In Italy a brochure website built by a professional costs between €300 and €5,000, and an online shop from €2,000 to over €15,000: those are the extremes quoted by the 10 Italian pages on Google's first page for "quanto costa un sito web" (how much does a website cost), which we read on 28 October 2026. On top of that come hosting, domain, licences and cookie consent, which recur every year and which, for hosting, can cost more than five times the launch price from year two.
Put simply: for the same brochure site, the first-page pages quote prices that differ by a factor of 16.
UK guides show the same spread. Ubie Websites, a UK pay-monthly provider, puts a five to ten page site at £500 to £3,000 from a freelancer and £2,500 to £10,000 from an agency, before VAT (October 2026).
And the build price is only the first line of the bill.
When a business asks us what a website costs, it usually already has two or three quotes and compares the figure at the bottom. The mistakes we see most often are three:
- comparing the build cost rather than the cost of the first three years;
- looking at the first-year fee, which is almost always an introductory price;
- not asking whether lead tracking is included, the item that tells you whether the site works.
The third one costs the most, and we know it first hand.
For Scovaventi we rebuilt on Shopify an online shop that got visits but no sales, with Google Analytics 4 live from day one: €77,000 in sales in the first year, with a €190 average basket. Before the project neither Tag Manager nor GA4 was set up, so nobody knew where orders were being lost.
At Valore Solare it was the other way round: the account counted 15,267 "conversions" in a month against 5,467 clicks. They were technical site events, not quote requests.
What does that have to do with the price of a website?
Everything, because that item is often missing from the quote. In this guide you will find:
- the figures from 10 first-page pages, in a single table;
- prices by type of site, from landing page to online shop;
- what year two costs, with renewal prices read on the official pages;
- the items quotes leave out and the three-year cost of a site;
- 8 questions to ask before you sign.
Let's start.
How much a website costs according to 10 first-page pages (from €300 to €5,000 for the same brochure site)
On 28 October 2026 we read the 10 pages Google shows on its first page, on mobile in Italy, for "quanto costa un sito web", plus the AI Overview at the top of the results. For each one we noted the update date and the prices quoted for a brochure site, an online shop and yearly costs. We left out Quora, which gives no price, and added the Shopify and SiteGround pages cited by the AI Overview.
| Page (Italian market) | Updated | Brochure site | Online shop | Yearly costs quoted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Protocolli Creativi | May 2022 | €1,620-2,800 (15 pages) | from €2,000, bespoke from €5,000 | fee €100-150 |
| Ivemind | Jul 2026 | €2,500-4,000 | €5,000-15,000 | maintenance €250-1,000 |
| Viasetti | not stated | €300-3,000 | not stated | no compulsory fee |
| Pitv | Jun 2025 | from €1,000-2,000 | not stated | domain €10-60 |
| SOS WP | Jan 2025 | not stated | €170-360 DIY | hosting €107-348 + VAT |
| Genesi | Nov 2023 | from €400 + VAT | a few hundred to over €3,000 | domain and hosting about €100 |
| CreaCity | Oct 2026 | €1,500-2,500 (semi-custom), €3,000-5,000 (bespoke) | sent to another page | maintenance €240-480 (semi-custom) |
| Marketingmaster | Nov 2022 | no price | no price | domain CHF 15-20 |
| Shopify Italia | Sep 2026 | small businesses €1,000-50,000 | €500-10,000 | hosting €5-250 a month |
| SiteGround Italia | Sep 2026 | builder €10-30 a month, custom €100-180 an hour | not stated | domain €12-60 |
| Google AI Overview | 28 Oct 2026 | €500-3,000 | €2,000-10,000 and up | maintenance €500-600 |
Five things stand out when you read the table top to bottom.
- The cheapest brochure site is €300, the most expensive €5,000. Both figures describe the same product: a few pages, a contact form, a company domain.
- All 10 pages are published by companies that sell websites, hosting or platforms. None is a neutral source, including the one you are reading.
- 3 of the 10 pages have not been updated since 2023 or earlier, in a market where hosting and platform fees change every year.
- Only Ivemind works out a multi-year cost: about €3,565 in year one and about €965 a year after that, for its brochure-site example.
- None puts a price on setting up conversion tracking, and only 2 mention the cookie consent banner.
So which figure is right?
The one that matches what the site has to do. That is why the next table starts from the type of site, not the price.
Prices by type of site (landing page, brochure, company site, online shop)
The type of site moves the price more than any other variable, because it changes how many pages need designing and writing and which functions need connecting (payments, CRM, languages). These are the ranges in the Italian pages we read, by type.
| Type of site | What it usually includes | Range in the pages read | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page or one-pager | one page, one form | €300-940 | Viasetti, Protocolli Creativi |
| Brochure site | 5-10 pages, contact | €300-5,000 | table above |
| Company site | 15-30 pages, blog, several languages | €2,500-8,000 | CreaCity, Ivemind |
| Online shop | catalogue, payments, shipping | €2,000-15,000 | Protocolli Creativi, Ivemind |
| DIY WordPress shop | theme and plugins, your own copy | €170-360 in year one | SOS WP |
Then there is who builds it, the second variable. A builder such as Squarespace costs €12 to €69 a month on annual billing, according to its Italian pricing page checked on 28 October 2026; Shopify starts at €19 a month (€27 billed monthly), according to Shopify's Italian pricing page. With a builder you don't pay for development, you pay with your time.
