How Much Does a Website Cost? Real Prices in 2026
Published on 18 Aug 2026
You asked for three quotes to build a website. The first says €900, the second €4,500, the third €18,000. Same brief, same number of pages, same company. And no one explains why.
It's not that one is ripping you off and the other is honest. It's that under the word "website", three providers understood three different projects. The first pictured a template and a quick go-live. The second pictured custom design and support. The third pictured development, integrations and content management.
This article gives the real price ranges by type of site, breaks down the factors that make the price of a website vary, and lists the recurring costs that most quotes stay silent about. The goal is simple: that you know how to read a quote and estimate your budget before you even pick up the phone.
Most quotes that can't be compared come from a vague brief. Three questions are enough to frame a project, and they move the budget far more than the choice of provider.
Present your company and reassure, capture contact requests, sell products online, or replace an internal tool. These are four different projects. A showcase site whose main job is to inspire trust does not cost the same as an e-commerce site with payment, stock and order tracking.
If you want to edit your text and your products yourself, you need a CMS and some onboarding, so training time to budget for. If you'd rather delegate, management shifts to monthly maintenance. Both options are valid, but they don't cost the same, and this choice is made before, not after.
A site designed for three years and one designed for ten aren't built on the same technical foundations. The second costs more up front and much less afterwards.
Answer these three questions in writing, on one page, and send it to each provider. You'll receive quotes that are finally comparable, and you'll immediately see which ones read your document.
Here is what building a professional site really costs on the Belgian and French market, excluding promotions and excluding self-service platforms.
| Type of site | Price range | For whom |
| Single landing page | €600 to €2,000 | Product launch, one-off campaign |
| Showcase site (4 to 8 pages) | €1,800 to €6,000 | Freelancers, SMEs, professionals |
| Catalogue site (products, no online sales) | €4,000 to €12,000 | Manufacturers, wholesalers, showrooms |
| E-commerce site | €6,000 to €30,000 | Online sales, integrated payment |
| Custom development | €15,000 and beyond | Member area, business tool, application |
These figures cover very different realities. A showcase site at €1,800 is clean work on an existing base, with your text and your photos. The same showcase site at €6,000 includes a reworked visual identity, copywriting, photos, and support over several weeks.
The type of project therefore sets the starting point, but it's what you put inside that fixes the final price.
Six factors explain most of the gaps. Knowing them lets you make trade-offs instead of enduring them.
This is the item that widens the gap the most. A bought theme adapted to your colours represents a few hundred euros of work. A design built page by page, with real UX work and thought given to your visitors' journey, represents several days of a designer's time.
The difference shows, but it isn't always justified. If your sector is barely competitive online and your clients come by referral, a clean template does the job. If you position yourself as premium and your site is your first impression, custom pays for itself.
Each additional page adds design, integration and copywriting time. Count on €150 to €400 per page depending on complexity.
Features weigh even heavier. A contact form is included everywhere. A booking system with availability management, a member area, a product configurator or advanced search features are development, billed by the day.
Connecting your site to your invoicing software, to your CRM, to a payment tool or to your stock management system requires technical work that nothing makes visible on the page. Yet that's often where a project's most expensive days go.
A simple integration through an existing solution comes to a few hundred euros. A connection to a business tool with no ready-made interface can represent several thousand.
It's the most underestimated factor, and the one that causes the most projects to fail.
A site with no text can't go live. Yet many companies sign a quote thinking they'll provide their content, then discover three months later that writing eight pages is real work that no one has time to do. The project stalls, the provider waits, and the site ships six months late.
Count on €100 to €250 per page for professional, SEO-optimised copywriting. Add €800 to €3,000 for a photo shoot, and €1,500 to €8,000 for video depending on the format.
And here's the trade-off that truly matters, the one few guides pose honestly. For the same budget, do you put €2,000 more into a more advanced design, or into a presentation video on your homepage?
The answer depends on your goals. If your visitors arrive already knowing your company, design reassures them and is enough. If you have to explain a complex service or build trust with people who don't know you, video converts better than a beautiful layout. We regularly see this tipping point with our clients: the site acts as a showcase, but it's the video that triggers contact.
That's exactly why we handle both together at Norde rather than separately. A video shot with no link to the site produces two visual worlds that don't answer each other.
