How much does a website cost in 2026?

A business website of five to ten pages costs £2,000 to £5,000 (€2,300 to €5,800) from a UK studio and €2,000 to €12,000 in Germany, going by the 2026 price guides of two British and two German studios. A site where customers log in and pay starts around £10,000 (€11,600). American agencies ask more.

The rows mark where the work changes kind: the first three are pages, a shop adds a catalogue and a checkout, and the last row is software. The site we rebuilt for Amir Hair Clinic, a hair-loss dermatology practice in Sofia, is a business site: a page explaining each treatment in turn, a results page with real before-and-after photographs, a questionnaire and consultation booking. Riomera, a wellness platform we built in Bulgarian and English with user accounts and paid subscriptions, belongs in the last row.

In the US, two guides to agency prices, both from 2026, put a basic small-business or brochure site at $3,000 to $15,000 (€2,600 to €12,900) and start a shop at $25,000 to $30,000 (€21,500 to €25,700). Hourly rates explain much of it. Going by client reviews of real projects, US web design firms charge $100 to $149 an hour, UK firms $50 to $99 and those in Poland or Spain $25 to $49, which is €86 to €128, €43 to €85 and €21 to €42.

The US sources cover different types of work. The review data lists an average project at $38,105 (about €32,700), while most projects cost less than $10,000. Use the ranges as context and check whether content and migration are included in the quote.

Six things move a quote more than design taste does: how many different page layouts there are, who writes the words, a second language, logins and payments and links to other software, an old site whose addresses have to survive, and photography. A quote that leaves one out is cheaper only until you need it.

Count layouts, not pages

A layout is designed once and built once; the fortieth page that uses it is mostly text going into a template. Thirty pages from three layouts can cost less than ten pages drawn one by one. On a clinic site like the one we rebuilt for Amir Hair Clinic, where every blog article sits on the same layout, the quote depends on how many kinds of page there are, not how many articles. Ask for the quote in layouts. It is the fastest check.

Who writes the words?

Copy is the line a low quote most easily leaves out, because “client supplies all text” takes the studio five seconds to type and moves weeks of work to your side of the table. A British studio's price guide has professional copywriting at £200 to £500 (€230 to €580) a page and a German one €50 to €120, while a 2026 survey of 573 copywriters puts the median freelance day rate at £440, about €510. Forced to choose, I would pay a professional for the home page and the pages people reach from Google, and write the about page myself, because those are the pages where a clumsy sentence loses the enquiry before anyone has scrolled far enough to find your phone number.

A second language

One German guide adds 15 to 25% per extra language, another 30 to 50% on the base price, and I read the spread as the difference between translating the second version and writing it. The build part is small: Google recommends a separate URL for each language version rather than one address that switches with cookies or browser settings, plus hreflang annotations on both pages naming each other, which Google ignores when only one side has them. The rest is words, twice.

I would not pay for a translate button that rewrites the page in the visitor's browser. The address stays the same, so the second language never gets pages of its own for Google to find.

Logins, payments and other software

A login is the largest single step on this list: registration, password resets, account emails, an admin screen for you, and personal data you are now responsible for. Payments add a fee on every sale that no build price covers. Stripe charges 1.5% plus 20p for a standard UK card and, on its Irish price list, 1.5% plus €0.25 on a standard EEA card, while Stripe Billing adds 0.7% of billing volume for subscriptions. Links to other software (a booking calendar, a CRM, a courier) are each a small project, priced by the quality of the other side's documentation.

A shop selling to EU consumers also falls under the European Accessibility Act, which has applied to e-commerce services since 28 June 2025 (Directive (EU) 2019/882). A business employing fewer than 10 people, with turnover or a balance sheet of €2 million or less, counts as a microenterprise and is exempt when it provides services; above that size, accessibility belongs in the quote as a line of its own.

The old site

Every address an old site has earned in Google needs a new home. Google's site-move guidance says to list the old URLs, decide where each one redirects, use permanent redirects such as 301 or 308, and keep them for at least a year. The listing is the work. A quote that says nothing about the old site has priced none of it.