A freelancer, a web agency and a software house work on different projects at different rates: the comparison is in our guide to web agency vs software house. If you are weighing up DIY, we measured what WordPress does for SEO out of the box.
A note on online shops. According to Istat, the Italian statistics office, only 14.7% of Italian businesses sold online in 2025. If you sell to other businesses and rely on quote requests, your site is usually not a shop: it is a site that has to generate leads, and it is designed differently (see our guide to the B2B website).
And if you sell in several countries, the cost rises with each language. Bosatta had an online shop on an outdated CMS that could not handle different languages and currencies: after we rebuilt the purchase journey and split campaigns for consumers and dealers, €240,000 in sales in a year across four markets.
Why year two costs more (launch prices vs renewals)
Hosting, domains and licences are almost always sold with an entry price for the first period, then renewed at full list price. We opened the official pages on 28 October 2026 and lined up both prices.
| Item | First period | Renewal | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SiteGround StartUp hosting (Italy) | €2.99 a month | €15.99 a month | SiteGround, excl. VAT |
| SiteGround GrowBig hosting (Italy) | €5.49 a month | €27.99 a month | SiteGround, excl. VAT |
| .ch domain (Switzerland) | CHF 5 in year one | CHF 15 a year | Hostpoint, incl. VAT |
| Astra Pro + AI theme | $99 in year one | $149 a year | Astra |
| Shopify (Italy) | €1 a month for 3 months | from €19 a month (annual) | Shopify |
On SiteGround's StartUp plan year one costs €35.88 and year two €191.88 (excluding VAT): the renewal is 5.3 times the launch price.
It is written on the page. But if you compare two quotes on the first-year fee, you are comparing two discounts.
What about the domain?
SiteGround includes it free for the first year with its hosting plans; Hostpoint charges CHF 5 for a .ch in year one and CHF 15 from year two. The figure hardly matters. What matters is whose name it is registered in: if the domain belongs to whoever built the site, changing supplier becomes a negotiation.
The items quotes leave out (and you pay for anyway)
The items most often missing from quotes are four: tracking and consent, copy and photos, migration from an existing site, and sales fees. On WordPress you can add yearly theme and plugin licences (Astra Pro alone costs $69 a year). They are not optional extras: if you don't pay for them at the start, you pay later.
Conversion tracking and cookie consent
If you use Google Analytics or Google Ads, Google's EU user consent policy applies to users in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland: you need valid consent for cookies and for ad personalisation, and proof that you collected it. A consent banner is cheap: the Essentials plan from iubenda is €4.99 a month on annual billing, excluding VAT, up to 25,000 page views a month.
The real cost is setting it up properly. When we prepare a quote for a site that has to bring in leads, the "tracking" item has five lines: Tag Manager, GA4, Search Console, form conversions and a consent platform. Without those lines the site works, but you don't know how many enquiries it brings. How consent connects to Google is covered in our guide to Consent Mode v2; the service is on our tracking and analytics page.
Copy and photos
Almost every quote assumes the client writes the copy. Ivemind estimates €50-150 per page for a copywriter and at least €200-500 for a photo shoot; Genesi quotes about €600 for photos of a small business. In the UK, Ubie Websites puts copywriting at £50 to £150 a page.
Migration from an existing site
If you rebuild a site that already exists, every URL that changes needs a redirect, or you lose the rankings you have earned. Redesigns are covered in website redesign and SEO; a platform change, like the one we did on visilay.com moving from Elementor to our own theme and from WPML to our own plugin, is in the guide to website migration SEO.
Sales fees
On an online shop the platform fee is not the only fixed cost. On its Italian page Shopify charges online card fees from 1.9% + €0.25, Squarespace from 2.0% + €0.25. On a €190 basket, like Scovaventi's, that is at least €3.86 per order: with 100 orders a month the fees overtake the yearly fee of the Basic plan in under a month. And an online shop today also has to deal with accessibility.
You pay for the site once. You pay for bad tracking every month.
At Valore Solare the account counted 15,267 "conversions" in a month from 5,467 clicks, and none of them was a quote request. When we build a site, tracking, consent and conversions are in the quote line by line: from day one you know how many enquiries it brings and where they come from.
Book a strategy callWhat a website costs over three years (four scenarios with prices checked on 28 October 2026)
The three-year cost of a website is build plus fees plus renewals: it is the number to compare between two quotes. We worked out four scenarios using the prices on the official Italian pages and the ranges quoted by the first-page pages.
| Scenario | Year 1 | Years 2 and 3 | 3-year total | What is left out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Builder: Squarespace Core, annual | €216 | €432 | €648 | copy, photos, your time |
| Online shop: Shopify Basic, annual | €228 | €456 | €684 | fees from 1.9% + €0.25 per order, apps |
| DIY WordPress: SiteGround StartUp + iubenda Essentials | €95.76 | €503.52 | €599.28 + VAT | premium theme, plugins, your time |
| Site built by an agency (Italy) | €1,500-5,000 + maintenance | €240-1,000 a year maintenance | about €2,200-8,000 | hosting, copy if not included |
The sum says one thing clearly: over three years the cheapest DIY route costs about €600, an agency-built site €2,200 and up. For the UK, Ubie Websites puts three-year totals at £500 to £1,000 for a builder and £5,000 to £16,000 for an agency.
