How Much Does a Website Cost? An Honest 2026 Guide

"How much does a website cost?" gets one of the most annoying answers on the internet: it depends. Which is true, but useless if you're trying to plan a budget. So let's do better. Here's what a website actually costs in 2026, what pushes the price up or down, and the ongoing costs most guides forget to mention.

One note before the numbers: prices vary a lot by country, currency, and who you hire, so treat everything here as a ballpark to plan around, not a quote. The figures are in euros. Adjust for wherever you are.

The short answer

If you just want a range to anchor to, here's roughly where things land for most people in 2026:

Do it yourself with a website builder: around €10-50 a month, plus your own time. The tools are the cheap part. Your hours are the real cost.
A basic site from a freelancer or template: roughly €300-1,500. Fine for something simple, though quality and reliability vary widely.
A professional custom site for a small business: roughly €1,000-5,000. This is where most serious small-business sites land, and where you start getting something built properly for you rather than dropped into a template.
A large or complex build (big online shops, web apps, lots of custom features): €5,000-20,000 and up. Complexity is the price driver here, not the number of pages.

If your eyes glaze at ranges that wide, fair enough. The width is the whole point. A website's price depends almost entirely on what it needs to do, so here's what actually moves the number.

Should you just build it yourself?

That do-it-yourself option is by far the cheapest, so it's worth being honest about when it works and when it doesn't. Builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify have made it genuinely possible to put your own site online with no technical skill. For some situations that's the right move. For others it costs you more than hiring someone would, just not in a way that shows up on an invoice.

When doing it yourself makes sense:

You're just starting out and need something online this week.
Your budget is genuinely tiny and the site isn't central to how you win customers.
Your needs are simple: a few pages, some photos, contact details.
You're testing an idea and don't want to invest until you know it works.
You enjoy the fiddling and have the time to spare.

When it starts to hurt your business:

It looks like a template, because it is one. Visitors have seen the same layouts a hundred times. If you're trying to stand out or look premium, blending in works against you.
**Free and cheap plans advertise their brand, not yours.** Many show the builder's own logo, ads, or a web address like yourbusiness.wixsite.com instead of your own domain. Customers notice, and it reads as "not quite a real business yet."
Your time isn't free. The hours spent wrestling with drag-and-drop, fixing what won't line up, and redoing it when it looks off are hours you're not spending on your actual business. That time has a real cost.
They can be slow and clunky. Builder sites often load more heavily than a cleanly built one, and speed affects both how many visitors stay and how well you rank on Google.
You hit walls as you grow. What's easy for a simple site gets frustrating fast the moment you need something specific the builder won't allow. Plenty of people start on a builder and end up paying to rebuild properly within a year or two, spending more in total than if they'd done it right once.
When something breaks, it's on you. Nobody is watching your site, keeping it updated, or fixing it when it goes wrong. That job is now yours.

The short version: doing it yourself can be the right call for a simple site or a tight budget. But if your website is how customers find you, judge you, and decide whether to trust you, a DIY site often ends up costing you business in ways that dwarf what you saved. A cheap site isn't cheap if it loses you the customer.

What actually drives the cost

How much there is to build. A five-page site costs less than a fifty-page one. Obvious, but worth saying, because scope is the biggest lever you control.

Custom design versus a template. A template is cheap because someone else already did the design work. A custom design, built around your brand and your customers, costs more because it's made from scratch. The gap in price is real. So is the gap in how the result feels.

What the site needs to do. A simple "here's who we are and how to reach us" site is one price. Add online payments, a booking system, customer logins, or links to other software, and each of those is real work that adds to the cost. Features, not pages, are usually what make a project expensive.

Who provides the content. Words and photos have to come from somewhere. Hand over finished text and good images, and you save money. Need copywriting, photography, or help shaping your message, and that's an added cost, often a worthwhile one.

Who builds it. The same site can cost wildly different amounts depending on whether you build it yourself, hire a freelancer, use a big agency, or work with a small studio. Big agencies carry big overheads, and those end up in your invoice. A good small studio can deliver the same quality for less, simply because there's less machinery to pay for.

The costs people forget

Here's the part that catches people out. The build is a one-time cost. A website is an ongoing one.

Whatever you spend to create the site, budget for these too:

A domain name (your web address): usually around €10-20 a year.
Hosting (where the site lives): from a few euros a month to more for busy or complex sites. Sometimes included in a care plan.
Maintenance and updates: software needs updating, things occasionally break, and content goes stale. Whether you pay someone or do it yourself, keeping a site healthy takes time or money. Skip it and you end up with exactly the kind of dated, broken site you were trying to avoid.

None of these are huge on their own. But leaving them out is how a "€1,500 website" turns out to cost noticeably more than you planned over its life.

Why the cheapest option often costs the most

It's tempting to just grab the cheapest quote. Sometimes that's the right call. Often it isn't, and here's why.

A bargain site that looks dated within a year, loads slowly, or can't grow with your business doesn't save you money. It costs you customers while it's live, then costs you again when you rebuild it properly. Two cheap sites in three years add up to more than one good one that lasts five, and you lost business in between.

That doesn't mean expensive is automatically better. It means the right question isn't "what's the cheapest?" It's "what will actually do the job, and last?" Spend enough to get something that works and holds up. Spending less than that is usually a false saving.

How to budget sensibly

You don't need to know exactly what your site should cost. You need to know what it should do. Work that out first, and the price follows.

Quick check before you ask anyone for quotes:

What's the site's main job? (Get enquiries, take bookings, sell products, build trust.)
How many pages does it realistically need?
Does it need any special features, like payments or bookings?
Will you provide the text and photos, or do you need help with them?

Take those answers to whoever you're hiring and ask for an itemised quote. A good one tells you what's included, what costs extra, and what the ongoing costs are. If a quote is a single vague number with no breakdown, ask for one, or be wary.

What we charge, plainly

Most studios won't put prices on their site. We'd rather be upfront. We build a clickable concept of your new homepage for €50, so you can see the quality before spending anything more. If you decide to go ahead, that €50 comes off the price of your build. We quote each project based on what it actually needs, so you'll always know the price before you commit.

The honest truth is that the only accurate answer to "what will my website cost" comes from someone looking at your situation. A guide like this gives you a budget to plan around. A real number needs a real conversation.

Want a real number instead of a range? Send us your site or your idea and we'll build you a concept and a straight quote, no guessing and no pressure.