How much should a website cost in 2026?

What each route costs

Do it yourself on a builder. Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify all bill in US dollars. On a yearly plan they run $16 to $39 a month, or $24 to $56 month to month, depending on the plan and whether you sell online. The software cost is the small part. Expect to spend somewhere between twenty and sixty hours getting it to a state you're happy with, and to keep spending hours on it after that. This is a real option when your time is worth less to you than the cash right now.

A cheap template build. A few hundred dollars on a freelance marketplace buys a template with your logo dropped in. You get a site. What you usually don't get is copy written for your business, photographs of your actual work, or anyone who answers when something breaks in month four.

An independent designer or developer. Roughly $2,000 to $10,000 for a business site built for you. You're paying for judgement: what the pages should say, what to leave out, and whether the site converts. You deal directly with whoever is doing the work.

An agency. $10,000 to $50,000 and up. You get a team, a process, and account management wrapped around the build. Worth it when the project is complex or the brand risk is high. Expensive when what you needed was ten good pages.

For context on where we sit: our builds start at $2,100, quoted once, all in. The pricing page has the detail.

Six things that determine what you pay

Within any of those ranges, the same six things determine what you pay. Two businesses in the same trade can be $2,000 apart for reasons that have nothing to do with who is charging more.

• How many pages. Ten is a normal floor for a business that wants to be found. Sites that need forty are a different job.
• What customers do on it. Reading your services and tapping to call is straightforward. Booking a time, paying a deposit, or checking stock is more to build and more to test.
• Photography. Usable photos of your own work keep the price down. A shoot on site adds time, and on a trade or a restaurant it's usually the highest-return line on the quote.
• How much writing. Copy written from a blank page takes longer than tightening what you already have. Most businesses underestimate this one badly.
• Software it plugs into. Booking systems, payment processors, inventory, a CRM, anything custom sitting behind the site.
• Moving an old site. Bringing across content, setting up redirects so you don't lose the rankings you have, and untangling whoever set up the last one. This is its own project and it's frequently skipped, which is how businesses lose their search traffic during a redesign.

What a quote has to cover

A number only means something next to what it buys. Anything missing from this list is a cost that arrives later, on a separate invoice.

• Copywriting, or a plain statement that you're writing it. Writing your own pages is the most common reason a launch slips by months.
• Photography, and which of the three it is: a shoot, your own pictures, or stock.
• The search setup at launch, meaning a Google Business Profile claimed and filled in and the site submitted to Google. Almost everywhere else that gets billed separately later.
• Testing on a real phone, on mobile data, rather than in a browser window dragged narrow.
• Hosting and an SSL certificate, running, with the yearly cost named.
• The domain, the hosting and the code in accounts that belong to you.
• Changing your own hours and prices without paying somebody each time.

The last two determine what you're holding if the relationship ends, and how to find a good website developer covers how to check them.

The ongoing costs

The build price isn't the whole picture, and the running costs are where people get surprised.

• Domain: roughly $20 to $30 a year. Non-negotiable and it should be registered in your name.
• Hosting: anywhere from free to $50 a month depending on what the site does. A brochure site can run on a free tier.
• Email: roughly $10 per user per month if you want yourname@yourbusiness.ca.
• Maintenance: optional. Care plans start at $89 a month for hosting, edits, and backups. What matters is that you're not locked in and can leave with your site.

Be careful with any arrangement where the monthly fee is the only way to keep the site online and you can't take it with you. That's a lease dressed up as a purchase.

So what's a fair price?

For a business that wants to be found on Google, look credible, and turn searches into calls, expect $2,000 to $10,000 in 2026 for a site built by someone accountable for it. Below that you're buying a template with your logo dropped into it.

Then set the number against what one extra customer a month is worth to you. For most businesses one a month pays back a $3,000 site inside the first year.