As a web designer, you have a wide range of skills to apply and multiple ways of creating an income. The sky is the limit.
You can join a freelance marketplace, sell your web designs on a marketplace, build websites for clients, resell hosting, set up e-commerce websites, and so much more. There are endless opportunities for you to make money online. You just need to find what niche you like and then double down on it.
These are some of the 9 best ways web designers can make money, I have some more to suggest to you, and I’ll also dive more into the ways mentioned. So let’s get into the first one, to join a freelance marketplace.
1. Join A Freelance Marketplace
This is the most common and straight-forward way to make money online as a web designer; join a freelance marketplace
There are so many marketplaces: Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer.com and Worksome, just to mention a few. All of these marketplaces are unique in their own way, but the more you can get in on, the better.
I’m personally only on Worksome right now as I’m not pursuing that much work, so choosing one platform, in my experience, can sometimes be suitable as well.
When you join a freelance marketplace, it’s important that you’re unique in some way. Clients are used to getting a lot of applications when they post a job, so one way to be unique is how you send your offer.
Go into detail about the offer, show why they should pick you and show you understand the job completely. Doing this means you’re already among the top 1% applying for the jobs. The rest of the 99% copy and paste for job positions, which is terrible.
2. Sell Templates On A Marketplace
If you enjoy and love designing websites, you can make a living from this, too, without having to deal with clients who want you to design specific elements.
Sign up for Themeforest, for instance, and then upload your designs either as coded or non-coded and then start to make money online based on this.
You do have a higher success rate if you deliver coded design. And you can easily sell your design for multiple platforms, WordPress, pure HTML or Ghost.
You can also sign up for Webflow’s platform and sell your designs here. Here you only build for one platform, but with the increase in popularity Webflow is experiencing, you’ll reach thousands of people with zero marketing efforts.
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3. Build Websites
You can also build websites. There are so many no-code platforms today that you don’t even need to know how to code to create websites. You can use Elementor with WordPress. You can use Webflow, EditorX or something completely different.
Find a market where they’re asking for designs, then study and get into it. You can preferably be on multiple markets. Clients want unique designs, but they also want to be able to manage the designs themselves. That’s why no-code platforms are win-win.
Here you’ll have to find clients yourself. As mentioned in the first point, you can do this by reaching out to your network, family and friends or pursuing clients on freelance marketplaces.
4. Resell Hosting
This is an underrated way of making money online. Everyone with a website needs hosting, and almost all hosting providers allow you to resell.
You might ask yourself, why don’t clients just buy the hosting themselves? First, they don’t know what hosting is good for them, and second, they don’t want to take care of that. They want you to take care of it all, so they just need to pay, and then they get a beautiful website.
Find a hosting provider you trust for different types of websites if you’re familiar with different websites, and then get a reseller account with them.
Every time you get a new client, then you suggest they either start on your hosting or move to your hosting as they’ll experience improved performance, or whatever the differences are.
For every hosting you sell, you’ll get a cut of the price every single month without doing anything.
5. Set Up E-commerce Websites
Just as you can build and sell websites, you can do the same with e-commerce websites. Now this is a bit more advanced, but you can still do it with no-code tools like Shopify, Wix or Squarespace.
It’s easy to get started, and with your web design skills, you’re ahead of all the pure developers, as web design within e-commerce is crucial.
You can even make yourself better at making an e-commerce website by learning complementary skills like conversion optimisation.
Again, here you’ll have to do something extra to find clients who need e-commerce websites or maybe need a website re-design. You can do cold outreach, where you suggest improvements to their website or sign up for a freelance marketplace.
6. Grow Websites And Sell Them
Now this is an interesting one and completely different from anything else.
You can build websites for yourself, whether it’s content websites or e-commerce websites. And when they’ve grown to a specific size, you can sell them with Empire Flippers or other marketplaces.
Not only do you cash out and make a lot of money when selling the website, but you also make money while creating content and building the website. You can add affiliate links and ads.
This will require you to learn SEO and some practicals on affiliate marketing, but you’ll learn a lot during this phase.
You can end up selling your websites for anywhere between $50.000 to $500.000, and it’s all up to you.
7. Learn A New Complimentary Skill
If you love to learn, then this is a step you need to take. Learn a complementary skill or two.
Even though your primary skill is web design, having complementary skills will only make you a better web designer.
You can learn SEO to make better design decisions based on on-page SEO optimisations.
You can learn conversion optimisations to make e-commerce websites convert better.
You can learn affiliate marketing to compliment your websites on performing better and, ultimately, help you make more money online.
Any complementary skill you can think of which is relevant to web designing will only increase your earnings one way or another.
8. Perform Maintenance Service
Technology today is moving so fast, but this also means any type of website requires maintenance.
If it’s WordPress, they have plugins and themes that need updating.
If it’s independent websites where the technology is on another part, like Webflow, well, then the design itself needs maintenance and updates once in a while to stay fresh and up-to-date.
You can offer all your clients a maintenance package, where they pay a fixed amount monthly, and in return, you ensure their website runs smoothly without any issues.
This is a way to create monthly recurring revenue and stability for you as a freelance web designer.
9. Join Or Partner With A Web Agency
The last way to make money online is to either join or partner with a web agency.
Web agencies get clients in all types of niches with all types of demands, and it’s not always the web agency that has time for the client or can solve their proposal.
This is where they’ll ask you as a partner to take on the client and ensure the client gets their proposal solved in the best possible way.
By doing this, you’ll get clients without having to do any cold outreach or sign up for any freelance marketplace.
The agency will most likely as in return that you forward them clients where you can’t solve their proposition, so in the end, you’ll have a partnership.
Conclusion
So as you can see, there are many ways other than just designing a website. Web designers can make money online.
What’s most important is you find your niche of work and then double down on it. And learning complementary skills like SEO will only improve your web design skills as you’ll take all the SEO rules into consideration while designing a website.
I’ll recommend you take on a couple of these to split your income. The more ways you’re making money, they better for your stability and income.
FAQ
Do web designers make good money?
Everything is relative, but yes, they do make good money. The average pay in just the US is stated to be around $64,000 per year.
While it’s not a lot to some, it’s decent pay, and the more experience you get, the higher the hourly rate you can charge.
How much money can you make as a web designer?
The sky is the limit. The average pay is around $64.000, and then you can go up and down from there. It also highly depends on your location and the competition in your specific niche.
Is there still money in web design?
Absolutely, yes. There is still a lot of money in web design. Even though ChatGPT can design websites now, it’ll take ages before it reaches the level of web designers, especially if you have years of experience. You know what rules to apply and when to do so.
How do I sell my web design?
If you’re looking to sell on a marketplace, Envato or Themeforest are among the best places. If you only wish to sell web design to a specific client. I would suggest you look into Fiverr or Worksome.