What a Business Website Really Costs in 2026

“So what does a website cost?” is the question we hear most often – and the one that’s hardest to answer in a single sentence. The honest answer starts with: it depends. Not as an excuse, but because the word “website” hides three very different products that can be a factor of 50 apart in price.

This article still gives you numbers to work with – solid 2026 ranges sorted by website type, plus the ongoing costs that fall through the cracks in most quotes. By the end you’ll be able to judge a proposal without being a developer yourself.

Why “what a website costs” has no honest single number

If someone quotes you a fixed price for “a website” without a single question, they either have a standard package in mind that may not fit you – or they’re guessing. The price rides on four levers:

• Scope: five pages or fifty, one location or twenty, one language or three.
• Customisation: adapting a ready-made template versus building design and technology from scratch.
• Features: pure presentation, or forms, booking, a shop, a login area, integrations.
• Content: do you supply text and images, or should the agency handle that too?

Every provider pulls each lever differently. That’s why looking at a single number tells you little – but looking at the category behind it tells you a lot.

2026 price ranges by website type

The ranges below are market benchmarks for the German-speaking region when built by an agency or experienced freelancers. Do-it-yourself builders sit below, enterprise projects above.

Website type	Realistic range	For whom
Landing page (1 page)	800 – 3,000 €	Campaign, product, event
Small company website (up to 5 pages)	3,000 – 8,000 €	Freelancers, small businesses
Business website (5–15 pages, custom)	8,000 – 25,000 €	Mid-market, custom design
Website + shop (WooCommerce)	15,000 – 40,000 €	Selling with a manageable catalogue
Web application / portal / platform	from 25,000 €	Custom logic, login, integrations

For context on how we calculate: we start a WordPress website with real substance at 3,000 €, and a custom Laravel web application at 10,000 €. Those are entry points, not final prices – but they show the order of magnitude where custom work realistically begins.

The cost factors in detail

Design. An adapted template is cheap but rarely looks like you. A custom design – wireframes, imagery, components – costs more, but it’s the difference between “another site like that” and a presence that fits your brand.

Content. Supplying your own text and images saves money. Adding professional photography, copywriting and a solid SEO structure adds a four- to low five-figure amount depending on scope. Content is the item most often missing from cheap quotes.

Features. A contact form is standard. Booking logic, a configurator, a members’ area or a connection to your ERP/CRM is development – and that scales with complexity, not with page count.

Hourly rates. For orientation: experienced web developers in the German-speaking region charge roughly 110 to 150 € per hour in 2026. If a quote is well below that, it’s worth asking who’s actually doing the work and where the difference comes from.

The item almost everyone forgets: ongoing costs

Most quotes talk about the build. But the build is only the first half of the bill. After it come:

• Hosting & domain: a few euros to mid double-digit amounts per month, depending on the system.
• Maintenance: with WordPress this is insurance, not luxury – updates, backups, security monitoring. We offer it from 79 €/month; more on our WordPress maintenance page.
• Evolution: new pages, campaigns, small features. A website is rarely “done”.

Together you land at roughly 50 to 200 € per month in running costs. Over five years that’s 3,000 to 12,000 € – for many projects the second half of the total bill. This is exactly where the technology choice matters: a static Astro site has structurally fewer moving parts, and therefore less ongoing effort, than a plugin-heavy WordPress. We broke that difference down in our honest Astro vs. WordPress comparison.

Total cost of ownership: count the five years, not the build

The most expensive mistake in website budgeting is looking only at the quoted price. A real-world example: a cheaply built WordPress site with twenty plugins might cost half as much to build – and then cost time and money every year for updates, conflicts and security patchwork. A slightly more expensive but cleanly built site is often the cheaper one over five years.

So don’t calculate “what the website costs”, calculate “what it costs me until I next touch it fundamentally”. That number decides, not the figure on the first invoice.

How to recognise a fair quote

• It asks about your goal, your scope and who maintains the site before naming a price.
• It cleanly separates one-time and ongoing costs – no surprises after launch.
• It states what is not included (content, photos, maintenance) instead of hiding it.
• It names a technology with a reason, not “modern” as an end in itself.
• You get a named contact, not a ticket number.

A quote that meets these five points may be more expensive than the cheapest one – and usually costs you less in the end.

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Want to know what your website realistically costs? Tell us what it should do, how many pages you’re planning and who maintains it afterwards – you’ll get an honest assessment from us with a clear split of one-time and ongoing costs. Drop us a line.