What does a professional website really cost in 2026?

The three price brackets

The figures below are observations from the German and wider European agency market in 2026 — the market Sitetik works in — quoted in euros. They are orientation, not quotes, and rates in your own country will differ. What travels well is the structure: three brackets, and the gap between them is driven less by page count than by how much is built from scratch.

A clean, straightforward site for a trades business, a practice or a restaurant normally lands in the lower-to-middle part of that second row. If you are quoted five figures for a project like that, ask in detail what the money is buying.

The item almost everyone underestimates: what comes after launch

The build price is only the entry ticket. A website is not a brochure you print once — it runs on software that has to be maintained. These items arrive after launch:

• •Domain and hosting — roughly €5 to €40 a month depending on the provider, more for larger sites.
• •Maintenance and security updates — especially on WordPress sites with a lot of plugins. Neglect this and the site eventually becomes vulnerable, or simply breaks.
• •Licences — premium themes, plugins, form and booking tools are nearly always annual subscriptions.
• •Changes — new opening hours, a new team member, an updated service. Billed by the hour, this adds up faster than people expect.
• •Content — copy and, above all, your own photography. A shoot costs extra, but it often does more for the site than any design decision.

Added together, running costs are commonly quoted at €100 to €500 a month. For a small business with a modest site the realistic figure sits nearer the bottom of that range — but it is never zero.

Calculate over three years, not over the first month

The only fair way to compare two offers is the total cost over the period you are planning for anyway. Three years is a sensible window — that is roughly how long a web design lasts before it needs reworking.

Take a typical small business site: €3,500 to build, €20 a month for hosting, €60 a month for maintenance and two smaller change requests a year at around €150 each. Over three years that comes to roughly €7,280. A subscription at €69 a month comes to €2,484 across the same period — provided maintenance and changes really are included.

And that is exactly where you should push back. What does “changes included” actually mean? How many, how quickly, and where does it stop? A provider who cannot answer that clearly will be billing by the hour later on. We put the underlying choice side by side in its own guide: website subscription or one-off purchase.

What actually drives the price

The big lever is not the number of pages, it is how bespoke the work is. A tailored design with its own photography, custom illustration and elaborate animation costs a multiple of a cleanly executed standard structure — even though both have “five pages”.

Functionality works the same way. A contact form is standard. Online booking with calendar sync, a customer login, or a shop with payment processing are projects in their own right. And the most underestimated cost driver of all is missing content: when copy and images still have to be created, that doubles the effort on many projects — and pushes the launch back by weeks.

How to spot a quote you should not sign

• •The price appears as one lump sum with no breakdown at all.
• •Nothing states who owns the domain and the content, or what happens if you part ways.
• •“SEO included” with no explanation of what that covers — or, worse, guaranteed Google rankings. Nobody can credibly promise those.
• •A long minimum term paired with a suspiciously low monthly price — the build is simply being financed through the contract length.

Where Sitetik fits into this picture — and where it does not

Our plans sit between €49 and €99 a month with no setup fee; hosting, maintenance and changes are included. That is not a conjuring trick, it is a calculation across the contract term: we work from a proven technical foundation instead of starting from zero every time, and we pass that saving on.

Equally honestly: if you want a fully bespoke design that exists nowhere else, or you need complex software — an ERP integration, your own portal, specialised booking logic — then a classic agency project is the right route, even though it costs more. For a trades business or a restaurant that mainly wants to be found online and to look trustworthy, it is usually overkill.

In short

A professional website for a small business typically costs between €1,500 and €8,000 as a one-off — plus running costs that are often missing from the quote. So ask three things of every offer: what does it cost in year one, what does it cost in the years after, and what happens if we part company? Anyone who answers those three clearly is a serious partner, whichever model they sell.