How much does a website cost in 2026? Honest ranges, and what moves the price

You have three quotes on your desk for the same website. One is a few hundred dollars. One is six thousand. One is forty thousand, and it came with a slide deck. Nobody has explained why the same five pages can cost a hundred times more from one supplier than from another, and you are starting to suspect that nobody will.

So here is the answer to the question you actually typed, how much does a website cost, with numbers rather than "it depends". A professionally built business website in 2026 usually costs somewhere between $3,000 and $75,000, depending on how much of it is designed for you, how many other systems it has to connect to, and who writes the words. Below that range you are configuring a template yourself. Above it you are buying software with a website in front of it. The rest of this guide places your project inside that spread and explains what moves it.

How much does a website cost? The short answer, by tier

A quick way to place yourself: count the things the site has to do rather than show. A site that shows (who you are, what you offer, how to reach you) is a brochure site or a marketing site. A site that does (takes a payment, logs a customer in, calculates a quote) is a platform, and it is priced like software because that is what it is.

Three projects, placed

The tiers are easier to use with a project in front of you, so here are three shapes we see often. None of them is a client; they are patterns.

• A plumbing firm with five pages. Home, services, about, reviews, contact. A phone number and a quote form. It changes perhaps twice a year. This is a template on a builder, or the bottom of the brochure tier if you want it designed: illustratively $0 to $6,000 depending on that one choice. Spend the difference on photographs of real jobs.
• A dental clinic with online booking. Twelve pages, a team page that changes as staff do, a short blog for the questions patients ask, and a booking system the site has to connect to. The booking integration, not the page count, is what moves this to the brochure-to-marketing boundary: illustratively $8,000 to $25,000, with the range set mostly by how well the booking software talks to anything else.
• A B2B services firm that publishes weekly. Forty pages, a campaign landing page most months, a CRM the forms feed into, and a marketing manager who wants to ship a page without raising a ticket. This is the marketing-site tier and the case for a design system: illustratively $25,000 to $60,000, and the number that matters more is the near-zero cost of every page after launch.

Why website quotes vary so much

Three quotes for "a website" are rarely three quotes for the same thing. The word covers everything from a theme somebody configured in an afternoon to a product that took a team four months. When quotes differ by ten times, the suppliers are usually describing different projects, and the brief you sent left room for all of them.

The second reason is that a quote is a prediction, and cheap quotes predict the easy version. They assume you will hand over finished copy and photography on day one, that nothing needs connecting to anything, and that you will approve the first design. The expensive quote has priced in the fact that none of those things is usually true. Both quotes can be honest. Only one of them is likely to match your final invoice.

The third is who is doing the work, where they are, and how they charge. That deserves its own section, because the pricing model tells you as much as the number, and it comes after the five things every quote is built from.

The five things that move the price

• Pages and content. Not the page count on its own, but how many different kinds of page. Twenty product pages built from one layout cost far less than eight pages that are each designed from scratch. Ask a supplier how many unique layouts they have priced, and whether the "pages" in the quote are templates or one-offs.
• Custom design versus a template. A template gives you a proven layout that looks like the other sites using it. Custom design gives you something that looks like your business, and it costs weeks of a designer's time plus the development to build what they drew. The middle option, a design system of your own page blocks, costs more up front than a template and less over three years than either, because your team keeps building pages with it.
• Integrations. Every system the site has to talk to is a line in the budget: the CRM, the booking tool, the payment provider, the newsletter, the accounts package, the product feed. A connection with a documented interface is a day or two. A connection to a system with no interface is a small project, and it is the single most common reason a quote is exceeded. If a supplier has not asked what the site connects to, they have not priced it.
• Who writes the copy. Words are the part of a website most often assumed to be someone else's job. If the quote says "client to supply content", your launch date is now a function of your own free time, and the site will be written by whoever on your team is least able to say no. Copywriting, from the supplier or from a writer you hire, is illustratively $1,500 to $8,000 for a marketing site, and it is the part of the budget people most regret cutting.
• Who maintains it afterwards. A site is not finished at launch; it is started. Security updates, a broken form, a new team member, a price change, a campaign page: somebody has to do these. Either the quote includes a way for your own team to do them, or it includes a monthly figure for someone else to. If it includes neither, the small number on page one is going to be joined by a series of invoices on page two.

How suppliers charge, and what is normal

Three pricing models cover almost every quote you will receive.

