What Is the Cost of Drupal Website Development?

Learn about average Drupal developer rates and Drupal website development cost

Drupal development cost is a tricky issue. When you need a professional-looking site tailored to your business needs, hiring expert Drupal developers is the only way to go. In this post, we discuss the price of building Drupal-based sites from DIY projects to complex e-commerce solutions.

Many things in life grow better and more valuable as time goes by; that is, they age like fine wine, as they say. This is true for Drupal as well. Released in 2001, this content management system (CMS), or rather, content management framework, is one of the oldest platforms for manipulating content on the web — even older than WordPress.

At the moment of writing, Drupal powers over 576,000 live sites. This is a versatile system. You will come across Drupal sites used for all sorts of purposes, from simple profile pages to complex, global-scale marketplaces with multi-million-dollar turnovers.

This popularity hinges upon many factors. For instance, Drupal is the best solution for building multilingual sites, hands down. It also has great accessibility features right in the core to make sites convenient to use by people with disabilities.

The key advantage of Drupal, though, is a well-developed system of modules and capabilities for integrating third-party services. By using modules, site owners can meet all of their needs, starting from search engine optimization and ending with inventory management.

You can launch a Drupal-based site on your own by paying for hosting only. However, when it comes to serious solutions that are expected to yield revenue, hiring professional Drupal developers is preferred.

This begs the questions that novice Drupal developers tend to ask: “What should I know about Drupal website development cost?” and “What’s the standard Drupal developer hourly rate?” Unfortunately, there’s no definite answer.

Drupal site development cost involves a lot of variables, and we can only talk in terms of ranges. In this post, we have reviewed the main aspects of Drupal development that shape the final cost of building a Drupal website.

How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Drupal Website: the Key Aspects

DIY: (Almost) Zero Drupal Development Costs

Before we break down Drupal site development cost, let’s start with the simplest scenario. If you need to have nothing more challenging than a blog or personal web page, you can probably do without help from outside. You only need to invest the following:

• Some of your time into learning how to download and install Drupal on your machine and how to transfer files to a remote server.
• A tiny amount of money into hosting your site on a server and an appropriate domain name.

Therefore, in this case, you may not worry about things like Drupal developer contract rate or Drupal developer flat rate. If you’re planning on building a more complicated solution, though, the cost of Drupal development increases multifold. Here are the most important factors that influence the total price.

The More Features You Want You Site to Have and the More Comprehensive You Want It to Be, the Higher Drupal Development Cost Is

This is similar to any other product, like a house. How many stories do you want it to have? How many bedrooms? Bathrooms? Do you need a garage? A swimming pool? Landscape design? The answers will affect the total cost of the construction work.

If you want more pages on your site, more custom content types, more custom modules, the higher the cost of Drupal development will be. The ‘width’ of your site is only one price-shaping dimension. The ‘depth’ (how difficult it is to implement features) is as important. You should consider the following aspects that affect the cost of building a Drupal website:

• Leveraging external APIs. If you are planning on building a booking site, for instance, you may consider consuming third-party APIs to find out about available seats on airplanes or hotel room vacancies. Drupal 8 and 9 have excellent REST API capabilities that enable integrations with any external service. That said, you will hardly be able to leverage an API’s power yourself.
• Catering to international audiences. As we wrote in a previous post, Drupal is an excellent platform for building websites for visitors from various countries who speak different tongues. However, again, setting up this functionality the right way requires professional assistance.

The Tighter the Deadline, the Bigger Drupal Website Development Cost

If you are not pressed for time, even one developer can handle the task of building your site. Thus, you factor in having to only pay one Drupal developer day rate. It’s a different matter if you need to launch your site as soon as possible and set a tight deadline for a Drupal development agency.

To complete the work within a short timeframe, an agency will have to put together a team of developers, designers, and testers supervised by a project manager. There is an average hourly rate for each Drupal developer on the team. You will have to multiply this rate by an estimated number of hours for the entire project.

A Wider Test Coverage Augments Drupal Website Development Cost

We can’t stress enough the importance of quality assurance in web development. Testing a website properly has particular significance for online stores. What if the money that one of your customers has paid through your ecommerce site somehow doesn’t make it to your bank account? What if all the images and descriptions suddenly disappeared from a product page? Good, thorough testing can help you avoid scenarios like these.

If your website is a long-living project, then automated tests may also have to be written. This is to ensure that nothing has gone awry whenever a new feature has been added. It’s clear that all this work requires skill and expertise, so expect higher Drupal development cost.

The Cost to Develop a Drupal Website Depends on the Professionals’ Qualifications

Drupal developers differ in their experience and skillsets. A senior developer can do many things that a junior developer can’t. A senior developer normally has around five years of experience working on projects of all complexity levels. He or she can choose the best approach to developing, testing, implementing, and maintaining Drupal websites.

Drupal Website Development Cost Is Also Determined Based on the Type of Project

Another essential factor that seriously affects the final cost of building a Drupal website is the specific type of project. Companies also often add additional Drupal development costs to mitigate risks.

Conclusion

It’s not easy to determine the exact cost of Drupal development. There are a host of factors that can bring the final price up or down. For very simple websites, this price can be negligible, limited only by the cost of hosting and domain name. Larger, more complex websites are much more expensive.

How high the cost to develop a Drupal website is depends on the type of project, deadline, test coverage, the project’s scope, Drupal development hourly rates, and other variables.

The GetDevDone Drupal development team is a group of unrivaled experts in one of the oldest and most acclaimed content management platforms in the world. We have built thousands of Drupal-based solutions of all types, so we know exactly what this work involves.

Thinking of your own site on Drupal? We can provide you with the most accurate estimate of the Drupal development cost.Visit our service page for the details of our offering and talk to us about your project today!