How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026? A Los Angeles Answer

There are four ways to get a website, and each has its own price band. The bands overlap, which is why the question feels impossible to answer. Here is the short version, with the sources under it.

Levitate’s 2026 cost survey puts the typical small business site between $2,000 and $8,000, with advanced builds reaching $15,000 or more. Clutch’s pricing guide, drawn from reviewed projects, says most web design projects on its platform cost under $10,000 even though agency work spans $2,000 to $100,000.

The most useful local number comes from Sunlight Media, a Los Angeles studio that published its own 2026 contracts. Eight WordPress sites ran from $2,250 to $16,000 with a median of $3,600. The one custom web application in the set was $55,000. A behavioral health practice paid $2,250. A hospital foundation paid $12,500. Same city, same studio, six times the price, because the work was different.

Wix has four paid plans: Light at $17, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159 a month. Wix’s own plans page says the displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, so the $17 plan is a $204 charge on day one. Squarespace runs Basic at $19, Core at $29, Plus at $49 and Advanced at $99 a month on annual billing, or $25 to $139 month to month.

The subscription covers hosting, a template, SSL and usually the first year of a domain. It does not cover the part that costs the most: your evenings. Someone still has to write every page, find photos, place the phone number, connect the Google Business Profile and set up the form. Owners who go this route tend to underestimate that by weeks, and the half-finished site stays half-finished because the plumbing business does not stop.

There is also an exit cost. Wix’s help center says a Wix site must run on Wix’s servers and cannot be moved to another host. Squarespace exports layout pages, blog posts and text blocks to an XML file but not store pages, style settings or custom CSS. A builder site is a subscription, not an asset, and the price should be read that way.

A builder is the right call for a one-person business with time, no rush, and no need for booking or payments. It is the wrong call when the site has to bring in calls this month.

Clutch lists 1,648 web design companies for Los Angeles. The most common hourly band among the top-listed firms is $100 to $149, with some at $150 to $199. Minimum project sizes start at $1,000 for a few and $5,000 or $10,000 for most. Clutch’s pricing guide notes that agencies designing on builders like Wix, WordPress and Squarespace charge far less, around $25 to $49 an hour, while offshore teams in India and the Philippines come in under $25.

Webment Digital’s 2026 Los Angeles guide breaks the market into tiers: a basic business site of one to five pages at $1,500 to $3,000, a small business site at $3,000 to $6,000, a custom site at $6,000 to $15,000, and e-commerce at $8,000 to $25,000. By industry it lists restaurants at $1,500 to $4,000, healthcare and law firms at $3,000 to $8,000, and real estate at $4,000 to $12,000.

Freelancers are cheaper because there is one person and no overhead. Levitate puts a typical freelancer build at $500 to $5,000, with a premium freelancer at $5,000 to $10,000. The trade is risk. One person gets sick, takes a full-time job or stops answering, and the timeline is whatever their other clients leave over. Ask who owns the files before the deposit clears, because that question is where freelancer projects go wrong.

An agency buys you a team, a process and a person to call. It also buys you their rent. A small business paying $8,000 for a five-page brochure site is paying for account management it will use twice.

Price follows the feature list, not the look. Six things move it.

• Pages. Webment’s Los Angeles bands go from $1,500 to $3,000 for one to five pages to $12,000 and up past thirty. Every page needs copy, and copy is labor.
• Booking. Calendly has a free plan and a Standard plan at $10 a seat per month, so the tool is cheap. The work is wiring it to the right service and the right calendar. Sitesmith includes a booking embed in every Standard build and prices it at $100 as an add-on to a site we did not build.
• Payments and e-commerce. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic card transaction. Shopify Basic is $29 a month on an annual plan, $39 monthly, at the same card rate. A real store with product pages and a cart is custom work. Levitate puts agency e-commerce at $15,000 to $60,000 and up. Sitesmith scopes e-commerce inside the Signature tier and quotes it after a call.
• Integrations. Jobber, Housecall Pro, Square, a CRM, a review platform. Each connection is a few hours if it has been done before and a day if it has not.
• Copy and photos. WebFX lists copywriting at $60 to $300 a page. Sitesmith writes the copy from your reviews and services before the first call, which is why the price does not move for it.
• Custom design. A template adapted to you is fast. A design from a blank page is not, and that is most of the gap between a $3,000 site and a $15,000 one.

The build is one bill. These four arrive every year for as long as the site is up.

Add them up for a modest site on a freelancer build: roughly $12 for the domain, $192 to $252 for hosting, $84 per mailbox for email and $600 to $1,800 for maintenance. That is $900 to $2,300 a year before anyone touches the site, and it is the number most owners are not told.

Sitesmith folds hosting, SSL, backups and fixes into the lease at $49 a month, or into a care plan at $25, $49 or $99 a month if you own the build. The domain is registered to you either way and renews in your account, not ours.

Two tiers, each sold two ways. Standard is $500 down and $49 a month to lease, or from $1,500 to own. Signature is $1,500 down and $99 a month, or from $2,500 to own. Owning includes the first month of care, then $49 a month on Standard or $99 on Signature unless you cancel.

• Up to five pages, designed and written for you from your business, your reviews and your services
• Built before the first meeting, live the same day you approve it
• Contact form that texts your phone, click-to-call, booking embed and a service-area map
• Google Business Profile, Search Console, LocalBusiness schema and a live Google Reviews widget
• Domain, hosting and analytics connected, plus two revision rounds
• Signature adds Yelp, Bing Places and Apple Maps listings, review request texts, an online payment link and custom features scoped to your business

The lease can become a purchase at any time. Your deposit comes off the price, so the buyout is $1,000 from either tier. Monthly payments cover hosting and maintenance and do not count toward it. If you stop paying on a lease, the site comes down and you keep your domain, your content and your Google Business Profile.

You do not pay before you see it. The site is built first, with your name on it, and you approve it or walk away owing nothing.

Match the spend to the job the site has to do, and nothing more.

1. If the site has to make the phone ring: a plumber in Glendale, a painter in Long Beach, a chiropractor in Pasadena. Five pages, a big phone number, reviews and a service area. That is a $1,500 to $3,500 site anywhere in Los Angeles, and Sitesmith’s Standard tier is built for it.
2. If the site has to book and take money: a med spa in Irvine, a fitness studio in Santa Ana, a caterer with deposits. Booking, payments, listings and review automation. That is the $2,500 to $6,000 range, and Signature covers it.
3. If the site is the business: a store with hundreds of products, a portal with logins, a marketplace. That is custom work in the five figures, quoted after scoping, and it belongs with a team that has built one before.

Three questions to ask any quote. What is the total in year one, including domain, hosting, email and maintenance? Who owns the domain, the files and the Google Business Profile when we part ways? What happens to the price if I add a page or a booking form later? A vendor who answers all three plainly is worth more than one who beats the price.