How much does a website cost in 2026?

A professional website in 2026 costs anywhere from about $50 a year to more than $30,000. That range is useless on its own, so this page breaks it down by who builds the site, what you get, and what you keep paying afterwards. All figures are US market ranges published in 2026; they are observed averages, not quotes.

The short answer

• Do it yourself on a website builder: $10 to $99 a month, plus your own time.
• Hire a freelancer: $500 to $5,000 for the build, one payment.
• Hire an agency: $5,000 to $30,000 and up.
• Typical professional small business site: $2,000 to $8,000.
• Running costs afterwards: $10 to $20 a year for the domain, from $2 a month for shared hosting, and $50 to $500 a month if someone maintains the site for you.

Most small businesses land between $2,000 and $8,000 for a site they did not have to build themselves. The rest of this page explains why the spread is so wide, and where the money actually goes.

How much does it cost to build a website?

Building a website means three separate jobs that people often price as one: design, which decides what it looks like and how it is organised; build, which turns that into working pages; and content, which is the writing and the images. A quote that looks cheap usually covers the second job only, and leaves you to supply the first and third.

Priced by supplier, the build alone comes out roughly like this in the US market:

• Website builder, done by you: $10 to $99 a month. No build fee, but you do the design, the writing and the maintenance. Budget several full days of your own time.
• Freelancer: $500 to $5,000. Hourly rates run from $15 to $150, with most established freelancers between $50 and $120 an hour.
• Agency: $5,000 to $30,000 and beyond. Agency rates run $100 to $200 an hour, and the fee covers strategy, design, development and project management in one place.

The number that matters is not the hourly rate, it is the number of hours. A supplier who starts every project from a blank page bills dozens of hours before you see anything. That is the single biggest reason two quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of ten.

How much does website design cost?

Design on its own, without development, is usually quoted between $1,000 and $5,000 for a small business site. Some suppliers separate it as a line item, others fold it into the build. Ask which, because a $2,000 quote that excludes design is not a $2,000 quote.

What you are paying for is decisions, not decoration: what goes on the home page, what a visitor is meant to do next, how the pages are ordered, how it holds up on a phone. A template applied without those decisions is cheap because it skips them, and it shows.

How much does it cost to have a website built for you?

If you want to hand the whole thing over and receive a finished site, expect $2,000 to $8,000 from a freelancer or a small studio, and $10,000 upwards from a full agency. At the lower end you are usually expected to supply your own text and photographs. At the higher end the supplier writes and sources everything, which is where a large part of the extra cost sits.

Three questions decide the final figure more than anything else. How many pages. Whether the content is written for you or by you. How many rounds of revisions are included before extra work is billed.

How much does a small business website cost?

For a small business that needs a credible presence rather than a custom application, the realistic band is $2,000 to $8,000 for the build. That covers roughly ten to thirty pages, a mobile layout, basic search engine optimisation, a contact form and legal pages.

Above $8,000 you are generally paying for bespoke functionality: booking systems, customer accounts, integrations with your other tools. Below $2,000 you are usually buying either a template with your logo dropped in, or your own labour on a builder. Both are legitimate choices. Neither is the same product.

How much does a WordPress website cost?

WordPress itself is free. The cost is everything around it: hosting, a premium theme, plugins, and the person who assembles and maintains it. A WordPress small business site typically comes to $1,000 to $6,000 to build, then $20 to $100 a month once you count hosting, plugin licences and updates.

The recurring figure is the one people underestimate. WordPress needs regular updates to stay secure. If nobody applies them, the site eventually breaks or gets compromised, and the repair costs more than the maintenance would have.

How much does it cost to maintain a website?

Maintenance is where the ongoing budget goes. Published 2026 ranges look like this:

• Domain name: $10 to $20 a year, occasionally $25 on renewal.
• Shared hosting: from $2 a month for a small site, up to $120 a month for a demanding one.
• Professional maintenance: $50 to $500 a month for a small business site. Simple brochure sites sit near the bottom; anything with bookings or a shop climbs quickly.
• Doing it entirely yourself: $50 to $100 a year, covering the domain and basic shared hosting only.

Owners routinely overlook $1,100 to $5,000 a year in running costs across hosting, security, backups and marketing tools. When you compare two quotes, compare the five year total, not the build fee.

How much does a website redesign cost?

A redesign is usually quoted at 60 to 100 per cent of a new build, so $1,500 to $8,000 for a small business site. It is rarely much cheaper than starting again, because the work is the same work: new design, new pages, migrating content, redirecting the old URLs.

The one saving is content. If your existing text is sound, you are not paying for it twice. The one hidden cost is search rankings: a redesign that changes URLs without redirects can cost you traffic you had already paid to earn.

What you are actually paying for

Whatever the total, the money splits across the same items. Seeing them listed makes any quote easier to read.

• Design: structure, layout, visual identity applied to your business.
• Build: turning the design into working, fast, mobile-ready pages.
• Content: writing the pages, sourcing or producing images.
• Search engine optimisation: titles, structure, speed, indexing, so the site can be found rather than just exist.
• Legal pages: privacy policy, terms, cookie handling.
• Domain and hosting: the address and the server.
• Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring, small changes.

A quote that does not itemise these is not necessarily dishonest, but you cannot compare it with anything. Ask for the list.

Is $1,000 a good price for a website?

It can be, for a small site where you provide the text and images and the supplier works from an established process rather than from scratch. It is a poor price if it buys a template with no thought about structure, no mobile testing, no search optimisation and no legal pages, because you will pay again within two years.

The useful test is not the price. It is what the supplier hands over: do you own the site and its content, do you receive every access credential, and can you leave without losing the work you paid for.

How to pay less without getting a worse site

• Fix the scope before asking for quotes. A defined page list is the difference between a quote and a guess.
• Write your own content, or at least draft it. Nobody knows your business better, and content is a large share of the bill.
• Prefer a fixed price to an hourly rate when the scope is clear. It moves the risk of overrun to the supplier.
• Ask what happens after delivery. Who owns the files, what maintenance costs, what a small change costs.
• Do not buy functionality you have no plan to use. Booking systems and customer accounts are the most commonly bought and least commonly used features.

Where Grateau fits

We build brochure websites at a fixed price of €299, one payment, delivered in five business days. Up to thirty pages, custom design, mobile, on-page search optimisation, blog, FAQ, contact form and legal pages. Hosting and maintenance are separate and optional, with no lock-in.

That price is possible because the production work is done by AI agents working in parallel, with our developers setting the plan and reviewing every page. It is not the right answer for everything: if you need an online shop, customer accounts or an integration with your own systems, you are in the $8,000 and up band and you should budget accordingly.

Related reading: website costs in Canada, website costs in Australia, affordable website design, website packages, what a brochure website is.

See our fixed-price offer