How much does a website cost in 2026? Real prices, line by line

The short answer: if you build it yourself on a website builder, expect to pay roughly $50 to $470 a year in entry and mid-tier plan fees, plus a domain name. If you hire a professional, most agencies quote between $1,000 and $15,000 for a fixed-price project, according to a 2026 GoodFirms survey of more than 300 web development firms, with simple sites at the low end and mid-sized business sites more often at $5,000 to $20,000. ¹²⁴⁶

That range is wide because a website is not one purchase. It is a domain name, a place to host the site, the design and build, the words and photos, payment processing if you sell online, and someone to keep it working. Some of those are monthly, some are yearly, some happen once and some are a percentage of every sale. Below, we take each line in turn, using prices listed on October 14, 2026.

Three ways to get a website, and what each costs

Almost every small business website comes from one of three routes. You can build it yourself on a website builder such as Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, WordPress.com or GoDaddy, where hosting, security and updates are bundled into a monthly plan. You can hire a designer to customize a template on one of those platforms. Or you can commission a custom build, where a team plans, designs and develops the site around your business, often on WordPress or a modern framework, with separate hosting.

None of these routes is automatically the cheap one. A do-it-yourself site costs the least in cash but the most in your time, and the result depends on how well you write, photograph and organize. A professional build costs more up front, but you are paying for decisions as much as for pages: what the site should say, in what order, and what you want a visitor to do next.

Website builder prices in 2026

Builder plans are the easiest prices to compare because they are published. The table below shows the entry plans most small businesses consider, at the annual-billing rate the vendors advertise. Monthly billing usually costs more; Shopify Basic, for example, is $29 a month paid yearly or $39 paid monthly. Squarespace raised its annual prices by up to 26% in July 2026, a reminder that the price you sign up at is not fixed for life. ²³⁵

The plan is only the starting point. Paid apps, premium templates, extra storage, email accounts and booking or membership features can add more each month, and the free or cheapest plans often lack the features a business needs, such as taking payments or removing the builder's branding. When you compare builders, compare the plan that does what you need, not the headline price.

What a professional website costs

Professional prices are harder to pin down because every quote describes a different project. The most useful current data is GoodFirms's 2026 survey of more than 300 web development firms in 31 countries. It found fixed-price projects ranging from $1,000 to more than $150,000, with 63% of agencies quoting between $1,000 and $15,000. Basic sites cost $1,000 to $3,000 at most agencies, and mid-sized business sites most often cost $5,000 to $20,000. Clutch's 2026 pricing guide, based on client reviews, says a site usually costs less than $10,000, and Forbes Advisor's 2026 guide puts professional sites as generally starting around $1,500. ¹¹³¹⁴

Those are what firms charge, not a promise of what your site will cost. Quotes rise with the number of pages and templates, custom features such as booking, quoting or member areas, the amount of writing and photography the agency produces, integrations with your other software, and how much strategy and testing goes in before anything is built.

The costs that keep coming: year one versus year two

The up-front number gets the attention, but ongoing costs decide what a website really costs you. Four matter most.

Your domain name renews every year. Verisign, which runs the .com registry, raised its wholesale price from $10.26 to $10.97 a year from November 1, 2026. Registrars add their own margin on top, so retail renewals are higher, and some charge much more at renewal than in the first year. Hosting is the second line. If your site is not on an all-in-one builder, you pay for hosting separately: managed WordPress hosting starts at $28 a month billed annually at WP Engine and $30 a month billed annually at Kinsta for a single site. ⁸⁹¹⁰

Watch introductory prices. SiteGround's shared hosting starts at an introductory $2.99 a month, but its regular StartUp rate is $17.99 a month on a 12-month term, which is what you pay at renewal. The same pattern applies to many domains and builders: a low first-year price that resets. Ask any provider or agency what year two costs before you sign. ¹¹

If you sell online, payment fees are a cost on every sale. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for a standard domestic card, with extra fees for international cards and currency conversion, and Shopify Payments charges the same 2.9% plus 30 cents for standard online cards on the Basic plan. Finally, maintenance: software updates, backups, security monitoring, small content edits and fixing what breaks. We could not find an independent survey of maintenance costs, so ask for a written scope that lists exactly what is included and how quickly problems are fixed. ⁵¹²

The costs people forget until they are expensive

Accessibility is the first. A website that people using screen readers or keyboards cannot use is a legal risk as well as lost customers. Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, up 27% from 2,452 in 2024, mostly filed in New York and Florida. The widely used standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which the Department of Justice adopted for state and local government websites; in April 2026 it moved that rule's deadlines to April 26, 2027 for larger governments and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. That rule does not cover private businesses directly, but it is a clear signal of the standard courts and buyers expect. Building accessibility in from the start costs far less than retrofitting it. This is general information, not legal advice. ¹⁵¹⁶

Speed is the second. Google's Core Web Vitals define a good experience as the main content loading within 2.5 seconds, the page responding to a tap within 200 milliseconds and the layout not jumping around, measured on real visitors' devices. A Google-commissioned Deloitte study of 37 brands found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile speed was associated with 8.4% more retail conversions. It was sponsored by Google, so treat the exact number as directional, but the lesson holds: a slow site quietly costs you customers every day. ¹⁷¹⁸

Content is the third. Many projects stall because nobody has written the pages or taken the photos. If an agency writes and photographs, it costs more up front; if you do it, budget your own time honestly. Search setup is the fourth: page titles, descriptions, redirects from your old site, a Google Business Profile and analytics. Skipping these on launch day is how a new site loses the traffic the old one had.

How AI is changing what websites cost

AI website builders can now produce a first draft of a site in minutes, which pushes the price of a basic site down. In the GoodFirms survey, more than half of firms estimated that an AI-built site costs $1,500 or less. Designers feel the pressure: in a February 2026 survey of 500 US web designers by the hosting company 20i, more than three quarters said competition from AI had made their job harder, and about nine in ten said clients underestimate what web design costs. ¹¹⁹

What AI does not do on its own is decide what your site should say, prove it with your real work, check that it is accessible and fast, or connect it to how you actually win customers. Those decisions are where most of a website's value comes from, and they are also what AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode look for when they decide which businesses to recommend.

How to get a quote you can compare

• List the pages you need and the one action each page should lead to, such as calling, booking or buying.
• Write down the features you need now, and the ones you might need in a year, such as online booking, payments or a customer area.
• Decide who writes the words and who provides the photos, and get that in writing.
• Ask who owns the domain, hosting and website accounts. They should be in your name.
• Ask what year two costs: hosting, domain, licences, maintenance and support, at regular rather than introductory prices.
• Ask which accessibility standard the site will meet (WCAG 2.1 AA is the common benchmark) and what speed targets it will hit.
• Ask what happens when you want changes after launch, and how long they take.

What this means for your business