How much does a website cost in 2026 (real prices by type)

Two thousand euros.

That’s the border where the conversation changes. Below it you’re almost always buying a template put together in a hurry. Above it you start paying for decisions.

The reality is that the price of a website doesn’t depend on the number of pages in your menu: it depends on how many decisions someone makes for you and how many you end up making yourself on a Sunday night.

Here are the four brackets with figures, what goes into each one and what pushes your quote up. Also how to spot an offer that can’t possibly be delivered for that money before you sign it.

A website quote is four line items, not one number

Almost every quote you’ll receive has the same shape: a list of pages and a total at the bottom. That way you can’t compare anything. It’s like choosing a mortgage by looking only at the first year’s repayment.

Behind that total there are four items you always pay for, whether the supplier separates them or not:

• Design: deciding what your customer sees, in what order and with what goal on each screen. It isn’t picking your colours.
• Development: turning that into a site that loads fast, that you can edit without breaking it and that doesn’t depend on seven paid plugins.
• Content: your copy, your photos, your product pages and the structure that organises them. It’s the item most often ‘thrown in’ on quotes and the one that delays projects most.
• Baseline SEO: URL architecture, semantic hierarchy, structured data and 301 redirects if you’re coming from another website.

If your quote doesn’t separate these four, one or two of them aren’t in it. Usually content and SEO, which are exactly the ones that decide whether anyone finds your website a year from now.

Asking for that breakdown isn’t distrust. It’s the only way to compare two offers that are a thousand euros apart.

And when you ask for it, something revealing happens.

The supplier who has thought about your project replies in the same email, with rough hours per block and what they need from you. The one who was going to install a template replies that everything’s included and changes the subject.

That reply tells you more than their portfolio, because it separates who plans from who just lays things out. In how I set up a project before touching the design, that breakdown is the first document that comes out: before any sketch.

The four website price brackets

The ranges below are from projects built from Spain, as I build them, excluding VAT and without domain or hosting.

The €2,000 jump doesn’t buy ‘more design’. It buys someone making the structural decisions before the layout, which is exactly what doesn’t happen in the first two brackets.

You don’t need an expert to place your own case: count how many different designs your website needs, check whether any data has to come from another program and decide who writes the copy. With those three answers you know which row you’re in, and if two suppliers offer you the same row at prices three times apart, one of them has misunderstood your project.

The fourth bracket deserves its own warning

A shop doesn’t get more expensive because it has more pages, but because of everything that happens after someone clicks ‘Buy’: stock, payment gateways, invoices, shipping and returns.

There the price is set by your catalogue and your integrations, not the design. A shop with 40 products and one with 4,000 can cost the same or three times as much depending on where the data comes from and who keeps it up to date.

What they all have in common is this: a shop stops selling quietly when that part gets solved with patches.

And yes, there are very cheap websites that do their job for a while. The problem arrives when your business grows and your website can’t keep up, something you see in the typical mistakes on a small business website long before you see it on the invoice.

What pushes a quote up (and what doesn’t)

Design is almost never what sends your bill soaring. What does is everything that has to talk to another system.

The five variables that really move the figure:

• Number of distinct templates, not pages. Forty product pages with the same design are one template. Five pages with five designs are five.
• Integrations. An ERP, a booking engine, a CRM or a portal feed multiply the development work and, above all, the testing.
• Languages. Each language adds content, review, URL structure and hreflang tags. It isn’t just a plugin and done.
• Migration. Changing domain or structure without a 301 redirect map is the quickest way to lose rankings that took you years.
• Content. If the supplier writes it, add it to your quote. If you write it in your office, add it too: in your hours.

What doesn’t make your website more expensive: the number of menu sections, having a blog or not, and your brand colour. If a quote goes up because of that, you’re being charged for hand-building what should be systematised.

There’s a sixth variable that almost nobody puts on the quote and that someone does pay for: the deadline.

A five-template project gets delivered in six to eight weeks when the content arrives on time. If you ask for the same work in three weeks, either you pay a surcharge or the supplier cuts the part you can’t see: testing, measurement and original content.

Squeezing the date doesn’t speed anything up. It just moves the delay to the stage where you can no longer complain.

The same €3,000, two ways to spend it

This is where price stops being a figure and becomes an allocation decision.

Scenario A takes 4 seconds to load on mobile and hides the form at the bottom of 2,000-word pages. B isn’t prettier: it’s cheaper to run.

