What a Website Actually Costs in 2026, Platform by Platform

The site we’re pricing

Same site, six platforms. The spec is deliberately boring, because most business websites are:

• Five to ten pages, plus a blog you actually post to

• A contact form that reaches a human

• Decent SEO: sitemap, structured data, Open Graph tags

• Scenario B: all of the above, in two languages

Ground rules: every number below is checked against the provider’s own pricing page or a dated source, and every cell in the league table carries its receipts. Where the honest answer is a range — WordPress maintenance, notoriously — we attribute the range to whoever published it rather than inventing our own. Prices are USD at annual-billing rates unless marked otherwise, as of July 12, 2026.

WordPress: free software, priced like a boat

The software costs $0, which is the last free thing that happens to you. Per Codeable’s March 2026 maintenance-cost breakdown, a domain runs $10–$30/year, hosting $20–$200+/month depending on provider, and a typical set of premium plugin and theme licenses another $500–$1,500/year.

Then there’s maintenance — and on WordPress, maintenance is not a virtue, it’s a security requirement, because unpatched plugins are how sites get owned (we’ve written about exactly whose problem that becomes). Codeable puts small-business care plans at $100–$300/month. Skip the plan and the invoice doesn’t disappear; it just moves from your bank account to your weekends.

So the real spread: roughly $900 in year one if you DIY everything and value your time at zero, or $2,100–$4,500 with a modest care plan and mid-range managed hosting. Multiply by three for year three — nothing in that stack gets cheaper with age.

The multilingual add-on is the one place WordPress behaves: WPML’s Multilingual CMS tier is €99/year with no cap on language count. The catch is structural — it’s one more plugin on the pile you’re paying someone to patch.

Wix and Squarespace: rent that repriced itself

Wix is refreshingly legible. Light is $17/month billed annually ($204/year) and Core is $29/month ($348/year); Light’s 2 GB of storage gets snug once a blog accumulates images, so Core is the realistic pick. The domain is free for year one, then $17.35/year. No surprise dimension here — the price is the price.

Multilingual on Wix is genuinely decent: the built-in multilingual app translates manually into 180+ languages at no extra plan cost, with paid word credits only if you want machine auto-translation.

Squarespace is the cautionary tale. Going into 2026, its four site plans ran $16–$99/month billed annually (Basic through Advanced). Then on July 6, 2026, Squarespace raised US site-plan prices across the board — and its own forum filled with renewal notices quoting jumps to $276 and $348/year. The subscription you budgeted is not the subscription you renew. We did the full exit math in Leaving Squarespace in 2026.

And if you need a second language, Squarespace has no native multilingual feature at all. The standard fix is Weglot, from $17/month ($170/year) for one translated language and 10,000 words — your second language costs more than half of what the pre-increase Core plan did.

Webflow and Framer: pro tools, pro meters

Webflow rebuilt its pricing on May 13, 2026: the old CMS and Business plans merged into a single Premium plan at $25/month billed annually ($39 monthly), with 50 GB bandwidth. Basic at $15/month covers static sites; a blog means CMS collections, and CMS collections mean Premium. Existing sites move to the new pricing at renewal.

Localization is where the meter starts spinning. Webflow’s add-on is priced per locale, per month: $9/locale on the Essential tier, $29/locale on Advanced — and both tiers cap how many locales you can add. Two extra languages on Advanced is $58/month before you’ve translated a word. We tore that pricing apart in the Webflow localization math.

Framer’s base rates undercut everyone here: Basic is $10/month billed annually with 2 CMS collections and 50 GB bandwidth; Pro is $30/month. But the growth dimensions are all billable: localization is $20 per locale per month (up to 20 locales), extra editors $20/month each, content-editor seats $10/month. The site is cheap; scaling it is the business model.

The multilingual multiplier

Look at the single-language column and the platforms cluster — a few hundred dollars a year separates most of them. Add one language and the spread explodes:

• WordPress: +~$105/year (WPML, uncapped languages) — plus more surface to maintain

• Wix: $0 for manual translation; auto-translate word credits are paid

• Squarespace: +$170/year minimum via Weglot, because there is no native feature

• Webflow: +$108–$348/year per locale, with locale caps on both add-on tiers

• Framer: +$240/year per locale

• StoryPress: +$0

Here’s the thing about that column: languages aren’t a resource. Serving a French page costs the host the same bandwidth as an English one. Charging per locale is charging for a database column — a meter bolted onto the part of your growth that was supposed to be free. We track this across the industry in the CMS language pricing index, and we’ve explained why StoryPress doesn’t count languages at all.

Where StoryPress fits — and where it doesn’t

StoryPress is $5/month, billed $60/yearly. That includes hosting on Cloudflare’s edge, the visual editor, SEO built in — JSON-LD, sitemaps, OG tags, llms.txt — cookie consent, GTM wiring, full content export, and an MCP server so an AI agent can edit your site conversationally. There are no plugins to patch because there are no plugins. Maintenance is our job; the $60 is the whole invoice.

We meter what actually costs money — bandwidth and storage — with plainly labeled caps sized generously for a small-business site. We refuse to meter languages, seats, or locales, because those aren’t resources. Our native CMS, arriving imminently, makes languages first-class with no cap on language variant count.

Now the caveats, because this table is worthless without them. StoryPress is opinionated: you build from a universal component system, not an arbitrary code canvas. If you need a heavy custom web application, a plugin ecosystem, or full-scale ecommerce, we’re the wrong tool — WordPress or Webflow will genuinely serve you better, and the table above tells you what that costs. And if your site outgrows the caps, you pay for the real resources you use — that’s the honest part of honest meters. What you’ll never pay for is a locale, a seat, or the eleventh month’s repricing email.

Atomic facts

• WordPress maintenance (Codeable, Mar 2026): small-business care plans $100–$300/mo; hosting $20–$200+/mo; premium plugin/theme licenses $500–$1,500/yr; domain $10–$30/yr.

• Wix Core: $29/mo billed annually ($348/yr); domain free year one, then $17.35/yr. Built-in multilingual app, 180+ languages, manual translation free. As of 2026-07-12.

• Squarespace raised US site-plan prices on July 6, 2026. Pre-increase plans ran $16–$99/mo billed annually; forum renewal notices quoted $276 and $348/yr. No native multilingual — Weglot from $17/mo.

• Webflow merged CMS and Business into Premium on May 13, 2026: $25/mo billed annually, $39 monthly, 50 GB bandwidth. Localization: $9/locale/mo (Essential) or $29/locale/mo (Advanced), locales capped.

• Framer: Basic $10/mo billed annually, Pro $30/mo; localization $20/locale/mo up to 20 locales; extra editors $20/mo. As of 2026-07-12.

• WPML Multilingual CMS: €99/yr, no language cap.

• StoryPress: $5/mo billed $60/yearly. Bandwidth and storage metered with plainly labeled caps; languages, seats, and locales never metered. Native CMS with uncapped language variants arriving imminently.

If you’re pricing an exit, start from what you actually paid over the last twelve months — renewal emails included — and put it next to the table above. Then read Leaving Squarespace in 2026 or WordPress vulnerabilities: zero of them should be yours, depending on which bill you’re holding. And when the math checks out, getting started takes about as long as this section took to read.