“How much will my website cost?” is usually the first real question in any client call I have, and I get why people hesitate to ask it directly — pricing in this industry is all over the place, and nobody wants to be the person who asks about money too early. So let’s just get it out of the way. Here’s what things actually cost in 2026, based on what I quote and what I see other developers charging.

Rough numbers first

A simple landing page runs $250–$600. A proper small business site, five to eight pages, lands somewhere between $600 and $1,800. A WooCommerce store starts around $1,200 and can climb past $4,000 depending on complexity. A fully custom-coded site with no page builder involved starts at $2,500 and has essentially no ceiling. And then there’s ongoing maintenance, which people always forget to budget for — usually $30 to $150 a month.

Those ranges are wide on purpose, because the honest answer to “how much does it cost” is always “it depends,” and I’d rather explain what it depends on than throw a number at you that turns out to be wrong.

What actually moves the price

Page count matters less than people assume. What really drives cost is how custom the design is. A five-page site using a solid pre-built theme is cheap. A five-page site where every section is custom-designed, with unique layouts and animation, costs a lot more — even though the page count didn’t change. I always ask clients to send me two or three sites they genuinely love the look of before I quote anything, because “a nice modern website” means wildly different things to different people.

Then there’s the builder question. Elementor or Divi sites go together faster and cost less, and for most small businesses they’re completely fine. Hand-coded WordPress themes cost more upfront, but they load faster and give you total design freedom — I usually recommend this route once a project gets past a certain size, or when page speed really matters (say, for a business that runs paid ads and can’t afford a slow landing page).

E-commerce complexity is its own thing entirely. Ten simple products with no variants is a small job. Add subscriptions, custom shipping rules, or a sync to QuickBooks, and the scope grows fast — not because anyone’s padding the quote, but because each of those things is genuinely more work.

And content. If you hand me finished copy and images, I move faster and charge less. If I’m writing your copy, sourcing photography, or helping you figure out what your site should even say — that’s real work, and it should be scoped as its own line item, not buried inside “design.”

The costs people forget to ask about

Domain registration is cheap, $12 to $20 a year, but it’s easy to forget. Hosting runs $5 to $30 a month depending on how much traffic you expect. Some themes or plugins carry license fees, annual or one-time. Stock photography, if you don’t have your own, adds up. And revisions past whatever was originally scoped — ask about this upfront, because “unlimited revisions” almost never actually means unlimited.

Freelancer or agency?

Agencies typically charge two to four times what an experienced freelancer charges for the same build, mostly because of overhead — account managers, office space, bigger teams passing work between them. That doesn’t make a freelancer automatically the right call for every project. But for most small businesses, a good freelancer gets you the same quality build for a fraction of the price, and you’re talking directly to the person doing the work instead of through a project manager.

How to actually get a real number

The fastest way to get a quote you can trust, from anyone, is to show up with three things: a rough page list, two or three example sites you like, and whether you’re supplying your own content. Give a developer those three things and most of us can quote you within a day — no vague “starting at” range, an actual number.

If you want that number for your project specifically, tell me what you’re building and I’ll reply within 12 hours with a real quote and timeline, not a range designed to get you on a call.