What does a website cost in 2026? An analysis of 1,000+ web design agencies in Greater Philadelphia

What does a website cost these days?

It's one of the most common questions I get from small business owners, and answering it requires understanding a few things.

For one, websites exist on a wide spectrum. They can be super simple, or incredibly complicated. They're like a house. You could live in a modified shipping container, or a modern castle with a professional gym, temperature-controlled wine cellar, and premium home theater.

Second, website building technology has changed dramatically in the past year. I've completely changed the software and processes I was using in the past 12 months. The entire landscape of what's possible has completely shifted very recently, although relatively few people have fully realized it yet.

Third, most web design firms only provide custom quotes rather than standardized, transparent pricing. This is partly understandable because each site requires some level of customization, and the majority of firms would rather have a conversation before committing to a number. It makes sense, but getting a bunch of quotes can be an exhausting task that busy entrepreneurs don't have time for.

I want to demystify all this for small business owners in particular, whether you're looking to launch your own company on a shoestring budget, or level up your current website to keep up with competition. Here I'll break down the various options, including DIY solutions. I'll then delve into a comprehensive audit I did of more than 1,000 web design freelancers and studios I found in Greater Philadelphia, so you're armed with the information you need to make the right decision.

There are more ways to get a website than ever

In the very early days of the World Wide Web, there was one way to build a website: learn HTML. It's been 30 years since then, and countless different options have come and gone. When I built my first website back in 2005, I used desktop software called Adobe GoLive, which doesn't even exist anymore. Google once offered small businesses free websites, but that service was discontinued in 2024.

With that in mind, I'm not going to list every conceivable technological option, but instead the larger questions I find most business owners asking first: should I build it myself, purchase a subscription service, or hire someone to do it for me?

Four ways to get a website, at a glance

Option	Build it yourself	Subscription platform	Freelancer	Agency
Cost	Lowest in dollars	Low to high; some run $6,000+ a year	Low to mid; good ones usually start at $75 an hour	Highest, and the most variable
Speed	Fast with AI tools; slow for first-timers	Fast, since it's a template	Depends on the person	Slowest, with more people and process
Your time	A lot: you do everything	A little	Some, plus time to find the right one	Some, mostly meetings and approvals
Control	Full control	Little: it looks like every other site on the platform	Depends on the freelancer	High, if you pay for it
Biggest risk	Missing the fundamentals	A generic site that's hard to stand out with	Hard to tell who's good until you've hired them	Paying for overhead, or a minimum you don't need
Best for	Brand-new businesses testing an idea	Businesses that need the platform's ordering, booking or listings	Owners who know what good looks like	Big, complex sites that need several skill sets

1. Build it yourself

If you want to build your own site, the best traditional options for most people are website builders like Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Webflow, etc. Until recently, these drag-and-drop builders were the simplest and fastest ways to build your own custom website, each of them with their pluses and minuses. Instead of moving things around on your own and tweaking settings, the newer route is AI, either with the AI options most of those builders now have, or dedicated AI building tools like Replit and Lovable. New ones are popping up almost every day. When I recently audited every website in a single nearby ZIP code, I found businesses using more than 60 different tools.

The good: It's the cheapest option in dollars, you're in full control, and you can launch a basic site quickly. For a brand-new business testing an idea, it can be a reasonable place to start. For me, I taught myself WordPress a dozen years ago when I started seriously building websites, then for the past few years mainly built sites using Squarespace. Now, I primarily use my own customized AI tools.

The not-so-good: Traditional builders are a lot less intuitive than their ads suggest, especially for someone who's never built a website. In my experience, novices make lots of mistakes and take several times longer to do the same thing a pro would. My recent search has shown that DIY websites have a pretty poor track record, meaning unless you're particularly dedicated and savvy, odds are your site will be missing some of the fundamentals.

AI tools solve the speed problem, and you'll have something that looks polished in minutes. But looking finished and being finished aren't the same thing. AI tools do a lot of things automatically, but also skip many important details if you don't specifically ask them. And, of course, they all need you to decide how the site should look, what it should say, how it should be organized, etc. Lastly, there are other things every website should have that a professional should do for you, but the platforms don't, such as connecting and configuring analytics so you actually know how people find you and what they do on your website.

Honestly, a lot of my clients started out building their own site, spending months trying to figure it all out themselves, then finally reached out for help because it was distracting them from more important things and delaying the launch of their business. Any time you spend building your own website is time you're not spending on aspects of your business no one else can do but you.

