How much does a medical device website cost?

Have you ever wondered how much a medical device website actually costs, or what factors drive this cost? 

If so, you’re in the right place. 

In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about what affects the cost of a medical device website, how much you should pay depending on your choices, and the questions to discuss with your agency or freelancer when starting a project. 

1. What is the objective of a medical device website?

This is the most important question to discuss before starting work on your medical device or healthcare website. 

What do you want your website to do? Should it: 

• Provide information on your company/product? 
• Deliver leads? 
• Be an education hub? 
• All of the above? 

Ultimately, all websites should deliver leads, but that may not be the primary goal of your site. Having numerous visitors to your site may provide an impressive statistic, but really, what’s the point if your visitors don’t convert into sales (or leads)? 

When it comes to pricing, typically, as you move down the list, the cost of your website will rise due to increasing complexity in the following stages. 

2. Development stages

Once you know the objective of your website, it’s time to decide what you want to do in-house and where you’d like support. 

To help you make the best decision for your team, we’ve broken down each element of website development below. 

User journey mapping

Before you start mapping out the pages of your site, you’ll need to understand who’ll be visiting your site and what information they’ll be looking for to progress through their buyer’s journey. 

There are many ways to do this, but here’s what we suggest. 

Firstly, map out each user profile—for example, future investor and HCP. Then, list the questions they’ll ask you about your product, technology, or company at each stage of their buyer’s journey. This often requires an internal workshop with your sales and commercial teams to ensure nothing is missed. 

Questions could be things such as: 

This may sound simple, but getting this correct upfront will significantly impact your site’s success. 

To read more about these questions, we highly recommend They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. In our opinion, it’s undoubtedly one of the best inbound marketing books written. 

User journey mapping costs

The cost of user journey mapping will vary depending on the number of user profiles visiting your site. 

For a simple site with one user profile, it may take only a few hours; however, for more complex sites with multiple products and user profiles, it may take 4–5 days. 

Finally, if you want to validate each of these questions and prioritise their importance, you may conduct market research. This will add significant cost to this stage but could supercharge the conversion rate of your final site. 

User mapping costs: £450 – £6,000+ 

Market research costs: £18K+ (number of participants and countries included will affect the cost) 

Site map

Once your user journey mapping is complete, it’s time to create your site map. This will outline the content on each page, any interactivity, and how your audience will move through the site. 

Things to think about during this stage include: 

• How and where will you answer each question? (above the fold, or in blocks 1, 2 or 3 etc.) 
• How many pages will each user profile click through to complete their journey? 
• Which pages will be optimised for keywords? 

Site map costs

The cost of creating your site map very much depends on the number of user profiles created in the first step. 

If you only have one user profile with limited questions, your site map can be created quickly. However, if you have three user profiles with 60 questions, this will obviously take longer. 

This cost ranges from: £250 – £2,500+ 

Copywriting

Once your site map is completed and you know where each piece of content will appear, it’s time to start writing the copy. 

Copy should be written in an engaging and simple way that draws your audience in. As such, you may wish to employ a professional copywriter for this. 

Your website needs to have just the right amount of information to move each user through their buyer’s journey, but not too much to be overwhelming. 

Copywriting costs

As in previous sections, the answer to this is, ‘well, it depends’. It depends on the number of pages on your site and the amount of content to be written. 

Also, does your content need to be optimised for search engines? 

If you’re a smaller company and your website is being used as an information source for existing contacts, then SEO content is probably not required. However, if it’s to bring in leads, then absolutely! 

SEO optimisation is no problem, but make sure your website and copywriting teams are aware of it at the briefing stage so your keywords are mapped out during site map creation. This is not something you want to do retrospectively, as it will burn time, requiring pages to be rewritten and incurring additional costs. 

Cost of copywriting for each page: £250 – £1,250 (depending on length and content) 

SEO optimised copywriting for each page: This will increase the cost of each page by 10–25% depending on your freelancer or agency experience and specialisation, and the number of pages to be optimised. 

SEO optimisation

SEO optimisation is an ongoing process, as Google likes to see continual updates on your site, which should ideally be done through new content. 

When you’re initially building your site, there are two areas of SEO that need to be addressed: 

Technical SEO

Any contractor you work with, whether it’s a freelancer, web agency, or dedicated healthcare agency, should ensure your website is technically optimised for SEO before it’s handed over to you. This will normally be included in the cost of site design and programming. 

Content SEO optimisation

Optimisation of content falls under ‘copywriting’. As each page is written, your copywriter will also provide meta descriptions and suggested URLs for each page. 

Finally, all images need optimised ALT text, which will be read aloud to visually impaired users to describe the image. Alt text is also read by Google to understand what is contained in the image. 

