What a professional website costs in 2026

Asking what a website costs is like asking what a car costs. The useful answer is not a number: it is understanding what you are buying at each price band, and what you will be dealing with two years from now.

This guide breaks down the four real options a small business has in 2026, with what each includes, what it costs to keep running, and the kind of business it suits.

The four options and what they really cost

Option	Up front	Per year	Live in
Site builder (Wix, Squarespace)	€0–300	€200–500	1–2 weeks
WordPress template	€400–1,200	€300–800	2–4 weeks
Freelance custom build	€1,000–3,000	€150–500	3–6 weeks
Agency custom build	€2,500–10,000	€300–900	4–8 weeks

The annual figure is the part almost nobody mentions in the first meeting: domain, hosting, template and plugin licences, certificate, backups, and somebody’s hours to apply updates.

What you are paying for in each band

Site builders: fast and cheap, with a ceiling

Wix or Squarespace solve “I need to be online this month” well. You build it yourself, you need nobody, and it works.

The ceiling appears when you want to compete in search. These systems produce heavy HTML and give you no fine control over structure or performance. Against a competitor who does work on technical SEO, the gap is hard to close on content alone.

Fits you if: you do not depend on organic traffic, your leads come from referral or social, and you need a respectable presence as soon as possible.

WordPress templates: the middle ground with the most small print

A marketplace template costs €40–80, and that is where the cheap part ends. Getting it operational takes six to fifteen plugins: forms, caching, SEO, backups, security, multilingual. Each is a failure point and a monthly update.

The real problem is not price, it is performance. A generic template drags along the code for every design variant it offers, whether you use them or not. It is common to see installs loading more than 2 MB of JavaScript to render a contact page.

Fits you if: you publish content often, you want full autonomy over the copy, and you accept spending time on maintenance.

Freelance custom build: best value, with a dependency

A solid freelancer hands you something made for you, without surplus plugins and with direct contact. Value for money is usually the best of the four.

The risk is continuity. If your site depends on one person and that person changes job, gets overloaded or disappears, you are left with code somebody else has to decipher. It is worth agreeing in writing that the repository and all accesses are handed over.

Fits you if: you know what you want, the project is bounded, and you find somebody with a demonstrable track record.

Agency custom build: when the site has to produce

Here you are not paying for pages, you are paying for strategy: keyword research before anything is written, a URL architecture designed to rank, content with search intent behind it, conversion measurement and a growth plan.

The difference shows in year two. A site built on a solid structure gets extended; an improvised one gets rebuilt.

Fits you if: a meaningful share of your revenue depends on being found, or you compete in a sector where everybody else is already investing.

The five things that push the price up

1. Multilingual. It is not translating text. It is separate URLs per language, hreflang tags, a sitemap per language and adapted — not carbon-copied — content. Adds 30–60% to a project.
2. E-commerce. Catalogue, payment gateway, shipping, tax, returns and optimised product pages. Two to three times the scope.
3. Content. If the agency writes it, budget €80–200 per properly worked page.
4. Integrations. Connecting the site to your CRM, ERP or booking system is development, not configuration.
5. Original photography. A shoot costs €300–900, and it is what visually separates a site from its competitors more than anything else.

How to compare two quotes that look nothing alike

When you have two proposals in front of you, ask both the same things:

• Do I own the code and the repository when this is finished?
• Whose name are the domain, hosting and analytics accounts in?
• What mobile performance target do you guarantee, and do I see the report before launch?
• Does it include 301 redirects from my current URLs?
• What if I want to add a section in a year? What does that cost?
• Who answers when something breaks, and how fast?

The answers to those six questions almost always explain the price gap between two quotes that looked equivalent.

Warning signs

• A fixed price before anyone looked at your business. If nobody asked what you sell and to whom, they are selling you a template.
• “Guaranteed first position on Google”. Nobody can guarantee that. Google does not sell organic positions.
• A compulsory 24-month maintenance contract. Maintenance is legitimate; a long lock-in is a way of holding on to people who would rather leave.
• No hosting access. If your provider will not let you touch your own server, you do not have a website — you have a rental.

A sensible order if you are starting from scratch

1. Buy the domain in your own name. It is the one genuinely irreplaceable asset.
2. Decide what the site has to achieve: calls, bookings, quotes or sales. One primary thing.
3. Gather the content: what you do, who for, prices if you publish them, real cases and photos.
4. Get two or three quotes against the same requirements document, so they are comparable.
5. Launch and measure. A site with no analytics configured tells you nothing.

If you are unsure which band your case falls into, get in touch: we will review your situation and tell you what we would do, with a fixed quote and no obligation.