How much does a website cost in 2026? Real prices and what nobody tells you

1. The short answer: three routes and what they cost

The table is a little misleading, because it compares different things. A website builder gives you the tool and you supply the work, the design, the copy and the strategy. A bespoke site gives you all that done, and the difference shows where it matters most: whether the site wins clients.

Why it is worth doing the maths properly

According to Spain's statistics office (INE), 82.9% of Spanish companies with ten or more employees have a website, but only 36.2% of those with fewer than ten. Selling through it is another matter. Eurostat puts Spain above the EU average for companies with a website, 83.4% against 79%, but below it for companies taking orders or bookings through their site, 18.1% against 22.5%. Having a website is normal. Having one that works for you, less so.

2. What pushes the price up or down

Two sites that look alike can differ threefold in price. These are the items that move the quote:

1. 01Number of pages. Five pages is not the same as one page per service and per city, which is what ranking for several searches requires.
2. 02Design. An adapted template is cheaper than original design, but looks like many others and usually weighs more.
3. 03Copy. Writing it yourself saves money. Writing it around what people search for is copywriting and SEO work.
4. 04Features. Bookings, client areas, calculators, search or forms connected to your CRM raise the budget.
5. 05Online sales. A shop needs a catalogue, payment gateway, shipping, taxes and e-commerce legal obligations.
6. 06Languages. Each language is almost another site to translate, link properly for Google and maintain.
7. 07Integrations. Connecting the site to your ERP, invoicing or booking system saves the most later and costs the most up front.

3. What you pay every year

The initial price is only part of it. These are the recurring costs of a professional site, at November 2026 prices in Spain.

4. Build it myself or commission it?

Building it yourself is reasonable if you are starting out or the site is not your main source of clients. The limit comes when the site has to rank on Google, load fast with a lot of content or connect to your tools. What decides it then is not the tool but how the site is built: what loads, how images are optimised and how much code is left over.

What rarely pays off is the in-between: a cheap template assembled without strategy, which costs money, brings no clients and has to be redone within a year. If the site is what makes people call you, the price that matters is what each client it wins costs you.

5. What about a landing page?

A landing page is built for a single action, usually the page someone lands on after clicking an ad. Its price depends on the same things as a website, but with fewer pages and more work on every detail: message, form, speed and tracking.

In Google Ads the landing page directly affects what you pay. Google scores it as «landing page experience», the relevance and usefulness of your page to people who click your ad, and it is one of the three components of Quality Score. A better landing page can lower the cost of every click.

• It says exactly what the ad promised.
• It loads fast and works well on mobile.
• The action is easy and repeated through the page.
• It has genuine customer reviews.

Those are Google Ads' own recommendations. If you are planning campaigns, our Google Ads vs Meta Ads comparison shows what each costs.

6. What it costs to maintain a website

A website is not a brochure you print and forget. It is software that ages. WordPress, which runs most CMS-based sites, shipped eight security releases between January and October 2026, seven of them between July and October. Its own site is clear: only the latest version in each series is considered safe.

The problem is that many sites are not updated. According to WordPress.org's public statistics, about a third of WordPress sites are not on the current version, and one in five runs a PHP version older than 8. Those sites are exposed to known flaws.

What good maintenance includes

• Updates to the CMS, theme, plugins and server, tested before applying them.
• Automatic backups stored off the server.
• Monitoring that the site is up and has not been tampered with.
• Small changes to content, opening hours or prices.
• Speed and form checks, which are the first things to break.

7. What the law requires (and costs if missing) in Spain

In Spain, any company website must include some legal pieces worth budgeting from the start:

8. Speed is money too

A slow site loses customers before they read a word. Google measures experience with three indicators, the Core Web Vitals, and considers a site good if it shows its main content in under 2.5 seconds, responds to taps in under 200 milliseconds and does not shift while loading.

• Vodafone improved its main page load speed by 31% and sold 8% more, according to an experiment published by Google.
• Only 48% of sites pass all three indicators on mobile, according to HTTP Archive's Web Almanac 2025.
• The median home page weighs 2.56 MB on mobile, 8.4% more than the year before. Unoptimised photos are the usual culprit.

9. And in Colombia?

There is a lot to do in Colombia. According to DANE's micro-business survey (2024), only 2.3% of the more than five million micro-businesses have a website, and half did not use the internet for their business. Among larger formal firms, about half of those with a website had no mobile version.

Colombian law also belongs in the budget: a data processing policy under Law 1581 and, if you sell online, the Consumer Statute obligations as reformed in 2024. We cover them on our Bogotá and Medellín web design pages.

10. Twelve questions before accepting a quote

1. 01What exactly does the price include, and what is left out?
2. 02How many pages and rounds of changes are included?
3. 03Who writes the copy and who handles SEO?
4. 04Is the design original or an adapted template?
5. 05In whose name are the domain and hosting contracted?
6. 06Will the code and content be mine at the end?
7. 07What does it cost every year, renewals included?
8. 08What maintenance is included and what does it cost afterwards?
9. 09Are the legal notice, privacy and cookies included?
10. 10How will we measure whether the site wins clients?
11. 11What warranty is there if something fails after delivery?
12. 12When and how is payment made?

A quote that does not answer these is not cheaper, it is incomplete. And for sector-specific sites we have guides on what each requires, such as what a dental clinic website costs.