What are the costs of a new salon website?

Young blonde woman smiling and looking at her reflection in a mirror while sitting in a salon chair discussing the costs of a new salon website

Whether you’re venturing into the hair and beauty industry for the first time, or want to build a new and improved website for your current salon, it’s important that you get each feature of your website right. Considering salons are so popular – hair and beauty businesses have a much higher survival rate after five years compared to other businesses – you’ll want to build a website which stands out. 

Whilst it might be a popular field to work in, the competition is fierce: in the UK, 12 new salons open each week. Nevertheless, this isn’t to say that the market is completely saturated; there are endless ways to draw in new clients

To capture their interest, however, you need to build a website which has a fantastic web design and is easy to use, as word of mouth isn’t solely enough to drive in customers. Whilst some use a website builder – such as Go Sitebuilder – for their salon website, you may want to build a site from scratch. We’ve broken down the costs of a new salon website to give you some idea as to where to begin. 

1. Web host

When building a site, you’ll need a web host for your website. Web hosts are essentially companies that rent out their services to host websites on the internet – a bit like renting out a chair in a hair salon for a freelance hairdresser to use. 

There are different types of web hosting options available, depending on the amount of control you want over your site. Shared hosting is great if you’re just starting up a salon business: it’s the most affordable option (costing around £5 a month) as your server space is shared with other sites, and it is relatively simple. However, due to the shared space with other websites on the same server, your site could become slow, and you also have little control over the server itself. 

Dedicated hosting gives you complete control over the administrative server and you don’t have to share your server space. However, this is a much more expensive option, costing anything from £40 to £100 a month, which is why it might only work for you if you already have a thriving salon business with spare cash to put into building a website. 

VPS hosting is a more advanced version of shared hosting, but cheaper than dedicated hosting, as whilst you still share servers, you are given your own resources which aren’t shared with other sites. 

2. Domain name

Your domain name is the name of your website: it’s the address people use to search for you on the internet. It must be distinctive to you, as not only does this characterise your salon brand, but it also prevents confusion, as customers could click on to the wrong site if you had a very similar domain name to another salon. A domain name normally costs between £8 to £10 a year.

3. Web design 

This is where it gets a little more complicated. Part of the attraction surrounding salons is the appeal of the aesthetic. You’ll want to reflect this in your website: a low-quality web design can give the impression that your salon is tacky and has poor standards. You’ll want to have a stunning web design so that you stand out; a professional and sophisticated website can elevate the image of your salon business even higher in the minds of potential clients. 

Unless you have extensive coding knowledge, you’ll need to get into contact with a graphic designer to take charge of the web design element. This can seriously eat into your budget: the price of a free-lance web designer can range from £15 an hour, to over £100 an hour, depending on their level of expertise.

4. Ecommerce platform 

One of the ways you can make your salon stand out online in a competitive market is by selling your own products. If you have any beauty or skincare products which you sell in your salon, why not sell your products online? With an ecommerce website, you can reach out to more people, and your products can act as an advertisement of the high-level services that you provide. 

Unfortunately, the cost of an ecommerce website can be incredibly expensive: ecommerce platforms don’t come cheap, and even website builders charge you quite a bit extra if you want to sell products online. 

If you don’t want to go through all these steps just to get a website up and running, Go Sitebuilder offers all of these – a web host, domain name, ready-to-go web designs for salons, an integrated ecommerce platform – and more!

If you don’t have endless amounts of time spare to build a website from scratch, and are worried that the prices could quickly and uncontrollably mount up, we suggest you try Go Sitebuilder: our free 14-day trial means you can experience all we have to offer, without having to spend a penny!