A €300 Website Can Be Very Expensive: What a Small Business Website Should Actually Cost

Published 2026-08-13

A €300 website sounds cheap. Until you realise the only thing it does is exist. It looks decent, has a contact form and a few stock photos, but nobody asked the most important question: what is this website supposed to do for the business?

So, how much does a small business website cost?

The annoying answer is: anywhere from a few hundred euros to several thousand. And both prices can be completely reasonable.

A small local business that needs its opening hours, services and phone number online does not necessarily need a €5,000 website. A company that expects its website to generate leads, rank for valuable searches, explain a complicated offer and connect with its sales process probably needs more than a €300 template.

Those are both called websites. They are not the same product.

That is why asking how much a website should cost without first defining its job is a bit like asking how much a vehicle should cost. A bicycle and a delivery van both get you from A to B. You probably would not choose between them based on price alone.

A €300 website can absolutely be good

This is worth saying clearly because cheap website design is not automatically bad website design.

If you need a simple one-page website, already have your branding, provide the copy and images yourself, do not need custom functionality and only expect a limited number of revisions, €300–€500 can make perfect sense.

Sometimes that is exactly what a new business needs. I understand that position particularly well because I started there myself. Years ago, when I needed my first ecommerce website, I was quoted roughly €2,800. I did not have the budget, so I built it myself.

There is nothing wrong with starting small. The problem starts when a €300 website is sold as if it includes the same thinking, research, implementation and responsibility as a much larger project. It usually does not. And it should not.

The expensive part is often the stuff you cannot see

Putting text, images and buttons on a page has become much easier. WordPress made it easier. Page builders made it easier again. AI has accelerated it dramatically.

Today, somebody with experience can build the visible part of a basic website much faster than five or ten years ago. That is a good thing. But the visible part is only one part of the work.

Before I care about animations, colours or whether the corners of your buttons should be slightly more rounded, I want to know what the business sells, who the ideal customer is, why they should choose this company, what action the visitor should take, which pages should exist, what objections stop enquiries and which services deserve their own landing pages.

None of those questions requires exotic technology. They require understanding the business. That is usually where the value starts.

AI made website development faster. It did not make experience worthless.

I use AI heavily myself. Pretending it has not changed website development would be ridiculous.

Work that once took days can sometimes be done in hours. Code can be generated faster. Problems can be debugged faster. Initial layouts can be explored faster. Research can be accelerated. That efficiency should benefit the client.

If something genuinely takes me ten hours today instead of thirty, I do not think the answer is to pretend I spent thirty hours on it.

But there is another extreme that makes equally little sense: if AI helped build it quickly, professional website work should now be almost free.

AI gives an experienced person leverage. It does not give an inexperienced person fifteen years of experience. Somebody still has to decide what to build, what not to build, whether the output is correct and whether it solves the original problem.

AI can generate a website very quickly. It can also generate the wrong website very quickly.

Your website is not five pages

This is probably my biggest issue with website packages: 'Five-page website: €399.' Okay. But why five?

Maybe you need three. Maybe you need twelve. Maybe one of your services deserves four pages because people search for four completely different problems. Maybe your About page barely matters, while a proper case-study page could help close deals.

Starting with a number of pages means defining the solution before properly defining the problem.

My website building process starts with one question: what is the goal of the website? Then we decide what needs to exist to reach it. The number of pages is an output of that process, not the strategy.

Design comes later than most people think

Good design matters. People judge businesses quickly, and a website that looks neglected can absolutely hurt trust.

But a beautiful website with unclear positioning is still unclear. A beautiful website with no obvious next step still loses leads. A beautiful website nobody can find is still invisible. And a beautiful website that gets traffic but gives you no idea what visitors are doing leaves you guessing.

This is why I treat design as part of a wider system: structure first, message next, user journey, search visibility, tracking, conversion points, then make the whole thing look good.

Not because design is unimportant. Because design has a job too.

SEO, analytics and conversion tracking are not black magic

Setting up Google Search Console is not difficult. Installing analytics is not difficult. Writing a meta title is not difficult. Making sure a page can be indexed is not difficult.

Individually, most of these things are not rocket science. That misses the point.

A professional website consists of dozens of things that individually may be simple but need to work together. The value is not in making Google Analytics sound complicated. The value is in knowing that it should be configured correctly before you start making decisions from the data.

The same applies to SEO. Basic technical SEO should be part of a properly built website. Ongoing SEO, content development, ranking analysis and conversion optimisation are different jobs that continue after launch. But the website needs a solid foundation for any of that work to be useful later.

A website launch is the beginning, not the finish line

This is another reason two website quotes can be impossible to compare. One provider builds the site, sends you the login and says goodbye. Another checks indexing after launch, submits the sitemap, verifies tracking, watches for errors and helps you understand what visitors actually do.

The pages might look almost identical on launch day. The service is not identical.

A website only starts producing useful data once real people begin using it. That is when you learn whether people understand the offer, whether they click the CTA, where they leave, what they search for and which pages actually generate enquiries.

That information should eventually influence the website. Otherwise you are not optimising anything. You are decorating and hoping.

When should you choose the cheaper website?

Choose the cheaper option when the scope is genuinely simple: you are just starting, mainly need credibility, most customers already know you before visiting the website, you have your copy and branding ready, you do not depend heavily on organic search and you do not need complicated integrations.

There is nothing wrong with buying the digital equivalent of a business card when a business card is what you need. In fact, paying €5,000 for it would probably be the worse decision.

When does paying more make sense?

Pay more when the website has more responsibility: it needs to generate leads, organic search matters, several services compete for different keywords, the messaging needs work, you need custom integrations, tracking matters or the customer journey is complicated.

If losing one good lead costs more than the difference between the cheap and professional build, the calculation changes quickly.

At that point you are no longer paying somebody simply to make a website. You are paying them to solve a business problem using a website.

The cheapest website can be the most expensive one

Imagine two options. Website A costs €300 and generates nothing. Website B costs €2,000 and brings in one additional €1,000 customer every month. Which one was expensive?

Upfront price is easy to compare because it is visible. Opportunity cost is harder because nobody sends you an invoice for the enquiries you never received. That does not make it less real.

This is why I would never recommend choosing a website provider based primarily on price. I also would not recommend automatically choosing the most expensive proposal.

Ask what you are actually getting. Ask what is not included. Ask who is responsible for copy. Ask what happens with SEO. Ask how results will be tracked. Ask what happens after launch.

And most importantly, ask the person building it: what do you think this website should actually do for my business? Their answer will tell you considerably more than the number at the bottom of the quote.

The real question is not 'How much does a website cost?'

It is: how much website does your business actually need?

A €300 website can be excellent value. A €10,000 website can be a complete waste of money. And the opposite can also be true.

Price does not tell you whether a website is good. Its job does. Define that first, then decide what it is worth paying to get it right.

If you are unsure what level of website your business actually needs, see how I approach website projects or get in touch and I will tell you what I would prioritise before you spend money on the build.