• Fixed price. One figure for an agreed scope. Predictable, which owners like, and the reason a vague brief gets an expensive quote: the supplier is pricing the risk of everything you did not specify. Anything outside the scope becomes a change request, so ask how those are priced before you sign.
• Time and materials. An hourly or day rate, billed for the work done. Fairer when the scope is genuinely uncertain, and fine when the supplier reports time honestly. It needs an estimate, a cap, and a weekly view of where the hours went.
• Retainer. A monthly figure for the work after launch: maintenance, small changes, new pages. Sensible for a site that changes often, and a waste for one that does not.

The rates behind those quotes vary with who is doing the work. Illustratively, freelancers commonly charge $40 to $120 an hour, small studios $75 to $175, and large agencies $150 to $300 or more. A team based outside North America or Western Europe usually sits below all three for the same seniority, because its overheads are lower. A low rate is not a warning sign on its own. The questions at the end of this guide are how you check that a lower number does not mean a lower standard.

Which of those to hire is the question people ask most on business forums, and the honest answer is that it depends on how much of your business runs through the site.

• A freelancer fits a simple site with a clear brief: five pages, a form, a menu, a portfolio. Cheaper, faster, and you talk to the person doing the work. The risk is that there is one of them. Ask what happens when they are ill, on holiday, or have moved on in two years, and make sure the code and accounts are in your name from day one so the answer can never be "nothing". If a previous developer has already gone quiet on you, our adopting software we did not build page describes how a handover without a handover works.
• A studio or agency fits a site your business depends on: leads, bookings, sales, a CMS your team will live in. You pay for more than one pair of hands, for design and copy and development under one roof, and for someone still answering the phone in year three. The risk is paying agency rates for freelancer work, which is why the questions at the end of this guide ask what is actually custom.

On payment, the usual pattern is a deposit of 30 to 50 per cent to start, with the balance at agreed milestones or at launch. Paying everything before anything has been shown is unusual and should make you cautious. So is a supplier who will not put the milestones in writing.

What is usually left out of a quote

Most of the difference between a quote and the final bill lives here. Before you compare numbers, check each quote for the following, and add your own estimate for anything missing.

• Copywriting and photography. "Client to supply" means you are paying, in time or in money, just not to this supplier.
• Content migration. Moving your existing pages, posts, images and files across. Fifteen pages is an afternoon. Four hundred blog posts is not.
• Redirects. Every old address mapped to its new home, so your search rankings survive the move. Skipped, it costs you traffic for months. Our redesigns and website rescues page describes what recovery looks like when it was.
• Revision rounds. How many rounds of design changes are included, and what a further round costs.
• Third-party costs. Hosting, the content system, form and email services, premium fonts, stock imagery, the domain. Each is small; together they are a real monthly number.
• Training and handover. A session with your editors, written documentation, and the accounts transferred into your name.
• Accessibility and performance. Whether the site will be tested against accessibility standards and measured for speed on a phone, or will simply "look fine" on the supplier's laptop.
• Launch support. Who is watching the site the week it goes live, and what it costs when something breaks in month three.

This is why the cheapest quote is so often the most expensive one. It is not that cheap suppliers are dishonest. It is that a quote which leaves all of the above out is not a price for a website. It is a price for the part of a website that is easiest to quote.

Template, custom design, or a design system of your own

Most business sites are built one of three ways, and the right choice depends far more on how often the site will change than on how much money you have.

The design system column is where our own company and brand websites work sits, so weigh what we say here accordingly. The honest version is this: it costs more than a template on day one, and it only pays for itself if your team actually publishes. A business that changes its site twice a year should not buy one.

Redesign or new site: does it change the number?

Less than most people hope. The expensive parts of a website, the design, the words and the integrations, cost the same whether or not a site already exists. What a redesign saves is the content you have already written and the structure you already know works. What it adds is migration and redirects, which a new site does not need.

So a redesign usually lands in the same tier as the site it replaces, sometimes a little below. It is genuinely cheaper when the old content is good and only the front needs replacing, which is what our redesigns and website rescues page is written for. It is dearer when the old site was never really finished and the redesign is a first build with an archive to move.

