How much does a website cost in 2026, and what the price buys

People post the same job everywhere: “I need a website for my business, budget five hundred”. Someone will take it. What they get for five hundred is the interesting part, and it is rarely what they pictured. The price of a website is not the price of the pages. It is the price of the decisions, the words, the design, the build, and what happens after.

The bands, honestly

Under a thousand. A template with your logo and text dropped in, on a site builder or a WordPress theme, by someone working fast. Fine for a first presence. The words are yours to write, the design is whatever the template does, and there is no plan for after launch. Where it goes wrong: when the business starts depending on it.

Two to six thousand. A proper business site of five to fifteen pages: a real design, your content shaped by someone who writes for the web, built on WordPress or similar, tested on phones, with the search basics done. This is where most small and mid-sized businesses should be, and where the difference between builders is largest. Two people can quote four thousand and deliver completely different things.

Six to twenty thousand. Custom design, more pages, a shop or a booking system or a members area, a second language, integrations with your other tools, real attention to speed and search. Often a rebuild of a site that has been earning for years and needs to keep earning through the change.

Twenty thousand and up. Applications. Portals, platforms, sites with logic and data at the centre, built in a framework by a team. The website part is usually the smaller cost.

Ongoing. Hosting, a domain, and looking after the site: updates, backups, security, checks. From a few hundred a year to a few hundred a month depending on how much the site matters and who does the work. This line is the one people forget to budget, and it is the one that decides whether the site is still good in three years.

What moves the price within a band

• How much is decided before the build starts. A clear brief saves days. “Make it look modern” costs money because someone has to work out what that means.
• Whether the content exists. Writing the words is real work. If you have them, the price drops. If you do not, budget for it, because a beautiful site with weak words does not convert.
• The number of different page layouts, not the number of pages. Fifty pages using three layouts is cheaper than ten pages that each need their own.
• Features that need to talk to other systems.
• Who is doing it. Freelancer, small studio, agency. Overheads differ. Quality does not track price as neatly as people hope.

A brief that gets you a real quote

Six things, one page:

1. What the business does and who the customers are.
2. What the site must do for you: leads, bookings, sales, credibility, all of these.
3. Three sites you like and one line each on why.
4. What content exists and what needs writing.
5. Which features you need at launch, and which can wait.
6. Who will edit the site afterwards.

Send that and the quotes you get back will be comparable, which they are not when the brief is a sentence.

Where cheap becomes expensive

Two places. A cheap site that has to be rebuilt in eighteen months because it could not grow: you pay twice. And a site with no one looking after it that gets hacked: the cleanup costs more than a year of care would have.

We quote fixed prices from a brief like the one above, and we will tell you if what you want costs less than you expected. That happens more than you would think.