How much does a website cost in 2026? The real prices, no waffle

“How much does a website cost?” It is the first question we are asked, and the honest answer is: it depends what is in it. The problem is that many agencies take advantage of that to bury the answer in an opaque quote. Here are the real market figures for 2026, what makes the bill vary, and how to tell whether a price is fair.

The real price brackets in 2026

In France, a professional site sits roughly in these brackets:

• Brochure site (a few pages): from €1,000 to €5,000 depending on how bespoke the design is and how many pages there are.
• Site with features (booking, advanced forms, multilingual): €3,000 to €8,000.
• E-commerce shop: €4,000 to €15,000, or more depending on the catalogue and the integrations.
• Off-the-shelf templates (Wix, Squarespace thrown together): a few hundred euros… but more on that below, it is not the right comparison.

On top of these build costs (paid once) there is almost always a monthly cost: hosting, domain name, maintenance. Allow €10 to €150/month depending on the supplier and the services included.

What genuinely drives the bill up

Two “brochure” sites can differ fourfold. The real items that move the price:

1. Bespoke design vs prefabricated theme. A unique design, thought through for your business, takes time. A theme bought for €40 and barely tweaked does not, but everybody has the same site.
2. The code. A hand-coded site is faster and lighter; a site stacked on dozens of plugins (WordPress) is heavier, slower and more fragile.
3. The content. Text, photos, site structure: if the supplier handles it, that is billed; if you provide everything, it comes down.
4. The features. Booking, online payment, customer area, multilingual: each brick adds to the budget.
5. Search optimisation (SEO). A “pretty but invisible” site is no use. Real optimisation work changes the outcome, and the price.

The “opaque €4,000 quote” trap

It is the great classic: an agency quotes €4,000 for a basic site, without detailing what is included, then charges for every change on top, and locks you into a maintenance contract at €150/month for three years. The result: you pay a lot and you do not even own your site.

Three reflexes to avoid that:

• Insist on a detailed quote, line by line (build, pages, features, hosting, maintenance).
• Check who owns the code at the end. If the answer is “we do”, walk away: that is rental in disguise.
• Be wary of long commitments. A good supplier does not need to tie you in for three years.

A €500 site or a €5,000 site: the real arithmetic

A €500 template and a bespoke site costing a few thousand euros are not in the same league. The template is yours… like it is for 10,000 other businesses, often slow, badly ranked, and impossible to grow cleanly. Bespoke means a site that looks like you, that is fast, that Google likes, and that belongs to you for life.

The real question is not “which is cheapest”, but “what will this site bring in?”. A site that loads in half a second, well ranked locally, that turns visitors into customers, pays for itself quickly, far quicker than a free template nobody finds.

Our stance at Filon Médoc

We built our offer precisely to break the opaque quote: prices published online, a foundation from €1,199 paid once, modules à la carte, a monthly plan with no lock-in from €39, and code that belongs to you for life. Every site is coded by hand, not a theme, and a mockup is presented and approved before any development.

Want to see what your site would cost, with no drawn-out quoting process? It is all transparent on our website design page, and the quote is free within 24 hours.