How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026?

A website's price comes from four things: how many pages it has, what it has to do, who writes and photographs the content, and how carefully it is launched. Two quotes for "a website" can be far apart because they price different amounts of each.

This guide breaks down each part, works through an example for a local contractor, and lists the costs that continue after launch. If you are still deciding whether you need a site at all, start with the next section.

Decide what the site has to do

A Google Business Profile is free, and social pages cost nothing to open. For some businesses they are enough for a while. What they don't give you is a place you control: the platform decides the layout, which competitors appear next to you, and what happens to the page.

A website earns its cost when it has a job. That might be getting a homeowner to request an estimate, letting a family book a ride, taking an order, or giving your ads and your Business Profile somewhere better to send people than a phone number. It also gives you your own data on what visitors do, through Google Analytics and Search Console.

Write that job down in one sentence before you ask for quotes. If the site mainly needs to explain what you do and make the phone ring, a web design project covers it. If it has to calculate, book or connect to other software, you are pricing development.

The four parts of the price

1. Pages

Each page has to be planned, designed, written and built. Pages that share a layout, such as a set of service pages, cost less each once the template exists. One-off pages such as the home page cost the most per page.

2. Features

Anything the site does beyond showing information adds build time: an estimate form that emails your team, an online booking flow, a price calculator, a gallery your staff can update, online ordering, or a shop with payments. Liferock Ambulance, for example, has a fare estimator and an online ride request built into its site.

3. Content

Someone has to write every page and supply the photos. If you write it yourself, the build costs less but the launch waits on you. If the developer writes it, that time is in the price. Real photos of your work say more than stock images, and getting them may only take a phone and an afternoon on a job site.

4. Launch and search setup

A careful launch includes a redirect for every old URL, a sitemap submitted in Search Console, structured data for the business, analytics, and checks on real phones. Leaving it out makes the quote smaller and can lose the search traffic the old site had built up.

Three ways to get a site, and how each is paid for

• Build it yourself on a builder such as Squarespace or Wix. You pay the platform's subscription and put in your own hours. It works for a simple brochure site if you enjoy the work.
• Have a designer set up a builder site. You pay once for the setup and keep paying the platform's subscription. You make changes through the builder's editor.
• Commission a custom build in a framework such as Next.js. You pay more up front, hosting is billed separately by a host such as Vercel, and features like estimators or large sets of service pages are built to your rules.

Our web development page compares builders and custom builds side by side. For an online store, the same split applies between a hosted platform such as Shopify and a custom shop, and our e-commerce page covers that choice.

A worked example: a contractor with six services and eight towns

The hours and the hourly rate here are assumptions for the arithmetic. They aren't our prices or a market average. Use the same layout to check any proposal you receive.

Assume a remodeling contractor in Essex County wants a new site. It offers six services, works in eight towns, wants an estimate request form, and will supply its own photos.

• Home, about, contact and project gallery: 4 pages at 4 hours each, 16 hours
• Service pages: a 6-hour template, then 6 pages at 2 hours each, 18 hours in total
• Town pages with real local detail: 8 pages at 2 hours each, 16 hours
• Estimate request form with email delivery: 4 hours
• Launch work: redirects, sitemap, structured data, analytics and phone checks, 6 hours

That totals 60 hours. At an assumed $100 an hour, the build comes to $6,000.

Change one input and the total moves. Keeping only the four towns where the contractor does the most work saves 8 hours. Adding online booking, at an assumed 20 hours, takes the total to 80. This is why a quote with no breakdown is hard to compare: ask for the price of each page type and each feature.

What it costs after launch

• Domain renewal every year, through your registrar.
• Hosting, monthly or yearly, unless it is bundled into a builder subscription.
• Email on your own domain, billed per mailbox by providers such as Google Workspace.
• Changes and new pages after launch, billed by the hour or under a care plan.
• Paid tools the site relies on, such as a booking system.

Register the domain in your own name and keep the login yourself. Of everything on this list, it is the hardest piece to get back if a working relationship ends badly.

For a written price on your own project, request a proposal. It gives each page type, feature and integration its own line. If you are comparing several developers, our guide to choosing a web developer lists the questions worth asking.