes all of this easier. Some are more user-friendly and flexible than others. While platforms like WordPress can save you money upfront, more complex systems might require custom development work, which can increase the cost.

• SEO Considerations

Getting your website to show up in search results is a lot of hard work – and your website’s front, back, plugins and APIs have a significant contribution to that. Building SEO into your website means using scheme tags, mega menus, and sitemaps, optimizing content, compressing images, loading webpages speedily and fixing technical issues. Most importantly, mobile responsiveness is very important for SEO and so these considerations impact the cost. 

• Security Measures

Investing in security measures like SSL certificates and regular security audits helps build trust with website visitors and buyers. More importantly, these are proactive steps that keep the bad guys out. But enhanced website security usually means spending more money upfront like in 2 Factor Authentication and end-to-end encryption, especially if your website is e-commerce 

• Scalability and Future Growth

Business websites have to scale with the business growth. With time, if your business and revenue are growing, you’ll notice an increase in organic traffic and visitors. Building a website that can handle more traffic and features down the road might cost more upfront, but it can save you headaches – and money – in the long run.

Websites with a low-scale scope are more economical than websites with commercial-scale scope and high-end experience requirements.

• Type and Size of Business 

Most website development companies in Dubai typically kick off their web development projects with a comprehensive discovery that covers target audience research and competitor analysis, technology stack and monetization framework, development execution sprints and timelines. 

Combined, the deliverables of the discovery stage are called a website development strategy – and each business, because of its type and size and growth targets will have a different strategy. So with scope, the type and size of your business matters. If you are a real estate business and want to create a listing website that updates visitors about the availability of property in real-time, this website will have a higher cost than a real estate blog that will earn from AdSense and affiliates. 

• Website Pages 

Each webpage you add to your development strategy factors in development hours and hourly costs. So more website pages, especially with customizations in content and design, mean higher costs. 

If you want to start small, and only add necessary pages, here is a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves: 

Still figuring out which features are important for your website? Skip the hassle and get a free custom web strategy from CMOLDS. Book a call!

• Platform and technology stack 

Developers utilize a set of technologies and frameworks to build business websites. This set is called a technology stack and includes backend and frontend frameworks, programming languages, APIs and plugins, and databases. 

According to most experienced web developers in UAE, MEAN Stack helps businesses reduce development costs because it is based on open-source technologies that don’t come with subscriptions. 

• Full-cycle coverage 

Most website development companies in the UAE will give you an option to buy standard services on a pay-as-you-go model. You can separately complete sprints of design, development, testing, launch and maintenance. Or, you can hire full-cycle web development services in Dubai, which cover everything as one project divided into sprints. As per my client’s experience, full-cycle coverage is more economical than buying standard services. 

• Team size 

Businesses can choose from different hiring options for website development. Two popular arrangements are outsourcing and in-house hiring. There is also a third option, IT staff augmentation, but it is only financially viable for commercial web applications, mobile apps and SaaS so we’ll move ahead with the first two.

In outsourcing, you can hire an agency, work on project discovery and let them kick off. They typically have project managers who keep clients posted about development progress and internally, have senior developers, UI/UX designers and quality assurance analysts to execute the development. 

You pay a fixed cost, typically upfront, or sometimes in installments in outsourcing. In comparison, in-house hiring are more expensive because of the office setup costs, recruitment costs, wages, benefits and managerial costs. 

• Location of the website development agency 

The hourly rate of website development in Dubai is lower than in the USA and Europe. While you can get an enterprise-grade, professionally designed website for AED 18,000 in UAE, the same will cost you AED 35,000 or more if you go for a web developer in the USA or UK. 

For a currency-wise comparison, know that a web developer in UAE typically charges $25 per hour, while USA and UK-based developers charge an average $65 per hour. The difference is material – and when you have high-end website design projects, your web development costs can significantly be reduced and optimized by working in Dubai.  

The main difference in hourly rates of these locations stems from the growing competition for tech and tax requirements. UAE, especially Dubai is the tech hub of the world now – popular exhibitions like GITEX attract product developers, and corporates from across the globe. Secondly, while the UAE gives tax-free salaries to most of its employees, the USA and UK have heavy tax requirements for working professionals.  

• Website Maintenance Costs 

Websites are a business asset – and like any other asset, they need regular maintenance and audit to keep their health and performance stable. Website maintenance services cover regular monitoring, identification of bugs and crashes, security assessments and updates and features. Maintenance services typically contribute 5 – 10% to the overall web development costs. 

• Third-Party Tools and Plugins 

Web development is getting more advanced than ever with emerging AI tools, security plugins and development frameworks. These are third-party tools that can be integrated into website’s backend to:

• decrease development time and effort
• reduce unused code load on website
• make website’s functionality more efficient
• automate specific features of the website 

Typical examples of plugins include payment gateways like Stripe, and email automation features from MailChimp. While integrating these third-party services does reduce development time, these tools come with subscription costs. So more plugins means more cost. 

Over to you…

So you have taken the first step of validating your brilliant website development idea and checking what factors can help you optimize the costs. What’s your next step? Find a web development partner that knows all-things-web. Book a FREE consultation call with our product development strategist and estimate your exact cost of web development and we’ll take it from there.