2. Purchase a subscription

Many industries have platforms that bundle a website with other tools you need to purchase: online ordering for restaurants (e.g. Slice, Owner, Toast), booking for salons and gyms, listings for real estate agents, pre-approved templates for financial advisors, etc. There are dozens of these platforms out there, often tailored to very specific industries, but they're all usually some form of template with limited editing capability. Sometimes you don't need to pay extra for the website service, sometimes you do.

The good: It's convenient, can be cost-effective, and the ordering, booking or listings piece usually works well, since that's what the company specializes in. Honestly, given how bad many DIY websites are, this is a perfectly fine route for new businesses to get off the ground, and have a solid way for people to buy what they're selling.

The not-so-good: The website itself is often very generic, with little control over the design, the words or how it's set up for search. It's often identical to every other site using the platform, except the logo and menu. If you want to add more information, or just stand out from your competition, you don't have many options. Sometimes the service can be far more expensive than just building your own site - like a $6,000+ annual subscription. Of course, if there's not a service like this for your specific business category, you might not even have this option.

3. Hire a freelancer

Freelancers also come in myriad varieties. You can find them locally or through online marketplaces filled with people from all over the world. They could be anyone from someone who's been coding since the mid-'90s to a college kid who just learned a month ago. Since you're working with an individual, who might not even have a formal business, the results can be much more variable. You could hire someone who wins design awards, or someone who just completely ghosts you.

The good: A great freelancer can be the best value. You talk directly to the person doing the work, and you usually pay less than you would at an agency.

The not-so-good: The trouble is finding a great freelancer. Given there are so many out there, it can be a job in and of itself to distinguish between who's good and who's not. I've worked with countless freelancers in different capacities over the years, and it's often hard to tell if someone's good until you start working with them. If you don't know what good looks like, you might not even realize your website has all sorts of problems. For instance, I just helped a client recently who had no idea a previous developer had accidentally hidden their entire site from Google.

What's understandably tempting for many new business owners is to hire a freelancer overseas for an absurdly low price - like $7 an hour. They figure, "It's so cheap, I don't really lose much if it doesn't work out, might as well give it a try." I can honestly say I have never seen this work out well. It usually seems to be all good at first, then six months later you're still finding things wrong with your site, and you wish it was just done right the first time. This is only my experience - others may feel differently - but given it's a pattern I've seen over and over again, I think it's fair to say the odds are against you. I have had great experiences working with freelancers all over the world, just ones that are charging more like $60 to $75 an hour, not a few bucks.

4. Hire an agency

Agencies also come in all shapes and sizes. There are dedicated web design studios, where that's all they do. There are full-service marketing agencies that offer websites as just one of their services. An agency could be a couple people, or a global conglomerate. The reason to work with an agency on a website would be because you need something highly complex, potentially with a mix of different skill sets involved.

The good: More people means more skills under one roof, a set process, and someone to call if your main contact is out. If you hire a respectable agency, you can be pretty sure you'll get a solid result.

The not-so-good: You're paying for that team and that process, including account managers and project managers. Because there's more people involved, working with an agency is almost always slower than using a freelancer. Many agencies won't take on a project below a certain price, so you'll get quoted their minimum, regardless of whether that's what you need.

Speaking of price, agency rates are the most variable of all, and they can be structured in significantly different ways. If you do decide to hire a professional to build your site, what's a fair price for what you need?

What a professional website costs in late 2026

To gather some accurate and thorough data on how much people are charging for web development today, I audited over 1,100 studio and agency websites in my home market of Greater Philadelphia, including Philly and all the counties surrounding it. I used various tools to gather their services, pricing, process and FAQs to understand what they offer and how they do it. I even looked at the websites they linked to as case studies or portfolio examples to see what they've actually built.

More than 1,000 web designers, from Doylestown to Rehoboth Beach

If you want to know more about the methodology, see the very bottom of the page, but for now, here are the results.

How web designers package and price their work

Most won't tell you the price

About 1 in 5 local web designers publish a price for a website anywhere on their site.

The other four want you to fill out a form or book a call first. There are fair reasons for that. A five-page site for a bakery and an online store with 3,000 products are different jobs. But it also means most owners start shopping blind.

What the published prices look like

Among the firms that do publish, here's the lowest price they list for a full website:

Most firms that publish prices start under $2,500

The median starting price is about $1,240, and half of these firms start somewhere between $600 and $3,000. At the high end, 24 firms list website packages of $10,000 or more.

Most firms with prices offer tiers. About 70 percent list at least two packages, typically a small starter site and one or two bigger ones.

