Websites

How much does a website cost in 2026? Real prices, line by line

Real 2026 website prices in Canadian dollars: builder plans, freelancers, agencies, e-commerce, bilingual sites and the yearly costs nobody quotes upfront.

October 21, 20268 min read

A small-business website in Canada costs anywhere from about $300 a year on a do-it-yourself builder to $3,000 to $8,000 for a simple custom site from an agency, and $10,000 or more once you add online sales, a second language done properly, or custom features. Then come the running costs: domain, hosting, email and maintenance, which add roughly $300 to $4,000 a year depending on how much you hand off. The rest of this article breaks those numbers down line by line, so you can tell a fair quote from a padded one.

All prices below are in Canadian dollars unless marked US$, and come from current price pages and Canadian pricing guides listed at the end.

The price ranges by type of site

These are market ranges, not quotes. Where a site lands inside a range depends on the drivers in the next section.

Builder site you set up yourself: $0 to $500 one-time, plus a monthly plan.
Landing page for one offer (freelancer or agency): $250 to $1,500.
Brochure site of 5 to 8 pages (freelancer): $1,500 to $5,000.
Custom small-business site (agency): $3,000 to $8,000.
Larger business site with many service pages (agency): $8,000 to $25,000.
Online store (freelancer or agency): $5,000 to $60,000 and up.
Client portal or web application (agency or developers): $15,000 to $50,000 and up.

Two things stand out. First, the ranges overlap a lot, because "website" covers very different jobs. Second, most real projects sit toward the bottom: Clutch, which collects verified client reviews of agencies, reports that most web design projects reviewed on its platform cost less than US$10,000, even though its average is pulled much higher by large builds.

What actually drives the price

When two quotes for "a website" differ by $10,000, one of these lines is almost always the reason.

Number of unique page templates

Agencies price by design work, not by page count alone. Ten service pages that share one layout cost far less than ten pages that each need their own design. Ask how many templates the quote includes.

Who writes the words

Copywriting is the line most often left out of cheap quotes. If you supply the text, you save money but the project waits on you. Professional copy for a small site is commonly quoted between $1,000 and $5,000 in Quebec market guides.

A second language

A bilingual site is not "the same site twice," but it is close in effort: every page, form, error message and email confirmation needs a second version, plus the technical setup that lets Google show the right language to the right person (hreflang tags). Quebec guides put multilingual work at 50% to 100% of the base cost. Translation alone typically runs about $0.15 to $0.40 a word in Canada, so a 6,000-word site can cost $900 to $2,400 to translate before anyone touches the design.

Custom design versus a template

A theme or template gets you live faster and cheaper. Custom design costs more but fits your content, loads lighter and is easier to adapt later. Clutch reports that agencies working mainly with builders like Wix, WordPress, Squarespace or Shopify typically charge US$25 to US$49 an hour, while shortlisted agencies in Canada and the US typically charge US$100 to US$149 an hour. That gap explains most price differences between quotes.

Features beyond pages

Each of these adds real work: online booking, online payments, a product catalogue, a members area, a careers portal, a quote calculator, or a connection to your CRM. Ask for each one to be priced as its own line.

Moving an old site

Redesigns cost more than people expect, because someone has to map every old address to a new one so you don't lose what Google already ranks. Skipping redirects is the most expensive way to save money on a website.

Builder plans: what you pay to do it yourself

If you build it yourself, the real cost is the monthly plan plus your time.

Squarespace lists CA$21, CA$32 and CA$46 a month on annual billing for its Basic, Core and Plus plans. The Basic plan charges a 2% fee on store sales; Core and up remove it.
Shopify, for an online store, lists CA$37 a month for Basic and CA$99 for Grow on annual billing, with online card rates from 2.8% + 30¢ on Basic.
Wix shows its plans in US dollars "for reference only" and says prices vary by location, so check the final price on its checkout page.
GoDaddy estimates builder plans at about $170 to $336 a year in its 2026 Canadian guide.

A builder is the right choice when you are testing an idea, have one simple service, or have more time than budget. It stops being the right choice when you need two languages done properly, many local service pages, or the site is your main source of leads and you need full control over speed and tracking.

Freelancer or agency

A freelancer is often the best value for a straightforward brochure site, especially one built on a theme. The trade-offs: one person's availability, one person's skill set, and a bigger risk if they disappear. An agency costs more because you get a designer, a developer, someone handling SEO basics, and continuity. For a site with several services, two languages, ad landing pages and tracking, that coordination is usually what you are paying for.

If you are comparing providers right now, our guide on how to choose a web design agency lists the questions that expose most of the differences.

The yearly costs, line by line

The build is a one-time cost. These keep coming every year.

Domain name (.ca or .com): $15 to $30 a year. Watch for first-year promotions. GoDaddy advertises .ca and .com domains from one cent for the first year on a three-year term; the renewal price is what matters.
Hosting: $120 to $1,200 a year. Simple sites run happily on $10 to $20 a month. Online stores and busy sites need more.
SSL certificate: usually free with hosting. Advanced certificates run $50 to $300 a year, and most small businesses don't need one.
Builder plan, if you use one: about $250 to $1,300 a year.
Business email: from about $110 per user a year. Google Workspace lists Business Starter at CA$9.20 per user per month. A free Gmail address on your business card costs nothing but looks it.
Maintenance plan: $600 to $3,600 a year. It covers updates, backups, security patches and small edits. A WordPress site with many plugins needs it; a simple static site needs far less. Ask what is included and how many hours of changes a month you get.
Plugins, fonts and form tools: $0 to a few hundred dollars a year.

A realistic total for a small service business with a custom site: about $300 to $1,000 a year if you only need hosting, domain and email, and $1,500 to $5,000 if you also pay for maintenance and regular changes.

What a fair quote looks like

A quote you can compare should list, at minimum:

The number of pages and the number of distinct layouts.
Who writes and translates the content.
Each feature as its own line (forms, booking, store, integrations).
What is included for SEO basics: titles, descriptions, sitemap, redirects.
Analytics and conversion tracking setup.
Hosting, and who owns the hosting account and the domain.
The number of revision rounds.
Support after launch: how long, and what it costs after that.

If a quote is one line ("Website: $4,500"), ask for this breakdown. A provider who can't give it is guessing.

When to spend less

Spending more is not always the smart move. Keep it cheap when:

You are not yet sure what you sell or to whom. A one-page site and a Google Business Profile will teach you more than a $15,000 build.
Most of your clients come from referrals and only check that you exist. A clean three-page site with your phone number, services and reviews does the job.
You can't commit time to content. A custom site with placeholder text performs worse than a simple site with real words.

Spend more when the website is where strangers decide whether to call you, when you serve customers in two languages, or when you plan to send paid ad traffic to it. In those cases the site is a sales tool, and a weak one costs more in lost enquiries than the build ever saved.

A real example of what drives scope

DC Maintenance, a Quebec cleaning company in business since 1990, came to us with a site that hadn't changed since 2014: ten hand-maintained pages across two languages, built on 2010-era code and not adapted to phones. The rebuild became 28 pages in French and English, each with proper language tags, the company's first sitemap and a page per service. That jump from 10 to 28 pages is typical: once each service and each language gets its own page so it can rank, scope grows, and so does the price. You can see the result in the DC Maintenance case study.

How PNE prices a website

At PNE Solutions, our website design projects are custom-built (no templates), bilingual when you need it, and usually take three to six weeks. Every quote is itemized against the scope above, includes analytics and on-page SEO setup, and you own the site, domain and accounts once the final payment is made. We give a firm number after a short call, because the honest answer to "how much" depends on the lines in this article.