How much does a professional website cost in 2026?

Every week, a restaurant owner, a craftsman or a coach forwards us an agency quote and asks whether it's a fair price. The answer is almost always the same: <em>it depends what's inside</em>. And 9 times out of 10, the person quoting has never really read what they're buying.

This article won't compare providers. We'll explain what you're actually paying for when someone quotes you a website, item by item. After that, you'll read a quote in ten minutes instead of signing one blindly.

The 2026 price bands

The European market for websites aimed at freelancers and small businesses splits into five bands, roughly stable since 2023 despite the flood of AI tools. Here's what we see:

These prices cover <em>building</em> the site. Hosting, maintenance, content and acquisition (Google Ads, social) come on top. More on that below.

1. The 300 EUR site: what you're really buying

Wix, Squarespace, a friend who spent an evening on it. On paper, unbeatable. In reality, you end up with three things:

• A site that looks like a thousand others, with blocks locked into the theme.
• SEO that plateaus fast because the HTML structure is locked too.
• You, running IT support on your own website, handling every bug and every update.

This isn't a Wix takedown, just an observation. A pre-built template does the job if your need stops at <em>being present on the internet</em>. It stops working when you want to <em>convert visitors into customers</em>. The gap between the two is usually 2 to 3 years of learning for a non-specialist owner.

Verdict: fine if you're testing a project for six months. Bad investment if your business is real and you want to rank on Google.

2. The 2,000 EUR freelance site: the market's classic

This is the market median in 2026: a senior freelancer, a custom build or a well-kept WordPress, 3 to 5 weeks to deliver. Value is often solid, with two catches.

First catch, the <strong>actual timeline</strong>. Out of 100 freelance quotes, 70 slip by one to three months. It's not bad faith, it's structural: a freelancer juggles several clients, one unexpected issue at one shifts everyone. Plan for it if your opening, launch or season depends on the site.

Second catch, the <strong>content grey zone</strong>. Almost every freelance quote reads <em>content provided by the client</em>. In practice, if you don't write your copy or prepare your photos, the project stalls. A 5,000 EUR site sits unusable until you've written your twelve pages.

Verdict: strong choice if you already know your positioning, your copy, your photos, and you're not in a rush.

3. The 8,000 EUR agency site: what it actually funds

When an agency quotes 8,000 EUR for a showcase site, they're not quoting 8,000 EUR of code. They're quoting:

• The salesperson who signed you and their quarterly target.
• The project manager who shuttles between you and production.
• A designer, a developer, sometimes a copywriter.
• The office, accounting, insurance, margin.

This structure is legitimate for projects where legal risk, scalability or exceptional customisation are critical. It's overkill for a neighbourhood restaurant that wants to show its menu and take reservations.

Verdict: fair beyond 15,000 EUR of site, or when your site drives 100 percent of revenue. Oversized below that.

The hidden line items nobody prices

This is where the real bill lands. Out of 100 small business owners we meet, only 15 have anticipated the following items before signing.

Domain name

Between 8 and 20 EUR a year for a standard .fr or .com. No surprises, except on premium extensions or short domains already registered, which can climb into the hundreds.

Hosting

From 3 EUR/mo on shared OVH to 50 EUR/mo for managed hosting. Your site's performance depends directly on this, and Google weighs it for SEO. A 3 EUR host that loads in 4 seconds costs you 30 to 50 percent of visitors.

Maintenance and security

15 to 80 EUR/mo depending on complexity. Covers technical updates, backups, security watch. On WordPress, it's almost mandatory: an unmaintained site gets hacked within twelve months. On modern stacks (Astro, Next, static sites), maintenance is lighter.

Content (the most underestimated item)

A pro site without pro photos looks amateur. A craftsman photo shoot starts at 400 EUR. An SEO copywriter charges 80 to 200 EUR per page. If you write it yourself, count 2 to 4 hours per page including revisions. Time that isn't in the quote but costs you your hourly margin.

SEO and acquisition

This is the budget-buster. The site alone brings no traffic in year one, except on low-competition local queries. Three options:

• In-house SEO: free in cash, 2 to 4 hours of your time a week. Results in 6 to 12 months.
• Outsourced SEO: 400 to 1,500 EUR/mo depending on the agency. Results in 4 to 8 months.
• Google Ads: 300 to 3,000 EUR/mo of ad spend, plus management fees (10 to 20 percent or flat). Instant results but budget-dependent.

We've written a dedicated piece on <a href="/pricing" class="text-moss dark:text-mossUp underline underline-offset-4 decoration-1 hover:decoration-2">acquisition strategy for local businesses</a>, but the simple rule: a site with no plan to drive traffic stays a digital brochure.

The question that should come before the quote

Before asking <em>how much</em>, ask <em>what for</em>. A restaurant showcase built to take direct reservations isn't designed like a coach site selling online session packs. Here are the five questions we ask on every first call:

1. Who visits your site: a loyal customer checking your hours, a prospect discovering you, a journalist prepping an article?
2. Once they arrive, what's the top action to trigger: reservation, call, form, purchase, menu download?
3. Where do your customers come from today: local Google, Instagram, word of mouth, third-party platforms (Doctolib, TheFork, Planity)?
4. What must you absolutely avoid: inheriting a WordPress mess, depending on an unreachable provider, rebuilding the site every two years?
5. What total monthly budget can you sustain (site + hosting + acquisition) over twelve months?

A quote that hasn't answered these five questions isn't a quote, it's an hour count times a rate. You deserve better.

Our position at 500 EUR

Ubee charges 500 EUR for a showcase site delivered in 24 hours, first-year hosting included. How do we hold the price?

We've industrialised the <em>custom</em> part. Concretely, that means three things:

1. A reusable technical base. A Ubee site is a Cloudflare architecture proven on over 60 projects, not a bare WordPress that gets rebuilt every time. What takes 20 hours elsewhere takes 2 hours with us.
2. Ready business components. For a restaurant, the menu, the reservation module, the gallery, the Google reviews section, the contact form are preconfigured. We assemble and adapt, we don't reinvent.
3. Expertise focused on three sectors. Hospitality, craftsmanship, wellness and healthcare. We know your platforms (Doctolib, TheFork, Planity, Resalib), we know your objections, we know your seasonal priorities.

What we don't bill: the sales chain, the project manager, the agency margin. What we keep: custom work on content, design, launch. The result is a site that looks worked on because it is, at a price that looks impossible because we removed half of the sector's structural cost.

If you want to dig into a specific field, we've detailed our offer for restaurants, craftsmen, coaches and therapists. And if you're based in Paris, Lyon, Brussels or Geneva, we have a dedicated page for your city with the local specifics.

Frequently asked questions