A few other common patterns that appeared:

Starting prices often mean small sites. When a package states a page limit, the median is five pages. I took a closer look at the 95 firms whose cheapest website costs less than $1,000. For about a quarter of them, that price buys a single page, a landing page or a pre-made template, not a full website. Another 29 cap their cheapest package at five pages or fewer. One firm advertises websites "starting at $500," but that's a one-page site; anything bigger starts at $995.

Basics can cost extra. The fine print on those cheap packages matters, too. More than a quarter require a monthly fee on top of the build price. Sixteen show a sale or limited-time price. A dozen list things most people would assume are included, like a layout that works on phones, hosting, the ability to edit your own site, or more pages, as paid extras.

A website under $1,000 is often a single page, and the fine print adds up

The words are usually on you. Only 14 of the 209 firms with published website prices say their packages include copywriting. SEO setup (76 firms) and hosting (51) were far more common. If you've never written a website before, that's the part that tends to stall a project.

The bill doesn't always end at launch. About 29 percent of firms with published prices require an ongoing fee for hosting, maintenance or a "care plan."

Monthly plans add up. Thirty firms price their websites only as a monthly subscription, with a median of $199 a month. That's about $7,200 over three years, and the fine print doesn't always make it clear whether you own the site if you stop paying.

Keep in mind these are starting prices, the least you could pay. Even among firms that publish, the median top package is about $2,500. And I'd bet the four in five firms that don't publish charge more, not less. That's based on my experience working in and with other agencies, and seeing lots of website proposals over the years. If you're getting a custom quote, the last presentation slide usually requests a pretty hefty investment.

National research points the same way. In a 2025 survey of 208 web designers by Web Designer Academy, the typical project price was $2,500 to $5,000. At the low end of the market, Thumbtack, where local pros quote smaller jobs, puts the national average at about $1,057. Putting it all together, I think a small business in this area typically pays somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000 for a professionally built website, or about two to four times the median advertised starting price.

Most won't tell you how long it takes, either

Only about 1 in 10 firms say how long a website takes to build. Among those that do, the typical fastest promise is two weeks, and the longer end is usually around six weeks.

Finished, live websites in three days or less are rare. Out of more than 1,000 firms, 11 offer it as their standard, and a few more offer it as a rush option. Most of the fast offers are small starter sites.

What they build with

You don't need to understand the technology behind your website, but it's worth knowing what's under the hood, because it affects how fast your site loads, how easy it is to update and how hard it is to leave.

Here's what I found when I looked at the code behind each firm's own website:

• WordPress runs 60 percent of local web designers' own sites, and about 70 percent of the client sites linked from their portfolios. WordPress powers a huge share of the internet, and it's been around since 2003.
• Page builders sit on top of a lot of it. Elementor runs on 44 percent of those WordPress sites. Page builders make creation and editing easier, but they also add a lot of extra code, making sites slow and complicated to maintain.
• Everything else is a sliver. Custom-coded sites (7 percent), Webflow and Wix (3 percent each), Squarespace (2 percent), and a handful of marketing platforms that bundle a website with their software.

WordPress runs six in 10 local web designers' own websites

Most agencies built their own site the same way they build others, but not all of them. I compared each firm's own website with the sites in its portfolio, and about 1 in 8 did something differently for their own site than for their clients. The most common difference was that agencies custom-build their own site with modern code, then build their clients' sites on WordPress.

Web designers who skip the basics on their own sites

This one surprised (disappointed) me most. I checked each firm's own homepage for basics that any small business website should have: a secure connection, a mobile setup, a page language setting, a search description and the behind-the-scenes code (schema) that tells Google and AI tools who you are and what you do.

About 1 in 3 web designers miss at least one of them on their own site. And 68 firms still have placeholder text ("lorem ipsum," "edit or remove this text") live on their own websites. That's a dead giveaway they're simply not checking their own work.

A third of local web designers miss at least one basic on their own homepage

Takeaways

This research was surprising in some ways, but also helped reinforce some opinions I already had. I was surprised just how many different web designers there are in just this area, but not by how few actually publish prices. I didn't realize how many still focus on WordPress sites, but it makes sense given they've probably been doing it for years and haven't changed to the latest technologies.

Overall, I think it's critical for business owners to understand that there is wild variation in website pricing, as this data makes abundantly clear. Because the real pricing for 4 out of 5 sites is hidden in confidential pitch decks, it's almost impossible to compare comprehensively without requesting hundreds of quotes, and that's just in this local market.

