How Much a Website Really Costs: DIY, Builder or Agency

When someone asks what a website costs, the honest answer is: anywhere from €70 a year to several thousand euros. That is not evasion — it reflects a market where the same word covers three completely different products. Here is what you actually pay for, and when each route makes sense.

Option 1: Build it yourself on WordPress

Cheapest in money, most expensive in time. The real line items:

• Domain — €10–15 per year for a .com, a little more for country domains.
• Hosting — from €4.20 a month for a small business site. Our plans start there and already include SSL, a global CDN and daily backups, so there is nothing to bolt on later.
• Theme — free themes are perfectly usable; a premium theme (Astra Pro, Kadence Pro, GeneratePress Premium) runs €50–90 per year.
• Your time — realistically 20 to 40 hours for a first site. At €25 an hour that is €500–1,000 of invisible cost.

First-year cash total: roughly €120–200. For a five-page company site with a contact form, this is a completely legitimate choice.

Option 2: Website builders (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify)

Builders charge monthly and bundle everything — hosting, first-year domain, templates, support. Wix business plans are €12–29 per month, Squarespace €16–23, Shopify €29 for the basic plan plus transaction fees if you do not use their payment processor.

What rarely comes up in the sales pitch: you do not own the system. If you want to leave after three years, there is no export that works anywhere else. You also lose file-level access, which puts a hard ceiling on certain technical SEO fixes.

Annual total: €150–400, with no exit path.

Option 3: Freelancer

Typical 2026 European rates:

• Brochure site, 5–7 pages, on an existing theme: €400–900
• Custom-designed site: €900–2,500
• WooCommerce store up to 100 products: €1,200–3,000

Freelancers offer the best price-to-quality ratio and the highest risk. One question to settle before you sign: will the domain and hosting account be registered in your company name? If the answer is "I keep those on my own account," find someone else. Ownership of those two things is not negotiable.

Option 4: Agency

Agency projects start around €2,500 and go up without a ceiling. That budget buys what a freelancer usually cannot: discovery, content structure, cross-device testing, written copy, and someone who picks up the phone when something breaks two years later.

It pays off when the site directly generates revenue — e-commerce, B2B sites with long sales cycles, businesses where the website is the main acquisition channel.

The costs nobody quotes upfront

• Copywriting — €30–80 per page if you do not write it yourself. Most projects stall exactly here.
• Photography — stock images are €10–30 each; half a day with a photographer is €150–400. A site with bad photos looks cheap regardless of what it cost.
• Maintenance — WordPress and plugin updates, backup checks, domain renewals. Budget €20–50 a month if you outsource it.
• Post-launch changes — almost always billed separately. Ask for the hourly rate before you start.

How to decide

Ask yourself one question: how much revenue should this site generate in year one? If the answer is "I do not know, we just need to exist online," build it yourself or hire an affordable freelancer and put the difference into content. If the answer is a specific number, a build budget of 10–20% of that number is entirely reasonable.

The one place not to economise is hosting. The gap between bad and good hosting is a few euros a month, while the gap in load time is measured in whole seconds — and every second costs conversions. Look at what is included in our WordPress hosting before defaulting to the cheapest option you can find.