SEO optimisation costs

Technical SEO is normally included in the development of your site, so presents no additional costs. However, it’s good to understand what your contractor will do. 

This is the same for SEO content, which is included in SEO optimised copywriting. However, your contractor will need to spend time optimising your images. Normally a small budget will be left at the end of the project for this. The amount spent will totally depend on the number of images on each page. 

Cost of technical SEO: £0 (normally included in programming) 

Cost of content SEO: £0 (included in SEO optimised copywriting) 

Cost of ALT tag optimisation: £50 – £150 per page depending on the number of images. 

Conversion optimisation

If your website is being built to deliver leads, it’s critical that this is planned from the start. 

Strong calls to action are needed throughout your site and code or software added to monitor your conversion rates, ideally from initial contact (on social media or email) to conversion. As they say, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. 

Conversion optimisation costs

Cost of conversion optimisation per month: £500 to £3,000+ per month (depending on the software used) 

Design and programming

The cost of web design and programming will be affected by two main things (apart from the number of pages): 

Which platform are you using?

There are many platforms to build your website on, the most popular being WordPress—used for 43.2% of websites in 2022. Its popularity is due to its open-source platform, allowing the greatest customisation and integrations. 

Simpler ‘out of the box’ website builders include Wix or Squarespace (amongst others). Interestingly, these are used by large companies, so they shouldn’t be discounted; however, they tend to have fewer customisation options. 

Another option is HubSpot, which can come with a website builder (or integrate into WordPress). HubSpot provides unrivalled conversion tracking and integrated marketing functionality, but this comes at a cost. Saying that, if you have a large volume of traffic on your site, it certainly could be worth it. 

How much coding does your site need?

The final thing to consider is the volume of coding you will need on your new site, as this will take your website team time. A fully coded site will give you complete customisation, but it does come with issues (not to mention cost), so often a combination of a themed site with custom coding may be the best option. 

Your agency will be able to advise you on this. 

3. What are the hidden costs you should be aware of?

There are a few other costs that you might want to be aware of. 

These are the ongoing costs of hosting and maintaining your website that you might not think about when initially building your site, but you’ll need to consider them for your budget moving forward. 

Hosting your site

The hosting cost for the first year will normally be included in your project cost. This should also include an SSL certificate to ensure your site is secure for users. 

Many search engines will either block your site from being viewed or push you lower down the search engine results pages if you don’t have an SSL certificate. 

Cost of hosting your site

Cost to host per year: Anywhere from £60 – £240 per year. If you have asked an agency to organise this for you, they’ll normally add a 10–20% service fee onto this price. 

Website updates

If you have chosen a WordPress site, you’ll need to consider the website updates that are needed. These are normally conducted every quarter but may be more regular as your site ages. 

Why are these updates needed? Well, as WordPress is an open-source platform, some of the components that were used in the programming of your site (the main theme and plugins) will come from third parties. As such, they will be updated on an ad-hoc basis. 

These updates could clash with other parts of your site, leading to issues. To avoid this, these updates are forced manually, so any issues that occur can be addressed straight away. 

Website update costs

The cost of each website update will vary, as it depends on the amount of coding and work required to adjust the conflict between parts of your site. Normally, this is not a long process, and 2–5 hours of work once every 3 months should be adequate. 

Costs: Between £180 – £750 depending on whether you’re using a freelancer or agency. 

Reporting

Websites are your conversion hub, so it’s critical it’s working perfectly and your audiences are smoothly moving through. 

Your agency will be able to provide you with a robust monthly report. However, the most critical part of any report is what you’re measuring. Make sure you discuss what success looks like with your agency or freelancer before starting the project to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Cost of reporting

Reporting is largely automated once set up. However, it’ll take your freelancer or agency time to review the report and provide you with actionable insights. This should take less than 2 hours, costing between £120 – £260 per month. 

Any updates required to the report will often incur a charge, reflecting the time it will take your team to perform the update(s). 

Ongoing conversion and search engine optimisation

Once your site is live, it’s important to review your reports to understand what’s working and what’s not. 

This will guide you and your team on what changes could be made to improve conversion on your site. Once the changes are made, the report is analysed weekly to see the impact, before another series of changes are made. 

Cost of ongoing conversion and search engine optimisation

This is an ongoing process, so is usually on a retainer basis. 

Cost per month: between £350 and £3,500+ depending on the size of your site and the experience of the agency or freelancer you’re working with. 

So, how much does a medical device website actually cost?

We have broken down many of the elements that will impact the cost of your website, but overall, how much will a medical device website cost? 

The answer is, of course, it depends. However, we can certainly provide you with an average. 

The average website we build at Podymos is between £18,500 for a small site to £45,000+ for a comprehensive lead-generating website, with monthly ongoing costs of between £10 – £1,650.