So why not do it yourself?
Because the fee is not the cost that hurts. A site that brings no enquiries is. On 45 local business sites we counted 10 signs you can spot in 5 minutes. If the site is there but the leads are not, the diagnosis starts with the ones that arrive and get lost.
How to read a quote line by line (8 questions to ask before you sign)
A quote is easy to read when every line says what you get, who does it and what it costs after year one. These are the eight questions we get clients to ask when they compare offers, ours included.
- Is the domain registered to your company? If not, ask for it to be before launch.
- Are the hosting, Analytics, Search Console and Google Ads accounts yours? You should be able to hand them to another supplier without asking permission.
- Who writes the copy, and for how many pages? It is the item that moves time and cost the most.
- How many languages are included? For a Swiss business or an exporter, the second language is not a detail.
- Are conversion tracking and the consent banner included? If the answer is "we'll do it later", it won't get done.
- What does year two cost? Hosting, licences and maintenance, at renewal price.
- If the site already exists, who handles redirects? You need an old URL to new URL map.
- What does a change cost after delivery? CreaCity quotes €30-60 an hour for a semi-custom site and €40-80 for a bespoke one. In the UK, check whether the supplier charges VAT: registration is compulsory above £90,000 of taxable turnover, according to GOV.UK.
How we work is on our website development page: a line-by-line quote, a site you own, live in 6-8 weeks. The technical decisions worth making before you start are in our guide to building an SEO-friendly website.
How much a website has to earn to be worth its cost (start from the enquiries)
A business website is worth its cost if the enquiries it brings pay for the build and the fees within a time the business accepts. The right price comes from there, not from a price list.
Take Contesini Consulenze: a new landing page, tracking and local campaigns brought 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, with 68% becoming a sales opportunity.
The sum works like this: if a new client leaves you €3,000 of margin, a €6,000 site over three years pays for itself with two clients. If in three years it doesn't bring even one, the price was not the problem.
This is where the site stops being a separate line. The traffic that makes it pay comes from SEO and campaigns: for an online shop, from Google Ads Shopping and Performance Max; in B2B, from the channels in our guide to B2B marketing strategies.
Websites and AI answers: do you need an extra line in the quote? (no, but it changes what you write)
No: Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet (Google Search Central). A separate "AI optimisation" line in a quote should be explained item by item.
It does change what you write. On the Italian results page of 28 October 2026, the AI Overview for "quanto costa un sito web" cited 10 sources and none of the 9 organic results below it: 4 were platform pages (SiteGround, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace), 2 were YouTube Shorts. Almost all the cited pages had one thing in common: price ranges written in the text, next to the type of site. A site that states its numbers plainly (timelines, what is included, cases with results) gives AI something to quote; we measured which domains ChatGPT and AI Overviews choose in our test on AI cited sources.
Frequently asked questions
It depends: across the 10 Italian first-page pages we read on 28 October 2026, a professionally built brochure site costs €300 to €5,000, with most ranges overlapping between €1,500 and €3,000. In the UK, Ubie Websites puts a five to ten page site at £500 to £3,000 from a freelancer, before VAT.
It depends: a DIY WordPress site needs about €250 a year for hosting at renewal price plus a consent banner (SiteGround StartUp and iubenda Essentials, excluding VAT). Agency maintenance in the Italian pages ranges from €240 to €1,000 a year.
Yes. With a builder such as Squarespace or Shopify you start at €12-19 a month on annual billing on their Italian pages. Copy, photos, tracking and the time to learn the platform are still on you.
It depends: SiteGround includes it free for the first year with hosting, then it renews separately. More than the price, what matters is that the domain is registered to your company, not to whoever built the site.
It depends: it can do for a single page with contact details. A site that has to bring in enquiries usually lacks copy written for searches, conversion tracking and a consent banner, which you then pay for separately.
No, rarely in full. It usually covers basic technical SEO (CreaCity puts it at €150-400 on a semi-custom site); work on content and rankings is a separate, ongoing service.
Summary
Brochure site: €300 to €5,000. Online shop: €2,000 to over €15,000 (Italian first page).
All 10 first-page pages are written by companies that sell websites or platforms.
Hosting renewal can cost 5.3 times the launch price.
Tracking and consent are the items most often missing, and the ones that cost most when they are.
Over three years: about €600 DIY, €2,200 and up for an agency-built site.
There is one question almost nobody asks when requesting a quote: what will it cost to change the site in a year. Adding a language, a service page, a new form. A site that is cheap to build and expensive to change ends up standing still, and a site that stands still stops bringing enquiries long before it looks old. Ask for the hourly rate for changes along with the price: it is the number that tells you how far the site can grow with the business.
