In 2026, a website in India costs roughly 15,000 to 75,000 rupees on a template built by a freelancer or a small agency, 2 to 5 lakh for a business site designed and built for you, and 5 to 12 lakh for the marketing site of a product or a funded company. A store, or anything a customer signs into, is priced as its own kind of project. Those are wide bands, and the width is the point of this article. The same ten-page brief will come back with quotes from 30,000 to 6 lakh, and most guides explain the gap with a word like "quality". It has arithmetic behind it, and once you can see the arithmetic you can read any quote.
Two things this guide is not. It is not an ecommerce guide: a store has catalogue, payment and fulfilment problems that a marketing site does not, and the decision between a platform and a custom build is in Shopify vs custom ecommerce. And it is not a web app guide: the moment a customer signs in and sees their own data, you are building software, and the ranges for that are in our SaaS development cost guide. This article is about the site that tells people who you are and gets them to call.
The quick-reference table
| What you are building | What it includes | Typical range (INR) | Typical range (USD) | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Template site | 5 to 10 pages on a WordPress, Wix or Framer template, your logo and copy dropped in, a contact form, basic hosting | 15,000 to 75,000 | $180 to $900 | 1 to 3 weeks |
| Custom business site | 8 to 15 pages designed for you, a content management system, forms wired to your inbox or CRM, analytics, metadata and structured data, redirects from the old site | 2 to 5 lakh | $2,400 to $6,000 | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Product or company marketing site | A design system, 15 to 40 pages, a blog, case studies, integrations with CRM, booking and chat, performance and accessibility work, sometimes several languages | 5 to 12 lakh | $6,000 to $14,000 | 8 to 14 weeks |
| Online store | A platform store with a custom theme 2 to 6 lakh, a headless storefront 8 to 20 lakh | 2 to 20 lakh | $2,400 to $24,000 | 6 to 20 weeks |
| Web app or customer portal | Anything with sign-in and per-user data: a lean MVP 4 to 10 lakh, a sellable first version 12 to 35 lakh | 4 to 35 lakh | $4,800 to $42,000 | 8 to 20 weeks |
The market's own numbers sit below the second row. Across the agency guides that rank for this query, a "dynamic business website" is 30,000 to 90,000, and most Indian businesses are said to spend 25,000 to 1.5 lakh. Those figures are real, and they describe the first row with more pages on it. The second row is a different product with a similar name, and the rest of this article is about the difference.
Why the same brief gets quotes from 30,000 to 6 lakh
A template site sells you a theme's decisions. Someone else chose the layout, the type, the spacing and the sections, and the work is to pour your words and pictures into those shapes. That is a few days of a person's time, and the quote reflects it honestly.
A custom site sells you your own decisions, made and tested. Someone works out what each page has to get a visitor to do, structures the words before anyone draws a box, designs each page for a phone and a desktop, builds components the team can reuse, models the content so the marketing team can edit without a developer, sets up the metadata and the structured data that search engines read, maps every old URL to a new one so the rankings survive the relaunch, and tests the result on real devices. That is four to six weeks of two or three people, and the quote reflects that too.
Both quotes are honest. The mistake is comparing them as if they were for the same thing.
Where the money goes: a worked estimate
Tier tables hide the arithmetic, so here is an estimate for a concrete site. Take a ten-page site for a services company, a logistics firm, a clinic group or a manufacturer: home, about, four service pages, a case study page, a blog index, a careers page and contact, with a content management system so the team can edit it themselves. This is how we would break it down after discovery.
| Work package | Person-days | Day rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery: goals, audience, sitemap, and what each page must get a visitor to do | 2 | 16,000 | 32,000 |
| Content structure: the headings and the message of every page, agreed before design | 2 | 16,000 | 32,000 |
| Design: a small system of type, colour and components, then ten pages for desktop and mobile | 8 | 12,000 | 96,000 |
| Build: the components, ten pages, responsive, with the CMS wired to every editable region | 8 | 16,000 | 1,28,000 |
| CMS setup and content entry, with the team trained to edit | 2 | 16,000 | 32,000 |
| Forms, analytics, the CRM or WhatsApp connection, cookie consent | 1 | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| SEO groundwork: metadata, structured data, the sitemap, the redirect map from the old URLs | 2 | 16,000 | 32,000 |
| Performance, accessibility and cross-device testing | 2 | 16,000 | 32,000 |
| Launch: DNS, certificates, monitoring, and a week of fixes | 1 | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| Total | 28 | About 4.2 lakh |
The rates are mid-band for an experienced Indian team: 12,000 rupees a day for design, the same figure our UI/UX design cost guide uses, and 16,000 for everything else. With a designer and a developer working in sequence, the calendar comes to about six weeks. The total sits in the second row of the table above, toward its top, because this site has a CMS, a relaunch and integrations. Drop the CMS and the old site and the same brief lands near 3 lakh.