A fast site, well structured and correctly tagged, is billed at more than a merely pretty one. It's invisible work: heading structure, tags, load time, image optimisation, a mobile version that's actually tested.
Count on €500 to €2,500 for serious optimisation at launch. Without it, your site exists without being findable, which amounts to printing brochures and leaving them in the garage.
For an identical service, an experienced developer bills more than a beginner, and delivers in half the time with half the corrections after go-live. Skills come at a price, but you recover it over the following months.
The price of a website doesn't stop at the build invoice. Here's what comes next, every month or every year.
The domain name: €10 to €40 per year. It's the only item no one argues about.
Hosting: €5 to €50 per month for a showcase site, €30 to €200 for an e-commerce or a high-traffic site. Cheap hosting saves €20 a month and costs you visitors who leave before the page loads.
Maintenance: €50 to €300 per month depending on the technical solution. On a classic CMS it's mandatory, because plugins and the core receive regular updates that, if not applied, open security holes. On a site built without dependencies, it comes down to monitoring.
The security certificate: free with most serious hosts. If you're billed €200 a year for it, change provider.
Evolutions: budget 10 to 20% of the initial cost per year. A site that doesn't move for three years ages fast, and not only visually.
Over five years, these management costs often represent the equivalent of the build price. It's the line that €900 quotes never mention.
Three ways to build a website, three pricing logics.
Self-service tools like Wix or website builders of the same kind cost €15 to €40 per month, all included. For a freelancer just starting out on a tight budget who's willing to spend their evenings on it, it's a defensible solution. The limits arrive fast: capped customisation, average performance, and above all a site you can't take elsewhere.
A freelancer bills €300 to €600 per day, i.e. €1,500 to €8,000 for a complete showcase site. You talk directly to the person doing the work, which is fast. The risk is availability: a freelancer on holiday, ill or overloaded, and your project waits.
A web agency costs 30 to 60% more, and bills for what the freelancer doesn't provide: several skills under one roof (design, development, copywriting, SEO), continuity if someone is away, and a single point of contact when the project touches several trades.
The choice doesn't depend on your budget but on your availability. If you have the time to steer the project, provide your text and photos and chase your provider, a freelancer is plenty, even on an ambitious site. If you have neither the time nor the content, an agency costs more on the quote and much less in hours taken from your own work, including for a simple showcase site. And as soon as a project combines site, content and SEO, it coordinates poorly when you assemble three providers who don't talk to each other.
A personal aside, because I paid this lesson twice.
About ten years ago, I created my first blog on WordPress, back when everyone swore by it. I banged my head against the wall with every update. A plugin to install, an option to configure, and the next update breaking the site. The blog didn't earn a single euro, so investing in it wasn't an option. I took the hit.
When I launched Norde, I knew I was about to walk that road again. I knew nothing about it, and in my head, having a professional site built meant €50,000. So I went back to WordPress. And once again I banged my head for entire days over the design, because the template I wanted never had the feature I needed. Evenings and weekends trying to get something clean.
Then I hired Julien, our head of IT (and expert). I explained my problem, what I was after, the site I'd had in mind for months without ever managing to build it.
Two days later, he calls me. He has something to show me.
The site was done. Not a mockup, not a first version to rework: finished, exactly what I had described, pixel perfect.
Today, the slightest change takes him ten minutes and the result is right the first time.
The conclusion I draw isn't that WordPress is bad, but that the real price of a home-made site can't be read on an invoice. It's counted in evenings and weekends, and it never stops, because a site lives and demands regular management. If your time has value for your business, do the maths before choosing based on your real needs.
Belgian rates run 10 to 20% below Parisian rates for an equivalent service, and get close to those of large provincial French cities. A showcase site billed €5,000 in Paris often settles around €4,000 in Brussels or Wallonia.
Watch out, though, with cross-border quote comparisons: VAT, payment terms and the legal obligations around legal notices and data processing differ. A cheaper quote that leaves you to handle your own compliance isn't cheaper.
If you work with a provider from another country, finally check the support question: availability gaps, the language of technical exchanges and response times weigh more on a project than €500 of difference on the initial quote.
Three questions to ask before signing. They cost nothing and save years of trouble.
Who owns the site once it's paid for? The answer must be: you, entirely, code and content included. Some providers keep technical ownership and in reality rent you your own site. You only find out the day you want to leave.
