What a Website Should Cost in 2026, With Prices

The short version

The gap between two quotes for the same site is rarely about skill. It is scope, ownership and who pays after launch.
Get four answers in writing: who owns the code, who holds the domain, whose name the hosting and analytics are in, and what twelve months costs.
Words and photographs are the commonest thing missing from a quote, and the commonest reason a build stalls halfway.
Page count is a poor pricing unit. Both sides can game it.

Two suppliers look at the same twelve page website. One says nine hundred euro, the other nine thousand. The reflex is to decide somebody is dishonest, and usually nobody is. They have quoted two different jobs and used one word for both.

Almost every other business purchase arrives with a specification. A website quote is one line and a number, and the decisions behind it stay in the supplier's head until something goes wrong. So this guide is mostly about what separates two prices for the same site.

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The website costs you will see quoted in Europe

This is the part of a pricing guide easiest to fake, so treat it carefully. I have not run a survey, and I am not going to dress up an estimate as one. What follows is what these bands look like from inside the trade, and you should weigh it accordingly.

Template and marketplace builds sit in the low hundreds. Somebody fits your logo and text into a bought theme, so you buy a layout rather than a decision, and the cost lands later.

A solo freelancer quoting a small business site usually lands between about €800 and €4,000, and the spread is driven almost entirely by whether the words are included. At the bottom you supply the text. At the top, someone interviews you and writes it.

A small studio, two to eight people with somebody running the project, tends to start around €4,000 and reach into the low tens of thousands. You pay for coverage, process, and the overhead of people not building your site.

A full agency starts where studios stop: discovery workshops, brand work, a design system, research. I am not putting a range on this band, deliberately, because any figure I gave you would be second hand. The shape matters more: you buy a process and the people who run it, and the build is a modest share of the bill. For a firm with several product lines that is rational. For a nine person business that needs to be found and believed, it is a cathedral for a congregation of one. No band is wrong; the mistake is comparing across them.

What each kind of quote usually leaves out

The freelance quote most often omits the writing, the photography, what happens after launch, and cover, because a fixed price is only as fixed as one person's year. The studio quote omits licence fees and anything past the scope line. The agency quote omits nothing on paper, its real advantage, but rarely says who does the work. The template build omits the second year.

Fixed price, day rate, or retainer

Three ways of buying the same hours. What matters is whether the shape fits the work.

A fixed price puts the risk on the supplier. If the build runs twice as long as they thought, you still pay what the paper says, so they price in a margin for error and hold the scope tightly. It suits work you can describe in advance, and suits you badly when nobody can yet say what is being built.

A day rate puts the risk on you, and suits work whose destination is genuinely unknown. The danger is not the rate, it is the absence of a ceiling. Insist on an estimate in days, a cap you both agree, and a warning as you approach it.

A retainer is right for work that never finishes: search, ads, a store gaining products weekly. It is wrong for a build. A build sold as a low monthly fee is usually a finance agreement wearing a service badge, so ask what the minimum term totals, then what you own on the day you stop paying. Sometimes it is nothing, which is legal and the most expensive sentence here.

Who owns the code, the domain, the hosting and the accounts

Four questions, answered in writing before money moves. They decide whether you buy an asset or rent one.

Who owns the code and the design once it is paid for?

What you want to hear “You do, and it is written into the agreement.” If a bought theme or page builder is involved, they say so and name the licence.

What should worry you Silence, or “it sits on our platform”. Paying an invoice does not move copyright on its own. In the UK, section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes the author the first owner, and section 90(3) makes an assignment ineffective unless it is in writing and signed by the supplier, not by you. Dutch law is stricter. Article 1 of the Auteurswet gives the right to the maker, and under article 2 a transfer must be agreed in writing and then actually made by a signed deed, which does not have to go near a notary. The Wet versterking auteurscontractenrecht, in force on 1 January 2026, dropped that deed requirement for exclusive licences but not for transfers, so a friendly email saying the site is yours transfers nothing. In Germany, section 29 of the Urheberrechtsgesetz forbids transfer outside inheritance, so you buy a right of use under section 31.

Who is the registered holder of the domain?

What you want to hear Your company, in the registrant field, with the renewal invoice coming to you.

What should worry you The supplier in the holder field with an assurance that it is “yours really”. It is not. For a .nl domain the registrant recorded with SIDN is the holder, and moving supplier needs a transfer token your registrar must hand over on request. If they hold the domain, that token is theirs.

Whose name is the hosting account in?

What you want to hear Yours, paid by you, with the supplier added as a user. You can log in, take a backup and leave without asking.

What should worry you Hosting resold at a markup on an account you cannot see. It becomes a problem the day the relationship ends, because what you need most is the thing you have no login for.

Whose name are the analytics and ad accounts in?

What you want to hear Created under your email address on day one: analytics, Search Console and any advertising account.

What should worry you Accounts under the supplier's email. You lose the history, which tells your next supplier whether anything worked. More in the guide on choosing an SEO provider.

What “responsive” and “SEO included” mean in a quote

Responsive means the layout does not break on a phone. In 2026 that is the floor, not a feature. It does not mean fast on a phone, or tested on a mid range Android rather than the newest iPhone in the designer's pocket. Ask what it is tested on, and what the target loading time is, as a number.

SEO included almost always means the on page basics: a title and description on every page, one main heading, a sitemap, tidy addresses, the site submitted to Google. That belongs in any build, because a site launched without it is broken rather than unoptimised. It is not search work and will not win a competitive phrase, so it is not worth paying extra for. Whether to buy search work at all is a separate decision.

Even the floor gets missed. I ran the same technical check across 1,089 Dutch business websites and small online stores, and of the 1,033 that answered, 53% were slow and 27% had no structured data at all. The full findings are published. It says nothing about price, but it does show how many paid for websites miss things that take an hour to add.