Divide it out and the number that matters appears: about 42,000 rupees a page all in, or about 22,000 a page for the design and build alone. That second figure is the one to compare with a per-page quote, and the first is the one to budget.
Now watch the template quote come out of the same table. Remove discovery, content structure and design, because the theme did those. Cut the SEO groundwork to an afternoon and the testing to a day. What remains is six or seven days of work, done by a person billing 3,000 to 6,000 a day, and it comes to 20,000 to 40,000. That is the quote at the bottom of your inbox, and for a five-page site that nobody will edit and that has no rankings to protect, it is the right one.
The seven things that move the price
- Page count, but less than you expect. The design system, the CMS and the launch cost the same for six pages or sixteen. Each extra page on a custom site adds 15,000 to 25,000, and on a template a few thousand. A forty-page site is not four times a ten-page site; it is about twice.
- Whose design it is. A theme is free or a few thousand rupees. A design made for you is a fifth to a third of the budget, and it is the part visitors notice. If your competitors all bought the same theme, this is where you separate from them.
- Copy and photography. Every quote assumes someone will write the words and supply the pictures, and most quotes assume it is you. A copywriter is 1,500 to 5,000 a page. A photographer is 15,000 to 50,000 a day. A site with placeholder copy in week five is the most common reason launches slip.
- The CMS, and who will use it. No CMS is cheapest and means every change goes through a developer. WordPress is familiar and needs updating. A headless CMS is the most flexible and adds modelling work up front. The right answer depends on how often the team will edit, not on what the agency prefers.
- Integrations. A form that emails you is an hour. A form that creates a lead in your CRM, books a slot in a calendar, opens a WhatsApp thread or triggers a sequence of emails is a day each, and each one is a system that can break.
- The relaunch. A first site has no history. A replacement site has pages that rank, links from other sites, and customers with bookmarks, and every one of those URLs has to be mapped to its new home. Skipping this is the most expensive saving in web development, and we come back to it below.
- Languages and regions. A second language is not a second set of pages. It is a content model that supports translation, a URL structure search engines understand, and someone to keep both in step. Budget 30 to 50 percent of the build for the first additional language.
WordPress, a site builder, or a custom build: the three-year cost
The build price is the number everyone compares. The one that decides what a site costs is the three-year total, because a website is never finished paying.
| Option | Build | Each year after | Three years, roughly | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site builder: Wix, Squarespace, Framer, Webflow | 15,000 to 1.5 lakh | 6,000 to 40,000 in subscription, plus small edits | 35,000 to 2.7 lakh | Under ten pages, one editor, no integrations beyond a form, and nobody who will ever need the code |
| WordPress with a theme | 25,000 to 1.5 lakh | 5,000 to 25,000 hosting, 15,000 to 60,000 in plugin licences and updates, plus a maintenance retainer | 1 to 4 lakh | A content-heavy site edited weekly by non-technical people, where the plugin ecosystem does the integrations |
| Custom build on a modern framework with a headless CMS | 2 to 12 lakh | Hosting from free to 25,000, a CMS from free to 1 lakh, maintenance at 15 to 25 percent of the build | 3 to 18 lakh | A site that has to load fast and rank, that integrates with your own systems, or that will grow into a product |
The middle row carries a cost the table cannot show: security. A WordPress site with fifteen plugins is fifteen things that need updating, and an unmaintained one is the most common way a small business website gets defaced. The maintenance retainer is not optional; it is the price of the ecosystem.