Where is the site hosted, and can I move it? An imposed, non-transferable hosting is a commercial lock-in disguised as a service. Demand that the transfer be possible and that the credentials be handed over to you.
What exactly does the maintenance include? Updates, backups, bug fixes, small content changes: the list must be written down. "Monthly maintenance" with no detail is an empty line you can put anything into, or nothing.
A proper quote details the number of pages, the planned features, what's included in the content, the deadlines, the number of correction rounds included, and what happens beyond that. If it fits in three lines, the scoping work wasn't done, and it will be paid for later.
A showcase site takes 4 to 8 weeks, an e-commerce 8 to 16, a custom development several months. These durations assume you reply within 48 hours and that your content is ready.
Asking to go live in two weeks is billed 20 to 40% more, because the provider pushes other projects aside. Conversely, a project with no deadline drifts: it drags on, priorities change, and the site ships already outdated. Set a date, even a flexible one.
A site is an investment, not an expense, provided you know what it produces. Yet most companies never measure it and judge their site on gut feeling.
The basic tools are free. Google Analytics tells you how many visitors arrive and what they do. Search Console tells you which searches you appear on and at what position. Simply tracking submitted forms gives you the number of requests generated each month.
Three figures are enough to decide. How many visitors per month, how many contacts, and how many of those contacts become clients. If your €4,000 showcase site brings two requests a month and you sign one in four, it pays back its cost in a few months depending on your average order value.
This calculation also changes how you read the ranges in this article. A €2,000 site that generates nothing is more expensive than a €6,000 site that brings one client a month. Price alone tells you nothing about profitability.
So plan from the start for the measurement tools to be installed and configured. It's an hour or two of work, often forgotten, and without it you'll fly blind for years.
A professional showcase site sits between €1,800 and €6,000, an e-commerce between €6,000 and €30,000, with recurring costs of €500 to €3,000 per year. These ranges move according to design, features, integrations and above all content.
The real question isn't how much a website costs, but what you expect from it. A site meant to bring you clients, be measured and evolve isn't the same investment as an online business card.
At Norde, we build websites and video content together. Whether for social media or to be featured on your homepage, they serve the same goal and gain from being thought of as one. Our detailed packages and prices are on our dedicated website creation page.
Across all categories, the average sits around €4,000 to €5,000, but that average doesn't mean much since it mixes an €800 landing page with a €25,000 e-commerce. For an SME that wants a professional showcase site, the useful benchmark is more like €2,500 to €5,000.
Yes, but little. Going live itself is included in your provider's service. What costs money on an ongoing basis is hosting, between €5 and €50 per month depending on the type of site, and the domain name, between €10 and €40 per year. A site can't stay online for free in a durable, professional way.
Belgian rates sit 10 to 20% below Parisian prices. Count on €1,800 to €6,000 for a showcase site, €6,000 to €30,000 for an e-commerce. A web agency in Wallonia or Brussels generally bills between €400 and €700 per day.
Between €1,800 and €6,000 for a 4 to 8 page site. The bottom of the range corresponds to an adapted template with your own content. The top includes a custom design, copywriting and full support.
From €6,000 to €30,000 depending on the number of products, the payment methods, stock management and the connections to your management tools. A twenty-product shop on an existing solution starts around €6,000. A catalogue of several thousand references with integrated logistics quickly exceeds €20,000.
Between €600 and €3,600 per year, i.e. €50 to €300 per month. The amount depends mostly on the technical solution: a CMS site with many plugins needs regular updates, a site built without dependencies comes down to monitoring.
On the invoice, yes. In practice, rarely. A home-made site on a platform comes to €15 to €40 per month, but demands several dozen hours of your time up front, then regular hours afterwards. If you value your working hour, the maths often flips from the very first month.
Four to eight weeks for a showcase site, eight to sixteen for an e-commerce, several months for custom development. These timelines assume your content is ready. In practice, it's almost always waiting on text and photos that stretches a project, not the technical work.
Yes, at minimum for hosting. After that, it depends on your package: maintenance, updates, backups and small changes may be included in a monthly subscription or billed on demand. Always ask what exactly the monthly amount you're offered covers.
A good quote details the number of pages, the planned features, what's included in the content, the deadlines, the number of correction rounds and the cost of extra requests. It also states that the site belongs to you and that hosting is transferable. A three-line quote isn't a quote, it's an estimate in disguise.