How much does a small business website cost?

Between €500 and €3,000 on a template, and €5,000 to €15,000 custom-designed. The gap is not quality of code — it is whether the design was made for your business or adapted from someone else's.

Why do quotes for the same website differ by ten times?

Almost always because they are not the same website. Check three things: how many unique templates are designed rather than reused, who writes the copy, and whether the quote includes the work after launch. Two of those three are usually missing from the cheap quote.

Is a template website bad?

No. A template is the correct choice when your differentiation is not visual and you need to be online this month. It becomes the wrong choice when your website is the main thing standing between a stranger and a large purchase.

What ongoing costs should I expect after launch?

Hosting and domain, which is small. Then the real one: someone maintaining it. Budget for either a retainer or internal time. A site nobody updates loses roughly a year of relevance every year.

How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026?

Updated 22 July 2026·4 min read·чети на български →

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In 2026, a template-based small business website typically costs €500–€3,000, a custom-designed marketing site €5,000–€30,000, and a web application €25,000 upward. The number is driven mainly by how many unique page templates exist, whether the content is written for you, and how much integration work sits behind the interface — not by the number of pages.

Nobody wants to answer this question in public, which is why it is asked so often. Here are real ranges, and more usefully, the variables that move them.

The four tiers

Template build — €500 to €3,000. A commercial theme on Webflow, WordPress or Shopify, configured with your content. You get online quickly. You look like the several thousand other companies using that theme, which matters if you are selling on distinctiveness and does not matter at all if you are a local plumber whose customers found you on a map.

Custom marketing site — €5,000 to €30,000. Designed for your business specifically: original layouts, a real type and colour system, copy written rather than filled in. The range inside that band is set almost entirely by how many unique templates exist — a home page, a service page and a contact page is three; add case studies, a library, a pricing page and a careers section and you are at seven.

Web application — €25,000 and up, with no useful ceiling. Anything with accounts, dashboards, payments or a database that users write to. The website is now software, and it is priced like software.

Retainer — €1,000 to €10,000 a month. Continuous work: new pages, experiments, performance, content. This is where sites that keep working get their maintenance, and where sites that were launched and abandoned reveal what they cost in lost ground.

What actually moves the number

Most clients assume the driver is page count. It is not. In order of real impact:

Unique templates, not pages. Fifty blog posts using one template is one design job. Five pages that each look different is five.
Who writes the copy. Copy is usually a third of the effort and is the single most common cause of a delayed launch. If a quote does not mention it, the assumption is that you are writing it — and you probably will not, on time.
Integrations. A CRM, a payment provider, a booking system, an ERP. Each one is a small project wearing a form's clothing.
Motion and interaction. Static pages are cheap. Anything that animates in response to the user costs real hours and needs testing on hardware nobody on the team owns.
Content migration. Moving 400 existing posts is not free, and it is the line item most likely to be discovered in week three.
Approval structure. A project with one decision-maker and a project with a committee of six are different projects at different prices. Everyone knows this and nobody puts it in the quote.

What is quietly excluded

Read any proposal for these, and ask directly if they are absent:

Copywriting and content — see above.
Photography and illustration. Stock is included; anything shot for you is not.
Accessibility. Doing this properly is real work. If it is not named, assume it was not budgeted.
Analytics and tracking setup. Adding a tag is trivial; defining what you actually measure is not.
SEO beyond the basics. Titles and a sitemap are baseline. Search and answer-engine work is a separate discipline.
Post-launch fixes. How long is the warranty period, and what counts as a bug versus a change?
Training and handover. Can your team edit a page without calling anyone?

How to compare two proposals honestly

Ignore the totals. Build a table with one row per item above and fill it in from each proposal. The 10× gap usually collapses to about 2× once the cheaper quote's exclusions are priced in — and sometimes it inverts.

Then ask each supplier one question: what happens in month four? The answer separates people selling a launch from people selling an asset.

What it should cost you to decide

A useful sanity check before any of this: what is one new customer worth to you over a year, and how many extra customers would the new site need to bring in to pay for itself? If the answer is "three", the decision is easy at almost any price in these ranges. If the answer is "four hundred", you may not have a website problem — you may have a positioning problem, and no amount of design will fix it.

A website is a conversion instrument. Price it against what it converts, not against what it looks like. And before you sign anything, know why the current one doesn't convert — otherwise you will pay to rebuild the same mistake with better typography.

Questions people actually ask

How much does a small business website cost?: Between €500 and €3,000 on a template, and €5,000 to €15,000 custom-designed. The gap is not quality of code — it is whether the design was made for your business or adapted from someone else's.
Why do quotes for the same website differ by ten times?: Almost always because they are not the same website. Check three things: how many unique templates are designed rather than reused, who writes the copy, and whether the quote includes the work after launch. Two of those three are usually missing from the cheap quote.
Is a template website bad?: No. A template is the correct choice when your differentiation is not visual and you need to be online this month. It becomes the wrong choice when your website is the main thing standing between a stranger and a large purchase.
What ongoing costs should I expect after launch?: Hosting and domain, which is small. Then the real one: someone maintaining it. Budget for either a retainer or internal time. A site nobody updates loses roughly a year of relevance every year.