How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026?

How much does a website cost for a business in 2026? The honest answer is inconvenient: anything from a few hundred to tens of thousands of euros. And the gap is rarely about one studio being greedy and another being modest. It is about the fact that "a website" can mean very different things. In this article we break down what the price is made of, which costs you pay once and which you pay every month, where hidden costs hide, and how to work out whether a site will pay for itself. At the end you will find our own prices, with no small print.

At WebVisa we have been building websites since 1998 and have launched more than a thousand projects. So we will use real examples, and any figures about user behaviour come from published research, linked where they appear.

What goes into website design cost

A website's price is not "the cost of the design" or "the cost of the code". It is the sum of several jobs, and each one can be done superficially or properly.

Research and structure. Who your customers are, what they type into Google, which pages you need. This includes keyword research: finding the real phrases people search for. Skip it and you get a brochure for yourself rather than a tool for winning clients.
Copy. Service descriptions, prices, reasons to choose you, answers to common questions. Good copy sells and also helps the site show up in search.
Design. Not just attractive but clear: where the button is, where the price is, how to get in touch.
Front-end and back-end development. Turning the design into working pages that load fast on a phone, enquiry forms, and an admin panel for edits.
Technical SEO. SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of getting Google to show your site for the right searches. At launch that means proper headings, clean page addresses, a sitemap, speed and structured data.
Language versions. If your clients speak several languages, each version needs its own copy and its own pages, not an automatic translation button.
Launch and analytics. Connecting Google Search Console and analytics, testing forms, moving the site to hosting.

When two quotes differ by a factor of five, the cheaper one is almost always missing half of this list. Those steps simply never happen.

Business website price by type: landing page to custom platform

It is easier to compare specific types than "websites in general". Below are WebVisa's starting points and what usually pushes the budget up.

Type	Best for	WebVisa price	Timeline
Landing page	One service, one ad campaign, a quick launch	from €300	3–7 days
Business website	A company with several services, pages built for search, several languages	from €1,000	1–3 weeks
Online store	Catalogue, cart, payments, shipping	from €1,500	2–6 weeks
Custom platform	Client accounts, bookings, integrations, complex logic	quoted after a brief	several weeks and up

A landing page is a single page built around one action: send an enquiry, book, buy. It works well for advertising and for testing demand, but it is a poor fit if you want to be found on Google for dozens of different searches.

A business website is the main option for service companies. Each service gets its own page, each language its own version, plus pages about the company, prices, reviews and questions. The price grows with the number of pages, languages and the amount of copy.

An online store costs more because of the catalogue, filters, payments, shipping and product imports. A hundred products and ten thousand products are different projects.

A custom platform is for when ready-made tools don't fit: a complex calculator, a booking system, a client area, a link to your CRM (customer relationship management software, where you track clients and enquiries) or your warehouse. These are priced only after a detailed brief.

You can see what each stage includes on our web design page.

One-off costs vs ongoing costs

A common mistake is to count only the build. A website is like a car: buying it is one thing, fuel, insurance and servicing are another.

One-off

Building the site (structure, copy, design, development).
A logo and visual identity, if you don't have them yet.
Photos of your work, team and premises. Stock images don't build trust.

Ongoing

Domain, your web address. For .com, the base wholesale fee charged by the registry, Verisign, is $10.26 a year and rises to $10.97 from 1 November 2026, according to Domain Incite. Registrars add their own margin; Cloudflare, for example, sells domains at wholesale price with no markup. So a good domain costs in the region of ten to twenty dollars a year, not hundreds of euros.
Hosting, the server your site lives on. A small company site usually runs fine on an inexpensive plan. One catch: many hosts advertise a first-term price well below the renewal price, so always check what renewal costs.
SSL certificate, which gives you the padlock and the https address. You usually don't need to pay for it: Let's Encrypt issues trusted certificates free of charge to anyone who owns a domain.
Support: updates, backups, small edits, banners. Ours starts at €90 a month.
SEO: ongoing work to move the site up in search, with new pages, copy, technical improvements and reports. Ours starts at €350 a month, with first results usually in 3–4 months.
Content: new articles, case studies, photos, updated prices.

Watch out

If someone offers you "a website for €200 plus a paid SSL certificate at €100 a year", ask questions. A basic certificate is free today, and a domain in a popular extension costs roughly ten to twenty dollars a year.

Hidden costs and traps

The cheap template site

Templates are not evil in themselves. The problem is that in the budget version your business gets squeezed into the template rather than the other way round. There are no pages for individual services, the copy is generic, and the site is heavy with unnecessary plugins. It looks fine, but it brings no clients.

The slow site

Speed is money, literally. In the "Milliseconds Make Millions" study, carried out by Deloitte and the agency 55 for Google, making a mobile site just 0.1 seconds faster lifted retail conversion rates by 8.4% and travel conversion rates by 10.1%; on lead generation sites, the share of users reaching the form page rose by 21.6% (web.dev, 2020). Conversion rate means the share of visitors who do what you want: send an enquiry, message you, buy. Earlier, Google reported that 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load (Google, 2017).

