How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026?

How much does a website cost depends far less on the software than on who does the work, and the honest answer spans three orders of magnitude: roughly fifteen dollars a year if you write it yourself, to tens of thousands if an agency does. This lesson gives you the bands for each route and, more usefully, the costs that only appear in year two.

Vendor pricing below is checked against published pricing pages as of August 2026. Everything involving people — freelancers, agencies, maintenance — is an industry estimate, and is labelled as one.

The routes, priced side by side

Read the last column first. It is the one that decides whether your budget survives contact with reality.

DIY on a hosted builder

Mainstream builder pricing has settled into recognisable bands. On annual billing, entry tiers cluster at roughly $16 to $19 a month, mid tiers at $23 to $29, business and commerce tiers around $39, and the top tiers at $99 to $159. Monthly billing typically runs 5 to 8% higher than annual.

We are quoting bands rather than a table of brands on purpose. Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and Hostinger all publish plans that fall into these clusters, and which one a given feature sits in changes constantly. If you want a builder, price the tier that has the features you need and ignore everything above it — the commerce tier is not a better version of the site tier, it is a different product.

So a realistic first year on a builder is about $190 to $470 including the plan, before the domain.

Self-hosted WordPress

The software is free. Everything around it is not. Entry and managed WordPress hosting runs roughly $15 to $35 a month as an industry estimate — WP Engine, Kinsta and SiteGround are examples of that category — plus your domain, plus anywhere from nothing to about $300 a year for a premium theme and paid plugins.

One warning that applies across the whole hosting industry: introductory rates frequently multiply at renewal. A plan advertised at an attractive monthly figure for the first term can land two or three times higher when it renews. Find the renewal rate before you sign up, not fourteen months later.

Paying a freelancer or an agency

Industry estimates, all of them. Freelancers charge roughly $50 to $150 an hour, or $1,500 to $8,000 for a small-business project; marketplace rates spread much wider, from about $20 to $220 an hour, and that spread is mostly about experience and location.

Agencies typically quote $10,000 to $35,000 for a small-business site, with some starting near $6,500 and e-commerce projects commonly passing $20,000. What you are buying at that price is not better software — it is strategy, copywriting, design, project management and someone accountable for the result.

Ongoing maintenance, hosting and support for a small business site is estimated at $1,000 to $6,000 a year. Ask what it covers before you agree to it, because that range hides everything from a monthly plugin update to a retained developer.

The subscription is the price, and it never ends

Here is the arithmetic nobody puts on a pricing page. A $23 a month builder plan is $276 a year and $1,380 over five years. At the end of those five years you have paid the equivalent of a mid-range freelance project, and you cannot take the site with you — export gives you content, not design, and not the site.

A self-hosted WordPress site at $20 a month is $1,200 over the same five years. Almost identical cash. The difference is what you hold at the end: files and a database that move to any host, versus a login you stop paying for.

This is not an argument against builders. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying: on a builder you are renting a finished service, and the rent is the price of not maintaining anything. That is a fair trade for a lot of people.

Two costs that surprise almost everyone

The domain renewal

Budget $10 to $15 a year at an at-cost or fair registrar, and $18 to $25 at typical retail renewal rates. The cheap first year is a marketing decision, not a discount: registration and renewal cost the registry exactly the same, which is why the first-year-cheap trap is pure registrar markup. Budget the renewal, and multiply it by five while you are there.

Free hosting is not free for a business

The zero in the hand-coded row of that table has an asterisk. Several popular free static hosts prohibit commercial use in their terms, and one meters production deploys tightly enough that a busy afternoon can pause your project. The free-tier terms in lesson four go through them one by one. If the site earns money, price a paid plan at $9 to $20 a month and stop worrying about it.

What small businesses actually spend

One widely repeated figure, offered with a genuine health warning: a 2026 Clutch survey is reported to have found that around 61% of small-business buyers spent under $10,000 on their most recent website project, down from about 68% in 2023. We obtained that figure second-hand rather than from the survey itself, so treat it as directional only — the useful part is the shape, which suggests budgets creeping upward, not the decimal.

The cost that is not money

Every route carries a price in hours as well as dollars, and the two trade against each other almost exactly. A builder subscription buys you out of maintenance entirely. The hand-coded route costs close to nothing in cash and asks for your evenings instead. Self-hosted WordPress sits between them: cheap in money, steady in attention.

So put a number on your own hour before you choose. If an afternoon of your time is worth a few hundred dollars to your business, a plan that saves you six afternoons a year has already covered itself, and the question of ownership becomes a separate argument to have on its own merits rather than a tiebreaker on price.

Where this sits in the course

Cost is one input into the route decision and rarely the deciding one — maintenance usually is. The complete guide to how to make a website weighs all of them together.

Before you move on

• You have written a five-year total, not a first-year total.
• The domain renewal price is in that total, not the promotional price.
• You have checked the renewal rate on any introductory hosting offer.
• If the site earns money, its hosting plan permits commercial use.
• You know who maintains the site, and whether that person is paid.
• You are on the plan tier you need today, not the one you might need later.