You don’t have to take my word for it: take your average order value, divide 3,000 by that figure and see how many sales you need to get your investment back.

If you get three, either scenario will do. If you get eighty, scenario A never gets there: twenty badly planned pages don’t win eighty customers.

Buying traffic for a website that doesn’t convert is the digital version of paying interest without touching the capital.

I wrote it while looking at why so many businesses burn their budget on ads and it’s still the most expensive mistake I see.

There’s a variant of scenario A that keeps cropping up: spending it all on design and nothing on reading order.

A beautiful homepage where the visitor doesn’t know what to do performs worse than an ugly one with a single clear button. That gets fixed by looking at how your visitors really move around the page, not by changing the typeface.

How to spot an impossible offer

There’s a point below which the numbers don’t add up, and you can work it out without being in the trade.

A five-template project with content and baseline SEO is between 40 and 70 hours of real work. Divide the price you’ve been quoted by those hours. If the result is below €15 an hour, you’re not buying cheap: you’re buying something else. Usually a paid theme installed over two afternoons, with the theme’s own dummy content still sitting in your pages.

There’s a second, quieter sign: the quote that says ‘all included’ and doesn’t list what all is. In that format, all means the bought theme, its translated demos and your resized photos. What isn’t included doesn’t appear anywhere, which is why you can’t claim it later.

The extreme case is websites paid for with grant vouchers, where the price was set by the voucher and not by the project. The result is a huge number of sites delivered that are good for nothing, with the same structure repeated business after business.

No fixed offers without a brief.

A serious quote comes after asking you what you sell, to whom and what happens in your business when someone fills in the form. If you receive a PDF with a price before that conversation, that price doesn’t describe your project: it describes the template they already had set up.

How a website project gets paid

The payment schedule says as much about the supplier as the figure does.

The usual, healthy setup is two or three milestones:

1. At the start: 40% or 50%, covering the definition and design work.
2. When the mock-up is approved: a middle instalment, against a named deliverable.
3. On delivery: the rest, with the website live and working on your domain.

Each milestone should have a named deliverable, not a loose date in an email.

Two warning signs

The first: 100% up front on a four-figure project. It isn’t standard and it leaves you with nothing to bargain with if the work stalls.

The second: the never-ending monthly fee that replaces the project price, very common in ‘website for €49 a month’ offers. There you’re not buying anything. You’re renting a template and, the day you stop paying, it switches off.

Always ask what happens if the project stops halfway on your side, for example because the content is two months late.

A serious contract covers it and puts an expiry date on the quote. An improvised one will tell you once it’s already happened.

What comes after the invoice

The delivery price isn’t what your project costs. There are three recurring items that turn up no matter what:

Hosting and domain, between €100 and €400 a year depending on what your site really needs. Premium plugin licences, which on a website built with a page builder easily reach €300 a year. And maintenance, which is what stops a WordPress site left alone for six months from turning into a security incident.

What matters here is that they go into your sums from the start: a €3,000 build with €900 a year in licences costs you €5,700 over three years, not €3,000. That’s the figure you should compare two quotes with, and it’s almost never the one on the front of the PDF.

It’s also worth asking which part of that recurring spend is avoidable.

Page builder licences are a permanent toll. Hosting and backups aren’t. A well-planned project cuts the first item to zero and leaves only the ones that keep the site standing.

Four questions before you sign

These four separate a supplier who knows what they’re doing from one who’s making it up:

1. How many distinct templates does the quote include and what happens if I need one more?
2. Who writes the content and by what date do you need it from me?
3. What performance commitment do you make on mobile and with which tool is it checked?
4. What do I keep if tomorrow I work with someone else: access to the hosting, the domain and the code?

That last one is the one most people forget. If the answer is vague, the price stops mattering, because what you’re buying isn’t yours. Before asking for new quotes it’s worth checking what you were given last time and what you were left holding.

So, what’s your case worth?

It depends on three things: how many templates your website needs, which systems it has to talk to and who writes your copy.

With those three answers the range narrows to a few hundred euros, and you can compare two quotes without being in the trade.

I don’t give fixed prices over the phone. I give a range in the first conversation and an itemised quote once I know what we’re building. If your project doesn’t fit what I do, I tell you on that call and not in the third meeting.

Your website either pays for itself or it doesn’t, and that’s decided in the four items above, not in the template you choose. You can see finished projects with their figures to check which bracket each one was in, and the published work if you’d rather judge the result before the process.