At the very least, I think there are a few things business owners can do with this information:

• Understand that if you get a quote for a $10,000+ website, there better be a good deal of complexity involved. It should either be a giant website, be an unbelievable design, or require lots of custom work, such as integrating with other business systems. For a small business with relatively straightforward needs, $1,000 to $3,000 is very reasonable.
• That said, not every $1,000 website is created equal. You should ask for a specific list of everything it will include baked into it, rather than just assume it'll be taken care of. If they aren't checking boxes for analytics, SEO, UX, accessibility, security, and (if applicable) regulatory compliance, then you should maybe look elsewhere.
• Sometimes more expensive is just more expensive. Many of these firms are offering nearly identical deliverables, just for several thousand dollars more. This could simply be because they're targeting larger businesses that have the budget and feel safer spending $20,000 than $5,000.

Before you sign, ask these questions

Based on what I found, these are the questions I'd ask any web designer, including me:

1. What's the limit on my site's size? About a quarter of the cheapest offers are a single page or a template, and the typical page cap is five. Honestly, page count is a pretty arbitrary way to get to a price. A Contact page doesn't take nearly as long as a detailed About page. But if a package is priced by the page, ask what happens when you need one more.
2. What's included with the build? Get it in writing: copywriting, SEO, accessibility, analytics, security and, if your industry needs it, compliance. Only 14 of 209 firms with published prices include copywriting, and if the words are on you, plan for it, because that's usually what holds up a launch.
3. When will it be live? Nine in 10 firms don't publish a timeline. Get a date in writing.
4. What do I pay after launch, and do I own the site? About 29 percent of firms with published prices require an ongoing fee. At the median $199 a month, a subscription site costs about $7,200 over three years, and only nine firms say plainly on their homepage that you own your site.
5. Can I see live sites you built for real clients? Click through. Demo copies on temporary addresses aren't the same thing.
6. Does your own website get the basics right? A third of local web designers miss at least one on their own site. It takes two minutes to look.

How Mountwell stacks up

To turn the lens on myself, I've tried to structure my own offerings in a way that's different from most of the other agencies out there, in a few key ways:

Mountwell compared with the local market

Compared	Typical local web designer	Mountwell
Published prices	About 1 in 5 publish one	Yes, on our website
Starting price	Median of $1,240, among firms that publish	$500
Getting a quote	Usually after a form or a sales call	The same day as a free 30-minute call
Timeline	9 in 10 don't say; the typical promise is two weeks or more	As fast as a single day, once your content is ready
Built with	WordPress for 6 in 10, often with a page builder	Current tools, not older platforms out of habit
Search, AI and accessibility basics	1 in 3 miss at least one on their own website	Built into every site

As fast as you want to move. If your words, photos and logo are ready, we can build your website in a single day. Not because we skip steps, but because we skip the ones that are only there to make a project feel bigger. In a market where the typical published timeline is two weeks or more, and 9 in 10 firms won't commit to one at all, I think speed is a fair thing to promise.

Fair pricing. Websites start at $500. A simple site should cost what a simple site costs, and the price goes up when the work genuinely gets more complex, like an online store or a lot of custom features. What I won't do is overcomplicate a project to justify a bigger number. And you'll see the price before we start, since we send quotes the same day as our intro call.

Current technology. I don't build on older technology just because it's what I'm used to. Lately I've been building all my sites using a variety of AI tools, which is a big part of why a simple site can be done in a day. Given that most of this market runs on the same platform it did a decade ago, that's a real difference.

The basics, built in. Every site includes search optimization, the setup that helps AI tools like ChatGPT understand and recommend your business (sometimes called GEO), accessibility, privacy and compliance basics, and a layout designed around what your customers actually need to do. Those aren't add-ons or a separate package. They're part of the build, because a third of local web designers are missing at least one of them on their own websites.

How I did it

In November 2026, I searched Google Maps for web designers, website developers and digital marketing agencies across Philadelphia and its four Pennsylvania suburban counties, seven South Jersey counties and all three Delaware counties. That turned up more than 5,000 listings. Many weren't web designers at all (Google fills the gaps with whatever's nearby, including at least one hair salon), so I checked what each one actually sells. That left 1,039 businesses that clearly build websites.

I also compared that list with one I'd compiled earlier from industry directories like Clutch and DesignRush. Only 141 firms showed up in both, so neither source tells the whole story. Combined, I'd estimate roughly 1,300 to 1,500 businesses in the region will build you a website.

I then read the websites of more than 1,100 of those firms, including their services, pricing, process and FAQ pages, plus about 2,500 sites linked from their portfolios. Software did most of the reading, and I checked its work by hand. Platforms were identified from each site's code.

A few caveats: prices are only what firms publish on their own sites, and some hide prices in images or behind forms, so I surely missed a few. It's a snapshot from November 2026, not a definitive survey. But it's a far bigger sample than anything I could find published for this market.