Content and photography, the thing nobody prices

This is the item most often missing from a quote, and it is not small. One service page written properly, from a real conversation with the person who sells the thing, takes hours. Multiply by eight and the words are either a large part of the price or absent from it. Either is workable; not knowing which is not, because then you write them at nine in the evening and they read like it.

Photography is the same story, and half a day of a photographer's time is not expensive next to the build. So ask two questions: who writes the words, and where do the pictures come from. If the answer to either is “you”, fine, but it belongs in your budget and your calendar.

Why page count is a poor unit

A page is not a unit of work. The homepage and the contact page are both one page; one takes a day of thinking, the other twenty minutes. It is gameable from both ends, too: a supplier pads the count with thin pages, a buyer jams four services onto one page to stay inside a tier, then wonders why none of them ranks.

Everyone sells by the page anyway, me included, because it is the one thing a buyer can verify before work starts. So pair it with the question that repairs it: which pages, and what goes on each one?

The costs that start on launch day

A build price is a moment; running a website is a subscription, so price the year rather than the launch. The recurring lines are some combination of hosting, the domain renewal, a platform subscription, theme and plugin licences, backups, a form or mail service, and a maintenance retainer or per change hourly rate. Each is small, and together they often exceed the difference between the two quotes you are agonising over. Security updates need naming too: every platform ships them, some urgent, and if the quote does not say who applies them, the answer is nobody.

A newer line for 2026. The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, has applied since 28 June 2025, and e-commerce services are in scope: services provided at a distance, through websites, with a view to concluding a consumer contract. The technical benchmark everyone works to is EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 level AA, though a version written for this act is still being finished, so check which one your national regulator names. Settled: a consumer facing online shop in the EU is covered, and microenterprises providing services, fewer than ten people with turnover or a balance sheet total not above €2 million, are exempted by article 4(5). Not settled: how regulators treat a business just over that line, or a brochure site that sells nothing. Over the threshold, accessibility belongs in the quote, and so do consent and the privacy pages.

What a cheap template build costs in the second year

I will not invent a figure, because it depends on the arrangement you sign. The shape is this. A build sold at a few hundred euro is not meant to be profitable in itself: the margin lives in the renewals and the changes, and a site inside a locked page builder is slow to edit. A price change here, a staff photograph there, a page for the service you launched in March, and the year quietly costs a multiple of the build.

The money is not really the problem. You cannot leave: when the code sits on somebody else's platform, the domain is in their name and the content will not export, moving means a full rebuild. Plenty buy that knowingly, so be one of the people who knew. If I stop paying in eighteen months, what do I still have?

My own numbers, at the same standard

It would be strange to write this and not let you compare mine. Everything that bears on buying a website, ex VAT, as published on the pricing page.

Free 15 point site check: €0, written report back in two working days.
Audit and 90-day plan: €290, credited in full against whatever you buy next.
Starter website rebuild on a proven layout: €1,450 fixed.
Full website rebuild, designed and written for your business: €2,450 fixed, three weeks, half up front.
Extra pages beyond the agreed scope: €350 each.

Search rankings, online stores, custom systems and ad management are priced on that same page, ad management as a flat fee quoted in writing, never a percentage of spend.

That puts me in the upper half of the freelance band rather than the studio one, deliberately, with the consequence you would expect: one person is quicker and cheaper, with no account manager in the way, and no cover. If you need a team on call at three in the morning, buy a team. My ownership answers are the ones I just told you to demand, the rebuild page sets out what the fixed price contains, and photography is not in it. On custom systems the code sits in your repository.

One line matters when you set a supplier outside the EU against one inside it. I invoice from Pakistan, so for a VAT registered business customer in the EU the place of supply is your own country under article 44 of the VAT Directive, 2006/112/EC, and you account for the VAT yourself under the reverse charge in article 196. That changes your paperwork rather than your cost, provided you can recover input VAT in full. If your business makes exempt supplies, healthcare being the common one, you cannot, and the VAT is a real cost rather than a line that cancels itself out. Ask your accountant.

How to put two quotes on the same footing

Send every supplier the same list and ask for written answers. Ten minutes for anyone who knows their business, and the ones who go quiet have told you something.

Name the pages. Not “up to eight”, the actual eight.
Who writes the text, and who supplies the photographs?
Who owns the code, and is that written into the agreement?
Whose name goes in the domain registrant field, the hosting account and the analytics?
What is the total across the first twelve months, every renewal and licence included?
What does a change cost after launch, and how long does it take?
If I leave in eighteen months, what do I take with me?

Line them up, a column each. The cheapest quote usually stops being cheapest at question five.

Common questions

Is a cheap website always a bad website?

No. A template build for a plumber who needs a phone number, an address and three photographs is a sensible purchase; five thousand euro on it would be the mistake. Cheap turns bad when the site has a job it was never designed for: selling a considered service, competing in search, or carrying more than a handful of pages.

Should I rebuild, or fix what I have?

Fix it, if the bones are sound. Every fault the audit measured was a hosting or markup problem, and almost all of it was an hour of work rather than a redesign. It deliberately measured nothing about design or the words on the page, which are often the bigger problem, so take it as half an answer. A rebuild earns its price when the structure is wrong: the pages do not match what people search for, or you cannot edit the site yourself. Anyone selling rebuilds has an incentive not to say that, so ask for it by name.

Does any of this change for an online store?

The ownership questions do not change, and matter more, because a store holds customer data and order history as well as pages. What changes is that the work never finishes, which is why a store sits on a monthly figure with the migration included rather than charged separately. The furniture retailer case study shows one such move: 373 products, the same domain kept, search position held.

What a Website Should Cost in 2026