How much does a website cost in 2026? Real ranges from a senior studio
A practical budget guide for small businesses, with the ranges we use for early planning—not inflated enterprise numbers and not a misleading one-price package.
Quick answer: indicative 2026 ranges
These are starting planning ranges in euros, excluding VAT where applicable. A written proposal follows discovery and always wins over a range in an article.
Focused business website
€500–€1,200A small number of templates, clear content and standard contact or lead forms.
Website redesign
€700–€1,800Design, development and an SEO-safe migration of an existing small-business site.
E-commerce website
€1,200–€2,500A focused catalogue and checkout using a maintained commerce platform.
Custom web application
From €2,000One clearly defined workflow; broader platforms are planned in milestones.
Why one website price is not useful
Asking what a website costs is a little like asking what an office costs. The answer depends on what must happen inside it. A five-page site for a local service business, a multilingual catalogue, a store with payments and a booking platform can all be called a website, but they carry different design, content, integration and testing work.
The useful question is not how many pages you can buy. It is what the site must help a visitor do, what the team must be able to update and what existing systems or search visibility must be protected. Those decisions determine the real scope. Page count matters, but repeated templates are cheaper than ten pages that each need a different interaction or content strategy.
What a focused business website includes
At roughly €500 to €1,200, a typical small-business project has a focused offer, a manageable number of page templates and content that is mostly ready. The work should still include responsive design, solid front-end implementation, basic technical SEO, metadata, analytics, form setup, performance checks and a short launch QA—not only a purchased theme with a logo added.
The lower end assumes fast decisions and limited complexity. The budget rises when the team needs messaging help, custom illustrations, several languages, advanced calculators, directory features or integration with a CRM. A good proposal makes these assumptions visible. A cheap quote that leaves content, mobile QA or launch work undefined often becomes more expensive through change requests and missed tasks.
Why redesigns can cost more than new small sites
A redesign starts with assets and constraints that already exist. Some are valuable: ranked pages, backlinks, familiar navigation, analytics history and content customers rely on. Others are technical debt. The team must determine which is which before changing URLs or replacing templates.
Our €700 to €1,800 planning range includes a baseline crawl, URL mapping, permanent redirects where needed, content parity checks and post-launch verification. A redesign without that migration work may appear cheaper, but losing a useful landing page or creating hundreds of 404 responses is not a saving. The visual work and the SEO preservation plan belong in the same scope.
E-commerce: product count is only the beginning
A focused store can begin around €1,200 to €2,500 when the catalogue, payment method, delivery rules and platform are straightforward. The number of products matters less than the number of exceptions: product variants, regional tax, shipping logic, stock synchronisation, discount rules, invoices and connections to accounting or fulfilment systems.
Existing stores also need data migration and redirect planning. Checkout, transactional email and payment failure states must be tested with real scenarios. If a store depends on many overlapping plugins, part of the budget should be reserved for simplification and stability rather than another visible feature.
Custom software should start with one valuable workflow
A focused custom web application can start near €2,000 when the first release has one well-understood job. Examples include an internal approval flow, a partner portal, a booking tool or a back-office screen that replaces a recurring spreadsheet process. The first version should prove that workflow before it grows into a platform.
Broader products cost more because permissions, data migration, integrations, audit history, background jobs, security and support become part of the system. We plan those projects in milestones instead of hiding uncertainty inside one large number. Discovery can be its own small phase when stakeholders do not yet agree on the process.
The five factors that move a quote
First is content: who writes it, who approves it and whether existing material can be reused. Second is design variety: a repeatable article template is different from a product configurator. Third is data and integrations, including payments, CRM, booking, email and legacy APIs. Fourth is migration risk—especially URLs, orders, customer accounts and multilingual content. Fifth is the level of post-launch responsibility, from a short warranty period to continuous maintenance and optimisation.
Timeline can also change the price. Compressing an eight-week sequence into three weeks creates parallel work, faster approvals and less room to absorb missing inputs. A realistic schedule is often the easiest way to protect the budget without reducing quality.
What a serious website estimate should show
A useful estimate names the deliverables, assumptions, exclusions, milestones, payment schedule and ownership. It explains who supplies copy and images, how many design rounds are included, which integrations are covered and what support happens after launch. For a redesign, it should mention redirects and migration explicitly. For a store or application, it should describe test environments and acceptance criteria.
Compare proposals by responsibility, not only by the final number. If one studio includes discovery, content structure, responsive QA, technical SEO and launch monitoring while another lists only design and development, the offers are not equivalent. Ask what would need to go wrong for the price to change. The answer tells you how much uncertainty has really been considered.
A sensible way to set your budget
Choose the smallest release that can produce a real business outcome. For a service company, that may be clear positioning, credible work and a reliable inquiry path. For a store, it is a complete purchase for the most important products. For internal software, it is one workflow used by a real team. Keep secondary ideas in a later milestone rather than forcing them into the first launch.
Then reserve attention, not only money. A client still needs to provide expertise, review content and make decisions. Projects become expensive when approvals stall and old assumptions are reopened near launch. A named decision-maker and prepared source material can save more than choosing a weaker technical solution.