How much does it cost to build and maintain a website? the full cost in 2026.

Building: what you pay once

Creation is the entry cost and the only one that does not repeat: landing pages from €800, brochure sites from €1,500, online shops from €3,000 and web apps from €5,000. What raises the number from those bases is always the same trio: scope (how many pages and contents), functionality (forms, payments, member areas, languages) and who builds it (freelancer, agency or yourself on a platform).

This article does not dig into that bill; the full website pricing guide does that with a table by site type. What matters here is the other half of the question, the one that repeats every month and that guides usually forget: maintaining.

Maintaining: the recurring components, one by one

«Keeping a site online» has four infrastructure components plus one human one. The first four are mandatory for any serious site:

1. Domain (yourbusiness.com): the address, rented by the year, costing around €10 to €15 per year for the common extensions. Watch renewals: the second-year price is not always the first-year price.
2. Hosting: the computer where the site lives. It ranges from limited free plans to servers costing tens of euros per month; most business sites land around €5 to €20/month.
3. SSL certificate (the padlock and https): encrypts traffic and is a prerequisite for trust and ranking. It is free on most hosting plans today; distrust anyone charging it as a mandatory extra.
4. Professional email (you@yourbusiness.com): sometimes included in hosting, sometimes a separate service. It is the smallest component and the most underrated: a free email address on a business card costs customers.
5. Maintenance (the human work): updates, backups, fixes and small content changes. It is a service, not infrastructure, and it costs from €150 to €400/month when hired, or nothing if you do it yourself, with all the risk that implies.

Watch the wording: «keeping the site online» (infrastructure, this section), «keeping the site updated» (maintenance, a service) and «keeping the site visible» (content and marketing, another service still). Anyone selling «maintenance» without saying which of the three is selling ambiguity; the maintenance pricing guide separates what each package usually includes.

The total monthly bill, in three scenarios

Adding the components, the monthly cost of a website reads as three realistic scenarios:

• Simple site, managed yourself: domain plus hosting adds up to around €5 to €30 per month. It is the possible minimum, and the real price appears later, in the hours spent on updates and fixes, and in the cost of a problem nobody saw coming.
• Website by subscription: from €49/month with the initial build included, and domain, hosting, SSL, maintenance and updates all on the same invoice. It is the direct answer to «how much does it cost to build and maintain»: one predictable figure, no renewal surprises; the commitment and ownership terms are published on the website subscription page.
• A growing site with hired maintenance: infrastructure (€5 to €30/month) plus professional maintenance (€150 to €400/month). The format for people who do not want to touch the site and want it to work.

What exists in no scenario: a serious site at zero euros per month. Whoever promises that is hiding the component somewhere: in the free builder ads, in the missing own domain, or in the price of leaving later.

What free plans hide

The search for a «free website with your own domain» returns promises worth reading to the end. What free builders genuinely give: an address of theirs (yourbusiness.platform.com, not yourbusiness.com), platform ads on your site, functionality limits and, often, a narrow exit: exporting content to another platform is possible; exporting the design and structure, almost never.

Your own domain is never free: it is a yearly registry service, and any promise to include it «free» usually means it stays registered in the platform name, not yours. For a student card or a weekend project, a free plan serves. For a business, the real cost of free is lost credibility plus the price of migrating later, and that is always higher than having started right: a domain in your name, your own hosting or a subscription with clear terms.

Who owns the domain? The question that avoids hostage situations

When hiring someone to build the site, people almost always ask what it costs and almost never «whose name are the domain and hosting in». The correct answer is: yours. If the domain, hosting and accounts are registered in the name of whoever built it, your business depends on a phone call to change providers, and that is one of the most expensive contracts there is.

The ownership checklist fits in one line: domain registered to the company, hosting credentials shared with you, a current copy of the site accessible, and the contract stating what happens if you want to leave. In the subscription model, the legitimate question is what happens to the site at the end of the commitment period; in our case a buyout clause makes the site yours, and anyone evaluating subscriptions should demand equivalent transparency from any provider. The article on choosing who builds the site has the full list of questions before hiring.

Renewals: where websites die quietly

• Domain renewal priced differently from year one. Common practice: cheap entry, higher renewal. Always ask for the renewal price, not the entry price.
• Renewal email going to the old inbox. The domain expires because the notice landed in a mailbox nobody opens. Keep a current contact email on the domain registration.
• Who pays renewals when the contract ends. If the provider was paying for hosting and domain, the contract should state in writing who keeps what and how it transfers.
• Renewing one year when you can renew several. A serious domain is renewed two or three years at a time; it costs the same per year and removes a time bomb from the calendar.

None of these traps is technical; all are administrative. And all of them are solved on the day you choose the provider, not on the day the site goes down. The automated audit does not catch renewals, but it catches what failed renewals cause: site down, expired https, broken redirects.