Website cost in 2026: five price bands
Market ranges for a small brochure site, not an offer. Build it yourself on a site builder: $16–$49 a month in the US, £12–£35 in the UK, which is $190–$590 or £145–£420 a year, plus 20–40 hours of your own time. Junior freelancer: $800–$2,000 / £600–£1,600. Established freelancer: $2,500–$6,000 / £2,000–£4,500. Small agency: $5,000–$15,000 / £4,000–£10,000. Mid-size agency: $20,000 and up, with no clear ceiling.
Hourly rates are the quickest sanity check on any of those numbers: $40–$95 for a freelancer and $100–$200 at a US agency; £35–£80 and £80–£150 in the UK. If a quote and an hourly rate do not reconcile into a plausible number of hours, one of the two is decoration.
The spread stops looking absurd once you accept that it is not the same product. The gap between $1,500 and $15,000 is almost never the design: it is how many human hours sit inside, who writes the copy, who shoots the photos, and what happens when you ask for a change six months later.
What actually moves the price
Page count. The most honest multiplier there is, because every page is copy, layout, mobile testing and its own title and description for search. Going from one page to five does not cost five times as much, but it comfortably doubles the quote. Ask how many pages are included and what the next one costs: $150–$400 or £120–£300 is the going rate for an extra page.
Languages. A second language does not double the layout, it doubles the content, which is the expensive half. Professional translation runs $0.10–$0.20 a word; a 3,000-word site is $300–$600 per language before anyone wires the two versions together and tells search engines which is which.
Features. A contact form is in every quote. Online booking, a shop, memberships or a client area are a different category: they add build hours and, more importantly, third-party services with their own monthly fee that nobody adds to the first number.
Content. This is the line that blows up most projects, because it gets left until last. A copywriter charges $150–$400 a page; a half-day business photo shoot is $500–$1,200 in the US and £350–£800 in the UK; a decent stock photo is $10–$30. A quote that says "client to supply copy" has not removed that cost, it has moved it to you.
Deadline. Rush work is charged as rush work: a site that has to ship in a week carries a 20–50% premium at most studios, because it means pushing someone else's project. If you have a fixed date — a trade show, an opening — say so in the first conversation, not the last.
The line items a quote leaves out
Domain and hosting. A .com is $12–$20 a year, with the renewal trap we break down in the guide to how much a domain name costs. Shared hosting is $60–$300 a year; managed WordPress hosting, $240–$600. The padlock — the SSL certificate — has been free for years and any decent host issues it automatically, so ask why if it appears as a line item.
Email on your own domain. $6–$8 per user per month with the big providers, so $72–$96 a year per mailbox. A minor line until there are six of you, and then it is $430–$580 a year that was never in the quote.
Accessibility, in the US. Several thousand federal web accessibility lawsuits are filed in the United States every year under Title III of the ADA, and the practical standard courts and plaintiffs point at is WCAG 2.1 level AA. Retrofitting a finished site to meet it costs more than building it that way: colour contrast, keyboard navigation, real alt text and labelled form fields are a build decision, not a plugin. In the UK the same ground is covered by the Equality Act 2010.
The legal pages. A UK limited company must show its registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office address on its website under the Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2008 — the trading address is not enough. Cookies need consent before anything non-essential is set, under PECR and the ICO's guidance, and rejecting has to be as easy as accepting. A privacy notice that actually matches what the site collects costs $200–$600 to have written; a downloaded template costs nothing and is worth exactly that.
Maintenance. The only line you pay for the entire life of the site, and we compare it in full in the guide to website maintenance cost for a small business. The arithmetic is enough here: a $3,000 site on a $120-a-month plan has cost $5,880 by the end of year two.
Five questions that change a quote
1. Whose name is on the domain and the hosting account? Yours, from day one, with your card or your billing email. If the agency owns the registration, your address on the internet is not yours — the trap we document in the guide to cheap website design for small business.
2. How many pages, and what does the sixth cost? A quote without a page count is not a quote, it is an intention. Learn the price of the extra page before you need it.