The bottom row is what we build, on Next.js, and we would still send half the people who ask about it to the first row. A site builder is the right purchase for most companies with fewer than ten pages and nothing to integrate. The custom build earns its price when the site has to do something: rank on competitive terms, load in under a second on a phone in a small town, feed leads into a system, or become the front of a product later. Our web and SaaS development page describes what that looks like.
The costs that are not in the quote
| Cost | Typical size | When it surprises you |
|---|---|---|
| Domain and renewal | 1,000 to 3,000 a year for a .com or .in | When it was registered in the agency's name and the renewal notice goes to them |
| Hosting | Free to 25,000 a year for a marketing site | When the "free hosting" turns out to be the agency's shared server with a two-second load time |
| Copywriting | 1,500 to 5,000 a page | When the timeline assumed you would deliver ten pages of copy in week one |
| Photography and illustration | 15,000 to 50,000 a day, or stock licences | When the design was presented with photos you cannot use |
| The CMS licence | Free to 1 lakh a year | When the free tier runs out of editors or entries in month four |
| Redirect mapping | 1 to 3 days | When the old site's rankings disappear the week after launch |
| Forms, email, chat and booking services | Free to 30,000 a year | When the form tool's free plan stops storing submissions |
| Legal pages and consent | A day | When a customer asks for the privacy policy the site does not have |
| Maintenance | 15 to 25 percent of the build cost a year | The first time something breaks and the quote said nothing about afterwards |
GST at 18 percent applies to the development invoice as it does to any software work in India, and it is claimable as input credit if you are registered, but the cash goes out first. The maintenance line is the same rule of thumb our app maintenance cost guide uses, and it is smaller in absolute terms for a website than for an app because there are no app stores to keep up with.
What a relaunch costs, and the mistake that costs more
If you have a website already, the new one is a relaunch, and a relaunch has a cost that a first site does not: everything the old site earned. Pages that rank, links other sites made to those pages, and the addresses in customers' bookmarks and old emails all point at URLs that are about to change.
The work is a redirect map. Every old URL, including the ones you forgot exist, is listed, and each is pointed at the page on the new site that best replaces it. For a ten-page site it is a day; for a site with a blog and years of history it is two or three. It is the cheapest line in the estimate above and the one most often missing from a template quote, because the person building the template site has never been asked to protect a ranking.
What skipping it costs is easy to describe and hard to recover: the search traffic the old site had, gone within a fortnight, and a slow climb back over months. If the relaunch is also a redesign of every page, hold the URL structure anyway. New URLs and new content at the same time is the combination search engines trust least. The technical side of this, and the audit that catches it before launch, is what our SEO service does.
How agencies charge for websites
| Model | How it works | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Per page | A rate per page, usually 3,000 to 25,000, with the home page priced higher | What a "page" includes: design, copy, mobile, and states, or just the layout |
| Fixed price after discovery | A short discovery, then a scope, a page list and a price that holds | A fixed price quoted before anyone has asked what the site is for |
| Hourly | 800 to 3,000 an hour at Indian rates, billed against a backlog | No page list, so there is no way to know when it is done |
| A "free" website with a hosting or maintenance contract | The build is free or nominal; you pay monthly for two or three years | Who owns the site, the domain and the content if you stop paying. Often not you |
| Retainer | A monthly fee for edits, new pages and upkeep after launch | Reasonable at 10,000 to 40,000 a month for an active site, if it is optional and the handover is clean |
We work on the second model, with the fourth row's question answered in the contract: the domain, the hosting account, the code and the CMS are yours from the first day.
How to read a website quote
Six checks, ten minutes.
- Ask what "page" means. Design and build for phone and desktop, with copy, or a layout with your text pasted in. The word covers both, and the price difference is five times.
- Ask who writes the copy, and by when. If it is you, the timeline starts when you deliver it, and the quote should say so.
- Ask which CMS, and who can edit what. Then ask for a five-minute demonstration of editing a page. If the answer is "send us the change", there is no CMS.
- Ask for the redirect plan if you have a site today. If the answer is a blank look, the rankings are not in the price.
- Ask what you own. The domain, the hosting account, the code and the CMS account should all be in your company's name, and the quote should say so.
- Ask for the yearly bill beside the build price. Hosting, CMS, plugins, forms and maintenance. A build price with no yearly figure beside it is half a quote.
