How much does a website cost in 2026?

The four price tiers, honestly

Every web project falls into one of these four buckets. Where yours lands depends on how much of the work is custom and how many features it needs.

1. Template + DIY: $0–$500

Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow with a template. You build it. Fine for a personal page or a coming-soon holding site — not fine for a business trying to compete for local search. Templates rank slower and convert worse because they look like every other template.

2. Template + designer help: $500–$2,500

Someone customizes a template for you, swaps images, sets colors, wires the contact form. Faster than DIY, but you're still on a template's rails. Good option if budget is tight and you need something live in two weeks.

3. Custom small-business site: $2,500–$8,000

This is where most of our clients land. Custom design work, brand-aligned layout, real content strategy, mobile-first build, SEO baked in, and Core Web Vitals attention. Typical scope: 5–10 pages, contact forms, blog, analytics setup, launch coordination. Takes 3–6 weeks.

4. Ecommerce or custom-built app: $8,000–$25,000+

Anything with a cart, subscriptions, user accounts, custom integrations, or an actual application behind the marketing pages. More design work, more code, more testing, longer timelines (6–12 weeks). Ongoing maintenance costs more too.

What actually drives the price up

Three factors move a site from the low end of a range to the high end:

• Number of unique page templates. A "10-page site" where 7 pages share one template is much cheaper than a "10-page site" where every page is a bespoke layout.
• Custom functionality. A booking calendar, a multi-step form, a custom search, a members-only area — every one of these adds real dev time on top of the design work.
• Content creation. If you already have the copy and photography, we skip weeks of work. If we have to write, curate, or shoot for you, expect a 20–40% adder.

What you can safely skip

A few things agencies love to sell that most small businesses don't actually need:

• An 80-page site. Almost every business converts on 5–8 well-crafted pages. Padding out to 20+ pages dilutes SEO focus and slows the site down.
• Custom animations everywhere. One or two well-placed motion moments read as premium. Ten of them read as busy.
• Enterprise CMS platforms for a small business. If you'll only edit content once a quarter, a lightweight platform like Astro + Netlify or Wix Studio is faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain than WordPress or Drupal.

The ongoing cost people forget

A website's not a one-time purchase. Every site needs hosting, a domain, SSL, backups, and occasional updates. Budget $25–$150/month depending on what's included. Our hosting plans start at $25/month and cover all of it.

Skip this at your peril. We regularly see businesses come to us with a beautiful site built five years ago that hasn't been touched since — broken forms, expired SSL, plugins with security holes, and no backups. Rebuilding costs the same as buying a new site.

How we quote at Media City Design

Every project we take on gets a written proposal with one number. Not a range, not an estimate, not "starting at" — one number. That number includes:

• All design, development, and revisions in the agreed scope
• A written milestone schedule
• Content migration if needed
• Launch coordination and DNS handoff
• The first month of hosting free

If the scope changes mid-project, we write a new fixed price for the change before doing the work. You never get a bill you didn't approve.

Ready to get a real quote?

Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll rough out a scope + price range for your project during the conversation. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so and point you somewhere better — no hard sell.