3. Who writes the copy and where do the photos come from? That answer sets half the price and nearly all of the timeline. If you are supplying it, put a date on supplying it: the number one reason websites ship late is copy that never arrived.
4. How many rounds of revisions are included, and what happens on the next one? Two or three rounds is normal. Without that number in writing, both sides can be right, and that never ends well.
5. What do I take with me if I leave? Domain, hosting and CMS logins, an export of the site and the design source files. Ask while everyone is happy, because it is the answer that costs money when they are not.
Why two quotes for the same site differ by $5,000
Hours, and who spends them. The same site can be 15 hours from someone who has built it twenty times or 60 hours split across design, build, content and project management. Both are legitimate. Not telling you which one you are buying is not.
The stack underneath. A WordPress site is a core, a theme and fifteen to thirty plugins, each on its own update schedule. A static site has no such inventory. You barely notice the difference on launch day and you notice it a great deal in the year-two invoice.
Whether anyone measures speed. Ask the quote to state the mobile Lighthouse score it ships with. It is the cleanest way to tell a price that includes compressing images and self-hosting fonts from one that hands over the site and hopes. Ours ship at 100 on mobile across all four categories, and that is a line of the quote, not a favour.
What is in writing. Whoever will not write down pages, languages, revisions and the delivery date is always cheaper in the quote and dearer in March. If it is not written, it is not included, whatever was said on the call.
Retainers hiding in the build price. A suspiciously low build price attached to a twelve-month contract is a loan, not a discount: you are paying the difference in monthly fees, usually with a cancellation clause. Add the twelve months to the build price before you compare it with anything.
Year one, added up
Route A, you build it. $190–$590 of subscription, $12–$20 of domain and 20–40 hours of your time. Valued at $50 an hour, that is $1,000–$2,000 that never appears on an invoice but does leave your business. Cash out of pocket in year one: $200–$610.
Route B, a freelancer. $800–$6,000 to build, $12–$20 of domain, $60–$300 of hosting and $0–$1,200 if you take a light care plan. Year one: $870–$7,520.
Route C, a small agency. $5,000–$15,000 to build plus $1,200–$3,600 a year of retainer. Year one: $6,200–$18,600.
The number that actually decides is none of those three: it is year two, when there is no build left. Route A is $200–$610, route B is $70–$1,520 and route C is $1,200–$3,600. Decide with that column in front of you, because it is the one you will pay five times over.
What changes the price trade by trade
A photographer does not pay by the page, they pay by the image: two hundred full-size photos sink mobile performance, and preparing them at several sizes is real work that a per-page quote does not capture. Ask how many images are included and who optimises them.
A physiotherapist in the US has a question hiding in the intake form: if it asks what hurts, the form provider is handling protected health information and you need a business associate agreement with them. Most cheap form tools will not sign one. The cheap, compliant answer is a short form that collects a name and a phone number and leaves the clinical detail for the call.
A consultancy is where the quote genuinely climbs, and for good reason: a page per partner, written client cases and often a second language. There the content is the project and the design is the small half.
An optician needs brands, services and the opening hours of two branches, not a shop. In the UK the General Optical Council registration details belong on the site too. Confusing a catalogue with e-commerce is the fastest way to triple a quote without selling a single extra frame online.
How we do it
Our price is fixed and published, taxes included, and it is the same in every country. The pages that are included, the delivery time and the cost of an extra page are written on each pack in our website packs: you do not have to request a quote to find out what it costs.
The domain is bought in your name from day one and the logins are yours; the site goes live on your own domain as soon as production starts, even when it is still a skeleton. Maintenance is separate, annual and published in the digital growth plan, and if you do not take it, nothing renews behind your back.
If what worries you is where the catch in a low price is, that is the guide to cheap website design. If you want the recurring figure, it is in website maintenance cost. And if you are thinking of building it yourself with an AI tool, creating a website with AI covers how far that gets you and where it stops.
Related guides by trade