What does a website cost in 2026? What decides the price

What drives the price

The price of a website follows the amount of work, and the work follows a few factors: how many pages and templates are built, whether the content exists or has to be written, whether you need a webshop or booking, and how much is custom instead of standard.

Design from scratch costs more than an adapted theme. Text someone has to write costs more than text you deliver ready. Integrations — payments, accounting, booking — cost more than a contact page. None of these are wrong to pay for, but you should know which of them your quote contains.

Simple site, standard business site or webshop

A simple website — a few pages, ready content, standard design — is the most affordable option. Most of the job is setup, and little has to be written or made from scratch.

A business website with several subpages, adapted design and help with structure and text takes more work. Here the content often decides it: who writes the text, who provides the photos, and how many rounds of changes are included.

A webshop takes the most, because more has to be set up and tested: payments (for example Vipps or Klarna), shipping and shipping rates, products with variants, order flow, customer e-mails and often a connection to the accounting system. Every new connection to another system is work that has to be built and looked after. Offers on the market span widely, and low prices are not necessarily a scam — but they usually cover less work.

What the cheapest offers include — and omit

Offers in the lowest price range are usually a ready-made theme with your logo and text inserted. That can be exactly right for a simple start. But compare what is included, not just the number.

What is most often missing: copywriting, structuring around the searches your customers actually make, speed optimisation, training, and a plan for who helps you afterwards. Each part can be bought later — at full price, from someone who first has to learn your site.

What maintenance costs

A website is not finished on launch day. WordPress, themes and plugins need updates, backups must actually run, and small changes come up all year. Expect an ongoing cost — as an agreement with a provider, as hours when something happens, or as your own time.

Also ask who owns the site. If the domain, the hosting and the logins are in your name, you can switch provider without starting over. If everything sits with the provider, every switch becomes a new project. Without a maintenance agreement you pay per incident — often more expensive in the year something goes wrong.

How to compare quotes

Ask every provider for the same specification: number of pages, who writes the text, whether search structuring is included, what happens after launch, and what changes cost. Only then do the price differences mean anything.

If you want to see how we would solve it, you can get a new website sketched — you get a written proposal with scope and price before anything starts. And if you are unsure whether you need a new site at all, 10 signs your business needs a new website helps you judge.