You send an enquiry to three agencies. You get quotes for €900, €3,500 and €11,000. All three can be honest.
That is exactly why “how much does a website cost” is such a frustrating question. “It depends” is true, but useless. So here are the numbers first, and then what they depend on.
The short answer
These are typical prices on the Slovenian market for a one-off build, excluding VAT.
| Type of site | Typical price | Build time | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Template or site builder | €500 - €1,500 | 1 - 2 weeks | Sole traders, a first presence online |
| Custom brochure site | €2,000 - €5,000 | 3 - 6 weeks | Small businesses, service companies |
| Corporate or multilingual site | €5,000 - €12,000 | 6 - 10 weeks | Companies with several services, exporters |
| Online store | €3,500 - €15,000 | 4 - 12 weeks | Selling products online |
| Custom portal or web app | from €15,000 | 3 months or more | Bookings, user accounts, custom logic |
A quote below the bottom of its range is not necessarily bad. It does mean something has been left out. The only question is what.
Why quotes differ so much
The price of a website is not the price of a piece of software. It is the price of the hours someone spends thinking, designing, building and testing. Differences between quotes almost always come down to six things.
Template or custom design. A bought WordPress theme costs €60 and looks like a thousand other sites. Custom design means someone works out what a visitor must see first and where they should click. That is the difference between a site that exists and a site that sells.
Number of pages and templates. Ten pages sharing one layout is less work than five pages that each have their own. What counts is the number of distinct templates, not the number of pages.
Content. Who writes the copy and who supplies the photos? If you bring them yourself, the project is cheaper. If you expect the agency to write the copy, the price quickly rises by €500 to €2,000. Stock photos are cheap, but customers recognise them, as we covered in our post on authentic photography in the age of AI.
Features and integrations. A contact form is standard. A connection to your CRM, booking system, accounting software or ERP is not. Every integration is a small project of its own.
Languages. Each extra language is more than a translation. It means separate URLs, hreflang tags, translated meta descriptions and often different content for a different market. Budget 20 to 40 percent extra per language.
Speed and SEO fundamentals. A site that loads in one second and is properly structured for Google takes more work than a site that “sort of works”. We explained why this matters in our post on Core Web Vitals.
WordPress, Webflow, or Astro and Next.js
Technology does not only affect the build price. It also decides how fast the site will be and what it will cost you over the next five years.
| Technology | Build | Yearly costs | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | from €1,000 | €200 - €1,000 | Teams that already know WordPress, plugin-heavy sites |
| Webflow | from €1,500 | €300 - €500 | Brochure sites that marketing edits on its own |
| Astro or Next.js | from €2,000 | €0 - €600 | Sites where speed and SEO matter, and web apps |
There is deliberately no upper limit here. The final price depends on the project: the number of languages and pages, integrations, and whether you need something like a product configurator, a calculator or a booking system.
WordPress. The most widespread option and often the cheapest to start with. There is a plugin for almost every feature, so a site goes up quickly. The bill comes later: every plugin is another dependency that needs updating, and a site running thirty plugins is rarely fast.
Webflow. A visual tool for building custom design without traditional coding. Webflow handles hosting, security and updates, and your team edits content in a simple CMS without a developer. You pay a monthly subscription for this, roughly €25 to €40 a month for a typical brochure site. It is an excellent choice for brochure sites, but it hits its limits quickly with complex integrations and larger stores. We built the IR Image site in Webflow, for example.
Astro or Next.js: custom performance design. The site is written in code, with no unnecessary plugins or themes, and one goal: to be fast. These sites load in under a second, score 90+ on Lighthouse and run on Cloudflare for next to nothing. Astro is ideal for brochure and content sites, Next.js for sites with user accounts, bookings or other app logic. You still edit content yourself, through a headless CMS such as Strapi, Payload or Sanity.
The build can cost a little more, because everything is made to measure. In the long run, though, it is often the cheapest option: no plugins to update, no licences and far fewer security holes. That is how we built the Belleja site, and webzone.si too.
What you get in each price range
Up to €1,500: a template
A ready-made theme, your logo, your colours and your copy. For a sole trader who needs a business card online, that is a perfectly sensible choice. Just do not expect strategy, tailored design or serious speed optimisation.
€2,000 - €5,000: a custom brochure site
This is where design starts to come from your business rather than from a template. It usually includes 5 to 10 pages, a content management system, basic technical SEO, analytics and mobile optimisation. For most small businesses, this is the range with the best ratio of cost to impact.
€5,000 - €12,000: a corporate site
Several languages, several content types (news, case studies, careers, documents), more demanding integrations and often several stakeholders on the client side. A good share of the price is not code, it is coordination.
Online store: €3,500 - €15,000
The range is wide because a “store” can mean 20 products or 5,000 products with variants, wholesale pricing and a live stock connection. The biggest costs are importing and cleaning up products, payment systems, shipping and the ERP connection. We compared the two main platforms in Shopify vs WooCommerce.
Costs quotes often leave out
The one-off build is only part of the story. A website also has yearly costs.
| Item | Typical per year |
|---|---|
.si or .com domain |
€15 - €30 |
| Hosting | €0 - €300 |
| Maintenance and security updates | €200 - €1,500 |
| Paid plugins or themes (WordPress) | €50 - €300 |
| Platform subscription (e.g. Shopify) | from roughly €350 |
Maintenance is the line people skip most often. A WordPress site without updates becomes vulnerable within a year or two. Plugins go stale, the PHP version changes, something stops loading. Fixing a neglected site often costs more than a year of regular maintenance.
Hosting can be almost free, or not. A static site on Cloudflare costs practically nothing. An online store with heavy traffic needs a serious server.
A site does not bring visitors on its own after launch. If you are counting on traffic from Google, you need content and SEO, or advertising. That is a separate budget, not part of the build.
Where cheap pays off and where it does not
A cheap site is a good decision when the website is not your main sales channel. A hair salon that customers find through Google Maps and word of mouth does not need an €8,000 website.
A cheap site is an expensive decision when the site has to sell. If a thousand people visit each month and ten percent more of them leave than should, because the page is slow or the offer is unclear, the difference in build price is quickly covered by lost enquiries.
It also matters how soon you will replace the site. A €1,000 site you throw away after two years costs more than a €4,000 site that lasts five.
How to compare quotes
Quotes that differ by a factor of ten rarely describe the same work. Before you choose, ask every provider the same five questions.
Who writes the copy and supplies the images? If the answer is unclear, it will end up being your job.
Is the design custom or an adapted template? Both are legitimate. You just need to know what you are buying.
What is included for SEO? “The site will be optimised” means nothing. Ask about redirects, meta data, structured data and speed.
Who owns the site, the domain and the logins? Once you have paid, the domain, hosting and admin access must be yours. No exceptions.
How much does maintenance cost after launch? If it is not in the quote, ask now, not a year from now.
How we price
At WebZone we do not sell “small, medium, large” packages. We prepare a quote after a short conversation about what the site has to achieve, and break it down line by line so you can see what you are paying for. We work in WordPress, Webflow, Astro and Next.js, and with other tools where the project needs them, such as headless CMSs like Strapi and Payload. We choose the technology based on what the site has to achieve. You can see what our process includes on our web development page.
If you have quotes on your desk that you cannot compare, send them to us. We will tell you what is in them, even if you do not end up choosing us.