Photographs

Stock photographs cost little, and every competitor can buy the same ones. A UK studio prices a professional shoot at £300 to £1,500 (€350 to €1,750), and a freelance web designer puts the average at £400, about €470. For some businesses the photographs are the proof: the Amir Hair Clinic site carries real before-and-after photographs, and no layout could stand in for them.

A hosted builder, WordPress and a custom build have different pricing structures. Compare the initial work with hosting, licences and maintenance, and consider who will update the content. A custom build does not automatically have the lowest running cost.

Builders first. Shopify's Basic plan is £19 a month on a yearly bill in the UK and €24 in Ireland, a sensible start for an ordinary catalogue; shop platforms have their own article. A builder's real price is paid on the day you leave. Wix's help centre says a Wix site has to run on Wix's servers, and Squarespace's export leaves out store pages, product blocks, style settings and custom CSS, so leaving either means rebuilding far more than the design.

WordPress runs 40.3% of all websites, according to W3Techs on 10 September 2026, and the software is free to download. The bill lives in the theme and the plugins, many of which renew every year: Yoast SEO Premium is $118.80 a year before VAT, about €102.

Custom code is the reverse. The build takes longer, there are no plugin licences, and a site with no database can run on a static host's free plan. What it gives up is editing: a text change goes through a developer unless an editing panel is built in.

Choose the platform around who will manage the site and how often it will change. A site with occasional edits has different needs from a catalogue or a publication with several editors. Compare the initial build, editing tools and ongoing support in the same estimate.

Three costs keep coming after launch: the domain, about €5 to €9.50 a year; hosting, from nothing for a static site to around €16 a month for an entry-level shared plan once the first-year discount ends; and maintenance, listed at £30 to £200 or more a month (€35 to €235) on one UK price page and at €50 to €300 by a German agency.

A .com costs $11.08 a year at one registrar, a .co.uk $5.66 to renew and a .eu $5.88, roughly €4.90 to €9.50. Hosting hides its price in the renewal: an entry-level shared plan I priced on 10 September 2026 is €2.99 a month for the first 12 months, prepaid, then €15.99 a month before VAT.

Ask every host and every studio for the year-two price.

Maintenance follows the software. A static five-page site needs little beyond backups and a renewed domain, while a shop with a dozen plugins needs updates every month; website maintenance: what you pay for goes through a plan line by line.

Put both quotes on one sheet, one row for each piece of work, and mark what each includes. Blank cells explain most of the gap. If the rows match and the totals still differ, the difference is the rate, and you can ask about it.

A UK studio's pricing article puts the rate question in one line: sixty hours of work costs £15,000 at £250 an hour and £3,600 at £60 (about €17,500 and €4,200), a fourfold gap for identical hours before anyone has argued about what the hours contain. The same arithmetic sits behind any web design quote, ours included. These are the rows I would want filled in:

1. How many layouts are designed, and how many rounds of changes.
2. Which pages and forms are built, and where form messages arrive.
3. Who writes the words, in which languages, by which date.
4. Redirects from every address of the old site.
5. Testing on phones and tablets, analytics, and connecting the domain.
6. Hosting, maintenance and the price of a later change, and whether the domain and the code end up in your name (who owns the code covers the clauses).

We test every site on real phones and tablets before it goes live, and I would expect that line in any quote. Then check VAT. At the UK standard rate of 20%, a £4,000 quote before VAT is £4,800 to a business that cannot reclaim it.

Going by the timelines studios publish, one page takes one to three weeks, a business site of five to ten pages three to eight weeks, a shop one to five months and the first version of a platform two to six months. Waiting for copy and photographs moves those dates more than the build does.

UK studios' own guides give two to three weeks for a simple site and three to eight for a typical small-business or brochure site; one of them allows 12 to 20 for complex sites with e-commerce or custom features. A German studio that builds web applications puts a medium one at two to four months and a complex one at six or more. Another UK studio lists four to eight weeks for a custom site or a Shopify shop, and builds up to five pages in seven working days on condition that the content is ready. That condition is the point. If the words are not written on the day design starts, launch moves to the day they arrive, plus a week or so for layout and checks. Put the copy deadline in the contract, next to the payment dates.