A straight answer, broken down by project type, with the specific factors that move the number up or down.
Business owners ask this question before almost anything else, and most agencies dodge it with "it depends" and a request for a discovery call. It does depend, but not in some mysterious way. Website cost is driven by a small number of factors that are easy to name once you know what to look for: page count, design complexity, platform, content readiness, and the features running underneath the pages you see.
This guide breaks down what a website actually costs in 2026 across the three project types we build most often at Fimrix: marketing sites, ecommerce stores, and custom web applications. Real ranges, real reasons, and what changes the price.
A marketing website is your home page, service or product pages, an about page, a portfolio or work section, and a contact page, usually eight to fifteen pages total. This is the right category for consultancies, professional services firms, local businesses, and most B2B companies.
A tight page count, a design system built from a smaller set of components, and content that's already written and ready to drop in. This tier still gets you a fully custom design, not a theme, but the scope is contained.
Ecommerce pricing spreads wider than marketing sites because the underlying complexity varies so much. A twelve-product Shopify store and a two-thousand-SKU custom storefront with subscription billing are both "ecommerce websites," but they are not remotely the same build.
Custom design layered onto Shopify or WooCommerce, with a standard catalog, standard checkout, and common integrations like email marketing and basic shipping rules. Most small-to-mid-size retailers land here.
Large catalogs with heavy filtering, subscription or membership commerce, custom quoting or B2B pricing tiers, non-standard payment flows, or a storefront built outside Shopify and WooCommerce entirely. Here you're paying for engineering, not just configuration, because there's no platform doing the heavy lifting for you.
A client portal, a booking platform, a membership site with gated content, or any project with user accounts and a database behind it is a software project that happens to look like a website. Pricing here tracks feature complexity and the number of systems it needs to talk to, more than page count.
A design system built from scratch, matched to your brand's actual personality, costs more upfront than adapting an existing theme. It also converts better and doesn't look like a dozen other sites in your industry, because a template can only ever be as differentiated as the theme it started from.
A content model scoped precisely to what your team edits costs more to build than a generic drag-and-drop page builder, but it saves real time every month after launch. Cheap, generic CMS setups are usually the reason a business ends up paying a developer for routine text changes years later.
Every system your site needs to talk to, CRM, email marketing, booking software, payment processors, inventory management, adds scoping, development, and testing time. Two integrations is a minor line item. Six is a project in itself.
Projects where copywriting and photography still need to be produced cost more than projects where content arrives ready to place. This is one of the easiest levers a client can pull to bring a quote down: arrive with your content mostly done.
Compressed timelines mean more people working in parallel and less room to catch issues early, which usually shows up as a rush premium on the quote.
A $1,200 template site and a $6,000 custom site are not the same product at two different prices. They are different products. The cheap site typically needs a full redesign again within eighteen to twenty-four months, once it stops matching the brand, starts feeling dated next to competitors, or simply can't support a feature the business now needs. At that point the business has effectively paid for two websites to end up satisfied with one.
The way to avoid this isn't necessarily to spend more. It's to ask for a fixed-fee, scoped proposal that shows exactly what's included, rather than accepting a vague day rate with no defined deliverables. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, our own process walks through how we scope and price every project before a line of code gets written.
If you're a service business or local company needing to establish credibility and generate enquiries, budget in the marketing website range and prioritize custom website design over a cheaper templated option. If you're selling products online, budget for ecommerce and be honest with yourself about catalog complexity before assuming Shopify's base tier will cover everything you need. If you're building something with logins, dashboards, or business logic behind it, budget like it's software, because it is.
For a true placeholder, maybe, if you genuinely plan to replace it within a year. As a business's actual public face, no. At that price point you're typically getting a barely modified template with no strategy behind the layout, which tends to cost more in lost credibility and lost leads than it saves upfront.
Both models exist, but fixed fee is easier to budget against and forces the agency to actually scope the project properly before quoting. We quote fixed fee after an initial discovery call, once we understand what's actually being built.
Usually not. Hosting is typically a separate, much smaller monthly cost, and ongoing maintenance or support is often offered as an optional retainer rather than bundled into the build price.
Yes, this is one of the most effective ways to bring a quote down. Arriving with finished copy and photography removes a significant chunk of scope from most proposals.
Want a fixed-fee quote scoped to your actual project?
Start a ProjectEverything to prepare and decide before you brief an agency on a redesign.
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