How Much Does a Professional Website Cost? The Complete 2026 Pricing Guide

“How much does a website cost?” is probably the most common question asked of a web agency — and the hardest to answer in one sentence. A website isn’t a standardised product like a car or a phone plan: two projects that look similar on the surface can differ in price by a factor of ten, for reasons that are often invisible at first glance. Here’s what actually drives the final bill, with indicative ranges by project type.

Why there’s no single price

A website is fundamentally a custom project, even when it’s built on standardised building blocks. The final price depends on variables that have nothing to do with each other: number of pages, complexity of the requested features, amount of content to produce, level of visual customisation, and the support planned after launch. Two five-page brochure sites can therefore cost €900 or €4,000 depending on whether one uses a barely-tweaked generic theme and the other a design built specifically for the business, with a structure planned for SEO from day one.

What drives the price

Number of pages and functional complexity

A brochure site (home, services, about, contact) naturally requires less work than a platform with a client portal, online booking or a filterable catalogue. Every feature beyond displaying content — a complex form, third-party integration, a members-only area — adds specific development work, and therefore billed time.

Custom-built or preset solution

A site built on a generic theme, even customised, costs less than an entirely original design — but it also runs into limits sooner: harder to stand out visually, dependent on the theme’s own updates, and sometimes slower if the theme ships with unused features baked in.

Brochure site or e-commerce

An e-commerce site isn’t a brochure site with a cart bolted on. It involves catalogue management, secure payment, often an integration with inventory tools, and specific legal pages (terms of sale, return policy). These are requirements that weigh on the budget mechanically, regardless of the agency.

Content: writing and visuals

A website quote doesn’t always include copywriting or the production of photos and video. When it doesn’t, that work stays with the client or gets added as a separate line item — a cost that’s frequently underestimated when budgeting a project.

Support after launch

A website is never really “finished”: security updates, content tweaks, occasional changes. Some quotes include a warranty period or a maintenance plan; others don’t, which simply pushes that real cost further down the road, often without the client having planned for it.

Indicative price ranges by project type

These figures reflect orders of magnitude commonly seen in the French market for a professional website built by an agency — they vary by region, the provider’s experience and the exact scope of the project, and don’t replace an actual quote.

• Simple brochure site (up to 5-6 pages, adapted theme): roughly €800 to €2,500
• Custom brochure site (original design, in-depth content, SEO-minded structure): roughly €2,500 to €6,000
• E-commerce site (catalogue, online payment, inventory management): roughly €3,000 to €10,000, more for a large catalogue or specific integrations
• Custom platform (client portal, business-specific features): from €10,000 up, with no real ceiling depending on complexity

The cost of SEO: upfront and ongoing

Organic search is budgeted in two stages. An initial phase — technical audit, site structure, in-depth content, structured data — lays the foundations and is often priced between €400 and €3,000 depending on the size of the site. Then comes monthly follow-up, generally between €300 and €1,500 a month depending on how competitive the sector is and the pace of content publishing targeted. Unlike building the site itself, SEO is never a one-off cost: it’s ongoing work, because competitors are also publishing content and earning links. We cover this in more depth in our complete local SEO guide.

Google Ads: two budget lines, not one

A Google Ads campaign involves two distinct spending categories that should never be added together by mistake into a single figure. Ad spend is what you pay Google directly for each click on an ad — there’s no imposed minimum, but too small a budget dilutes results to the point of making them meaningless, in practice often starting from a few hundred euros a month for a local market. Management fees pay for the work of setting up, monitoring and optimising campaigns, charged either as a percentage of ad spend (often 10 to 20%) or as a fixed monthly retainer.

Additional costs that often get forgotten

Beyond the main quote, a few recurring but modest line items need to be factored into the overall calculation: the domain name (around ten euros a year), hosting (variable depending on the technology used, sometimes bundled into a maintenance plan), and technical maintenance itself — backups, security updates, minor fixes — often offered between €30 and €150 a month depending on the service level. Ignoring these lines when budgeting a project is one of the most frequent mistakes we see.

The cheapest option isn’t always the best value

An unusually low price almost always hides a trade-off: a generic theme not suited to the business, a structure that ignores SEO entirely, no support after launch, or content you have to produce entirely yourself without that being made clear upfront. A poorly built site doesn’t just underperform — it often costs more to fix or rebuild two years later than it would have cost to build properly from day one, as we cover in our complete website creation guide. Conversely, a high price isn’t a guarantee of quality on its own either — it’s the clarity of what’s actually included in the quote that should guide the decision, a point we develop further in our guide to choosing a web agency.

How to get an accurate quote

The ranges in this guide give an order of magnitude, not a quote. The exact price of a project depends on variables specific to each business: the number of pages actually needed, specific features, content already available or still to write, and the level of support wanted after launch. We offer a first, no-obligation conversation to assess these elements and put together a quote tailored to your project — for building your site, an online store, your SEO, your Google Ads campaigns, your brand identity or a maintenance plan.

In summary

The price of a website depends above all on what’s actually included in the quote — pages, content, customisation, post-launch support — far more than it depends on which agency you choose. SEO and Google Ads each add their own budget logic, one ongoing, the other made up of two distinct lines that shouldn’t be confused. Either way, the lowest price is only a good deal if it matches a genuinely simple need — otherwise, it usually just defers the expense, with interest. Get in touch for an accurate quote for your project.