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How much does a website cost in 2026?

Real 2026 price ranges for landing pages, business sites, e-commerce stores and web apps built by freelancers — and what drives the cost.

By Hannah Weber

“How much does a website cost?” is the question we hear most often from clients — and the honest answer, “it depends”, is useless without numbers. So here are the numbers. The ranges below come from fixed-price contracts completed by freelancers in 2025 and 2026, converted to the hours they represent at typical rates. They assume a professional freelancer or a small freelance team, not an agency with account managers and overhead.

The short version

• One-page landing page: $900–3,500 (15–45 hours)
• Small business website, 5–10 pages with a CMS: $3,000–9,000 (50–120 hours)
• Content-heavy marketing site with custom design system: $9,000–25,000 (120–300 hours)
• E-commerce store on Shopify or WooCommerce: $4,000–20,000 (60–250 hours)
• Custom web application or SaaS MVP: $20,000–80,000+ (300–1,000+ hours)

The spread inside each range is not random. It is explained by a handful of factors you can control — and understanding them is the fastest way to get a better website for the same money.

What actually drives the price

1. Custom design versus a template

A well-chosen premium theme or template costs $60–300 and removes 30–60% of the design and frontend work. A custom design from a UI designer typically adds $1,500–8,000 for a marketing site. Custom design is worth it when your brand is a competitive advantage or your conversion rate is a key metric; for a local service business, a customised template is often the smarter spend.

2. Number of unique page templates

Cost scales with unique layouts, not page count. Twenty blog posts share one template; a homepage, a pricing page, a case-study page and a contact page are four. When you brief a freelancer, list templates, not pages, and you will get far more accurate quotes.

3. Content readiness

Missing copy and images are the single most common cause of delays and budget overruns. If you need a copywriter, budget $0.10–0.35 per word or $300–900 per page for conversion-focused web copy. Professional photography or a curated stock package adds $300–2,000.

4. Integrations

Every connection to another system — a CRM, a booking tool, a payment provider, an ERP, a newsletter platform — adds work, testing and failure modes. Simple embeds take an hour; a two-way sync with an inventory system can take 40. Ask your freelancer to price integrations separately so you can prioritise them.

5. Performance, accessibility and SEO

A site that loads in under two seconds on a mid-range phone, meets WCAG 2.2 AA and has clean technical SEO costs 10–20% more than one that merely looks right. It is almost always worth it: Google’s Core Web Vitals remain a ranking signal, and accessibility is now a legal requirement for many businesses selling in the EU since the European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025.

Price breakdown by project type

Landing page: $900–3,500

A single page for a product launch, a campaign or a waitlist. The low end is a customised template with your copy; the high end includes custom design, animation, A/B-test variants and analytics events. Typical timeline: one to two weeks.

Small business website: $3,000–9,000

Five to ten pages on WordPress, Webflow or a similar CMS so you can edit content yourself. Includes contact forms, basic SEO setup, a blog template and training. The main variables are custom design and how many templates are needed. Typical timeline: three to six weeks.

E-commerce store: $4,000–20,000

A Shopify store with a customised theme, 50–200 products imported, payments, shipping rules and email flows lands around $4,000–8,000. Custom theme development, subscription products, multi-currency, B2B pricing or a headless storefront move it towards $15,000–20,000 and beyond. Remember recurring costs: platform fees, apps ($50–300 per month is common) and payment processing.

Web application or SaaS MVP: $20,000–80,000+

User accounts, dashboards, roles, payments, notifications and an admin area. A focused MVP with one core workflow can be built by a senior full-stack freelancer in 300–500 hours. Two-sided products, real-time features or complex permissions push toward 1,000 hours. For projects of this size, a paid discovery phase of $1,500–4,000 to produce a technical plan and estimate is the best money you will spend.

The costs people forget

• Domain and hosting: $15–40 per year for a domain; $0–50 per month for hosting a marketing site, more for applications.
• Maintenance: plugin and dependency updates, backups and security fixes, usually 2–6 hours per month.
• Content updates and new pages after launch.
• Analytics, consent management (if you use tracking cookies) and legal pages.
• Your own time: reviews, feedback and content collection easily add 10–30 hours for a small site.

A useful budgeting rule: plan 15–20% of the initial build cost per year for maintenance and improvements. A website is a product, not a one-off purchase.

Freelancer, agency or website builder?

A DIY builder is the cheapest option for a simple presence and costs mostly your time. A freelancer is usually the best value for anything from a custom landing page to an MVP: you pay for the work, not the overhead. An agency makes sense when you need strategy, design, development and ongoing marketing under one contract and have the budget — agency quotes are typically 1.5–3× freelance quotes for the same scope. We compare the options in detail in “Freelancer vs agency”.

How to get an accurate quote

1. List your page templates and features, marking each as must-have or nice-to-have.
2. Share two or three websites you like and explain what you like about each.
3. Say whether copy and images are ready, and who provides them.
4. List every integration with the tool name, not just “CRM”.
5. Give a budget range. Freelancers do not inflate quotes to match it — they use it to propose the right scope.

With that information, you will receive proposals that are comparable, realistic and much closer to the final invoice. And if a quote is dramatically below every other one, ask what is not included; the answer usually explains the gap.