The costs that continue after launch

The build is the number everyone argues about. The running cost is the number nobody asks about, and over three years it can match the build. Budget for these from the start:

• Domain. Illustratively $10 to $50 a year for an ordinary name. Registered in your name, in an account you control, or you do not own your own address.
• Hosting. From nothing, on modern platforms with generous free tiers, to a few hundred dollars a month for a platform with real traffic and a database. A brochure site should not need expensive hosting; if the quote includes it, ask why.
• Content system. Open-source systems cost nothing to licence and something to keep updated. Hosted systems charge per month, often per editor. Either is fine. The wrong one is the one your team will not use.
• Maintenance and care. Security updates, monitoring, backups, and a fixed allowance for small changes. Illustratively $100 to $1,500 a month depending on the tier, or an hourly rate with no commitment. Our continuous improvement page sets out what a care arrangement should and should not include.
• Third-party services. Forms, transactional email, search, analytics, maps, scheduling, live chat. Individually cheap, collectively a budget line.
• Content. The largest ongoing cost of a website that works is the time of the person keeping it current. A site nobody updates decays, and a decayed site quietly costs more in lost enquiries than any hosting bill.

What you should own at the end

Whatever you pay, the following should be yours, in writing, before you sign. Each one has been the subject of a call to us from a business that discovered too late it owned none of them.

• The domain, registered to your business at a registrar where you hold the login.
• The code, in a repository you can access or an export you can take elsewhere, with a licence that says it is yours.
• The hosting and content system accounts, opened in your name, with the supplier as a user you can remove.
• The content: every word, image and file, in a form you can take with you.
• The design source files, so a future designer is not starting from screenshots.
• The analytics and search console properties, so your history goes with you.
• Documentation: how to edit, how to deploy, what connects to what, and who to call.

If it has already happened, and your domain is registered to a developer you can no longer reach, it is usually recoverable. Look the domain up in a WHOIS search to see which registrar holds it and whose name is on it. Ask the developer, in writing, to remove the transfer lock and send you the transfer code. If they will not, or cannot be found, every registrar has a dispute process for exactly this, and proof that the business is yours (invoices, the contract, trading history) is normally what they need. Do this before the domain expires, because the day it lapses the problem becomes much harder.

If a supplier bundles hosting, domain and code into a monthly fee and cannot tell you what happens when you leave, the fee is the price of a rental, not a purchase. Rentals can be a sensible choice. They should be labelled as one, which brings us to the model that gets asked about most.

The subscription website: nothing down, a monthly fee

You will see offers of a professionally built site for no up-front cost and a flat monthly fee, illustratively $100 to $400 a month, covering the build, hosting, updates and small changes. Business owners ask whether it is legitimate. It is, in the sense that the maths is straightforward; the question is whether it is right for you.

• What you are buying. A service, not an asset. Over three years at $250 a month you will have paid $9,000, which is a brochure-tier build, and in most subscription models you will own the domain and your content but not the site itself. Stop paying and the site goes dark.
• When it makes sense. Cash flow matters more than ownership, the site is simple, you want somebody else to worry about hosting and updates, and the contract says plainly what you keep if you leave.
• When it does not. You expect to keep the site for years, you will want to move it later, or the provider cannot answer, in writing, three questions: what happens when I stop paying, do I keep my domain and content, and can I take the site with me for a fee.

The bad version of this model is not the monthly fee. It is the vague answer to the third question.

Not for you if

What to ask before you sign

First, the warning signs that come up again and again when business owners compare notes. None of them proves a supplier is bad. Each of them earns a direct question.

• A quote with a single number and no breakdown of what it covers.
• Billing by the week. It is not how websites are priced, and it is a pattern in complaints.
• A quote far below every other one, with pressure to pay a deposit today. The cheapest supplier is the one most often reported as disappearing after the first payment.
• A purchased theme, tweaked, presented and priced as custom design. There is nothing wrong with a good theme; there is something wrong with not being told.
• The domain, hosting or content system registered in the supplier's name "for convenience".
• Full payment before anything has been shown, or no milestones in writing.
• A monthly fee with no list of what it includes.

1. Which of the pages in this quote are unique designs, and which are built from a template? If a purchased theme is involved, which one?
2. What does "client to supply content" cover, and what happens to the timeline if we are late?
3. Which systems will the site connect to, and have you priced each connection?
4. How many revision rounds are included, and what does another one cost?
5. Are our existing pages being migrated, and is every old address being redirected?
6. What will we pay per month after launch, and what is included in that?
7. Can our own team add a page without you? Show us.
8. At the end, will the domain, code, accounts and content be in our name?
9. What happens if we want to leave in two years?
10. Which of the things usually left out of a quote are in this one, and which are not?

A supplier who answers all of these without flinching is one you can work with, whatever their number.

The decision you are actually making

You are not choosing between three prices. You are choosing between three different amounts of website, and the useful question is which amount your business needs: a template that shows, a designed site that shows well and changes easily, or a platform that does. Put each quote into its tier, add back what it left out, and the comparison usually becomes obvious.