How much does a website cost in 2026?
Real ranges, what actually moves the price, and why the cost of a site is not the cost of building it.
It is the first question a business owner asks, and the only one nobody answers straight. Agencies want a specification before naming a figure, comparison sites show ranges from a few hundred to fifty thousand, and the gap is never explained.
Here are the orders of magnitude, and above all what makes them vary.
What are the real ranges?
Three situations, very different, routinely lumped together.
The site you build yourself — on an online builder, from a template. The software costs a few hundred a year. The real cost is your time: count several full days for a decent result, and double that if the tool is new to you.
The site handed to a provider, on an existing template — the most common case in small and mid-sized businesses. A theme is adapted, your text and photos are integrated, the technical basics are set. Most of the budget goes into content and configuration, not code.
The bespoke site — structure, journeys and interface designed for your business, often with specific functions: a customer area, booking, a catalogue wired to your back office. The budget changes scale because the nature of the work changes.
An online shop is systematically above a showcase site at equal scope: payment, shipping, stock and legal obligations add whole categories of work.
What actually moves the price?
Rarely the number of pages. Almost always these four items.
Content. Who writes the text, who supplies the photographs. An owner arriving with written copy and usable visuals cuts a serious share of the quote. Conversely, "we'll sort the content later" is the leading cause of a project that stalls.
Functions. A contact form costs almost nothing. Booking synchronised with your calendar, a customer area, a connection to your management software: each is a small project of its own.
Rebuilds. Redoing an existing site often costs more than creating one: the existing material has to be taken over, page addresses preserved so your search ranking survives, and the migration done without downtime.
What happens after launch. This is the item quotes forget, and the one that decides the real cost over five years.
Why the real cost is not the cost of building
A website is not a purchase, it is a commitment. After launch it needs hosting, a domain name, security updates, backups, and somebody to step in when it breaks.
A site left without maintenance does not fail the next day: it degrades quietly. Components age, published vulnerabilities stop being fixed, and the day something goes wrong nobody knows the system any more. The quote to take it over is then higher than three years of upkeep would have been.
Which is why one question beats "how much does a site cost?": how much does this site cost over five years, upkeep included?
Can I do it myself with AI?
Partly, and that deserves an honest answer rather than a brush-off.
AI tools are now very good at what is codified and verifiable: a layout from a template, text variants, illustration images, translation. On those tasks the gain is real, and it has genuinely lowered the cost of repetitive work.
What they do not do for you is decide. Which pages should exist and which have no reason to, what a visitor must understand in eight seconds, why a competitor ranks above you, which legal obligations apply to your activity. A tool that does not know your market produces a plausible site, not a correct one — and a plausible site shows.
There is a more concrete trap, and it is measurable: many generated sites are invisible to search engines. When content only appears once JavaScript has run, a classic indexing robot sometimes sees it, but AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity — execute no JavaScript at all. Your site exists for a human who has the address, and for nobody else.
The honest conclusion: AI has made building cheaper, it has changed nothing about deciding or about upkeep. If your site is a business card, build it yourself with these tools. If it has to bring in customers, the useful money is no longer in the build.
How do you know what you need?
By looking at your current site with measurements rather than impressions. Real speed, visibility in search engines, protection of your domain name, compliance: these are facts, not opinions, and they say where the money should go first.
That is exactly what the diagnosis I produce does, and it is offered free.