The site built for desktop

According to StatCounter, mobile devices accounted for 58.99% of worldwide web traffic in September 2026, desktops for 39.26%. And Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. If your site is awkward on a phone, you lose both people and rankings.

The mixed-language site

This is very common for companies with international clients: an English heading, Spanish body text and a Russian menu, all on one page. Google explicitly recommends a single language for content and navigation on each page, separate URLs for each language version, and avoiding side-by-side translations. The versions are linked with hreflang, a tag that tells search engines which page is meant for which language.

The rebuild a year later

The most expensive trap. The cheap site doesn't work, and a year or two later you have to start again: pay for development again, wait again, and the months without enquiries are already gone. That is exactly what happened to one of our clients.

A real example: Maxiprof

Maxiprof is a garden and villa care company that has been working in the Marbella area since 2010. First they had a site on the Tilda builder that brought no clients. Then a freelancer built a WordPress site that was technically weak and mixed languages on the same pages. The money was spent twice, and online enquiries still didn't come.

After an audit, we suggested starting from scratch rather than patching: market research, keyword research in several languages, a new structure with pages for each service and area, and an SEO-optimised site. The new site went live at the end of September 2026. Alongside it we set up their Google Business Profile, tidied up the branding and produced a brand book. The site is now on a monthly SEO plan.

The lesson is simple: two cheap attempts together cost more than one done properly, and they took years. The full story is in the Maxiprof case study.

How to work out whether a website pays off

Compare the cost of a client, not the cost of a site. You need two simple numbers.

Cost per lead = everything you spent on the site and promotion in a period ÷ the number of enquiries in that period. A lead is simply an enquiry from a potential client.

Payback period = how many months it takes for profit from website clients to cover what you invested.

An illustrative example (numbers for clarity, not a forecast). A company orders a €1,000 website and SEO at €350 a month. First-year spend: 1,000 + 12 × 350 = €5,200. Say the site brings 80 enquiries in that year: cost per lead is €65. If 20 of those become clients and the average profit per client over the year is €400, the site has generated €8,000 in profit and more than paid for itself.

Now the "cheap" option: a €300 site with no promotion, three enquiries a year, one client. On paper it costs less, but each client costs more, and the lost business is huge.

To make these sums real, you need to count enquiries. That is why we built LeadBot, a CRM inside Telegram: enquiries from your website forms arrive in a chat with name, contacts, service and source; each has a New / In progress / Closed status with buttons; and you can export Excel reports for a day, week, month or all time. There is a free plan, and paid plans start at €7 a month.

Tip

Visitors decide in seconds. Nielsen Norman Group found that users often leave web pages in 10–20 seconds, and that to hold them you need to communicate your value proposition within about 10 seconds (NN/g). So the first screen should make it obvious what you do, for whom, where, and how to reach you.

What to ask a studio before you order

What exactly is included in the price? Copy, photos, language versions, SEO setup, analytics, or only design and coding.
Who will own the domain and the logins? The domain should be registered in your name.
What is the site built with, and can I edit text and prices myself?
How fast does it load on a phone? Ask to see speed test results from previous projects.
How will language versions work? Separate pages and copy, or automatic translation.
Do you have real case studies with results? Not just screenshots, but what changed for the client.
What happens after launch? What support costs, who fixes bugs, how SEO is handled.
Where do enquiries go, and how will I count them?

In the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility, researchers noted that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone, and advised making it look professional, easy to use, regularly updated and free of errors. A good studio will explain how it delivers on each of those points.

WebVisa prices: what a website costs with us

Landing page: from €300, 3–7 days.
Business website: from €1,000, 1–3 weeks.
Online store: from €1,500, 2–6 weeks.
SEO: from €350 a month, first results in 3–4 months.
Local SEO and Google Maps: from €350 a month, first changes in 4–8 weeks.
Website support: from €90 a month.
Bots: price on request, 1–4 weeks.
LeadBot: free plan, paid plans from €7 a month.

We mostly write our own code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Bootstrap), and when a ready-made system fits the job we use InstantCMS or OpenCart. The price is fixed before work begins. For ongoing growth, see our SEO services.

Bottom line

A cheap website is expensive if it brings no clients. Judge it by cost per lead and payback period, not by the invoice.

How much does a website cost? Frequently asked questions

How much does a website cost for a small business?

With us, a business website starts at €1,000 and a landing page at €300. The final price depends on the number of pages, languages and who writes the copy.

Why do quotes from different studios vary so much?

Because "a website" covers very different amounts of work. Compare what is included: research, copy, languages, SEO setup, speed and support.

How much does it cost to run a website each year?

A domain is roughly ten to twenty dollars a year, SSL is usually free, and hosting for a small site is inexpensive. Our support starts at €90 a month and SEO at €350 a month if you want a steady flow of clients from search.

Can you fix my old site instead of building a new one?

Sometimes. Start with an audit: if the structure and technical base are weak, fixing it costs more than starting again.

When will the site start bringing in clients?

From ads, right after launch. From Google, with regular SEO, first results usually appear within 3–4 months.

Want to know what your own site would cost? Message us on Telegram or WhatsApp, or use the form on our contact page, and we will estimate the budget and suggest where to start.

How Much Does a Website Cost for a Business in 2026?