The general version of this checklist, for choosing the company rather than reading the number, is in our guide to hiring a development company.
How to spend less without a worse site
- Launch with fewer pages, designed properly. Six good pages beat sixteen thin ones, with visitors and with search engines. Add pages when you have something to say on them.
- Write the copy first. Design around real words is faster and better than design around placeholder text, and it removes the most common cause of delay.
- Use a site builder if it fits. Under ten pages, one editor, nothing to integrate: Framer or Webflow will do it for a fraction of a custom build, and the money is better spent on photography.
- Keep the URL structure on a relaunch, and you keep most of the SEO work for free.
- Skip the animation budget. Motion is the most expensive pixel on a site and the one visitors on slow connections never see. Spend it on load time instead.
- Do not buy a package. "Ten pages, logo, SEO, social media" bundles price the cheapest version of each. Buy the site, and buy the other things from people who do them.
- Start the domain and hosting accounts in your name on day one, so ownership is never a conversation later.
When you do not need a website build
A good agency will say this on the first call, so here it is in writing. If the business runs on referrals and WhatsApp, a Google Business Profile with photos and reviews, a one-page site with your services, your area and a WhatsApp button, and a booking link will do more than a ten-page site for a tenth of the cost. Build the bigger site when there is a reason: a market that searches for what you do, a product to explain, or a team that will publish.
Questions people ask
How much does a website cost in India?
A template site from a freelancer or a small agency costs 15,000 to 75,000 rupees. A business site designed and built for you, with a content management system, costs 2 to 5 lakh with an experienced team. The marketing site of a product company runs 5 to 12 lakh. Stores and anything with a customer sign-in are priced separately, and the ranges for those are linked at the top of this article.
How much does a 5-page website cost?
On a template, 15,000 to 40,000. Designed and built for you, about 2 lakh, because the design system, the CMS, the SEO groundwork and the launch cost the same whether there are five pages or ten. The per-page cost falls as the page count rises, which is why a five-page custom site is rarely half the price of a ten-page one.
What is the cost per page for website development in India?
Template pages are quoted at 3,000 to 8,000. Custom pages, designed for phone and desktop and built as reusable components, work out at about 20,000 to 25,000 for design and build, or around 40,000 all in once discovery, the CMS, SEO and testing are spread across the pages. Ask what a page includes before comparing two per-page prices.
How much does a WordPress website cost in India?
25,000 to 1.5 lakh to build on a theme, which is where most Indian agency quotes sit, and 5,000 to 25,000 a year in hosting plus 15,000 to 60,000 in plugin licences and updates. The build is cheap because the theme did the design. The running cost is the part to budget, and a WordPress site without a maintenance arrangement is the most common kind to get compromised.
How much does an ecommerce website cost in India?
A store on Shopify or a similar platform with a custom theme costs 2 to 6 lakh, a headless storefront 8 to 20 lakh, and a fully custom platform 20 to 60 lakh. The platform fees and apps add 1.5 to 9 lakh over three years. The full comparison, and the four situations that justify building your own, are in our Shopify vs custom ecommerce guide.
How much does website maintenance cost per year?
Budget 15 to 25 percent of the build cost a year for a custom site, so 30,000 to 1.25 lakh for a 2 to 5 lakh site, plus hosting and any CMS licence. A site builder replaces most of that with its subscription. A WordPress site needs a retainer for updates and security whether or not anything changes, typically 3,000 to 10,000 a month.
How long does it take to build a website?
A template site takes one to three weeks. A custom business site takes four to eight weeks: a week of discovery and content structure, two weeks of design, two to three of build, and a week of testing and launch. The step that stretches the timeline is copy, because design cannot finish without it, and the step that shortens it is a decision-maker who reviews within a day.
Why do website quotes vary so much?
Because the word "website" covers two products. One is a theme with your content in it, made in days by one person. The other is a set of decisions about what each page is for, designed and built for you, with a CMS, SEO groundwork and a relaunch plan, made in weeks by a small team. Ask which one a quote is for and the variation mostly disappears.
Getting a real number
Ranges end where your actual site begins. We price web projects after a short discovery, so the number you approve is based on your page list, your content and what the site has to connect to, not on a template's page count. What that process looks like is on our web and SaaS development page.