A website for a trade business costs between €800 and €6,000 in Germany in 2026. The price hinges on three factors: the number of pages, whether content and photos already exist, and whether features like appointment requests or a careers section are added. Website builders like Jimdo or Wix cost €10–30 a month, but demand your own working time – realistically 20 to 40 hours for a usable result.
The three routes – and what they really cost
Build it yourself with a website builder: €150–400 a year plus 20–40 hours of your time
Value your hour at what you earn on the job site. At a €45 hourly rate, 30 hours of your own work is €1,350 on paper – except the result is usually weaker and that time is missing from the business.
Freelance web developer: €1,000–4,500 one-off
Fixed price, a fixed contact person, the website is yours. The risk lies in availability during illness or holidays – ask up front how support and reachability are handled.
Agency: €5,000–15,000 plus a monthly retainer
More structure and failover safety, but usually oversized for a business with five employees. You pay for layers of project management that a small business rarely needs.
How to spot a too-low price
An offer under €800 almost always means one of three things: a bought template with no real customisation, a subscription model you can only escape with difficulty, or someone building a website for the first time who is no longer reachable on the second project.
The most expensive website is the one you have to have built again in two years.
What really drives the price up
- Missing content: when text has to be written and photos taken, that costs time – often a third of the total price.
- Special features: online appointment booking, customer portal, quote calculator.
- Multilingualism.
- Not the number of pages – four or eight pages makes surprisingly little difference.
The running costs hardly anyone thinks of
The one-off price is only half the bill. On top come: a domain (€10–20 a year), hosting (€5–30 a month), and depending on the solution, maintenance or updates. With website builders these costs are included in the subscription – but the website is never fully yours. With an independently built website you pay less on an ongoing basis, but you carry responsibility for updates yourself or commission them.
Watch one point in the quote: do you get all the access credentials in the end? If not, the website isn’t really yours.
Does it pay off at all?
A trade business with an average order value of €2,500 needs a single additional order to pay for a €2,500 website. So the question isn’t whether the website is expensive, but whether it brings enquiries.
And that’s decided not by the price, but by three things: how fast the site loads on a phone, whether the business is found on Google at all, and whether visitors have a visible next step – call, message, request a callback. An expensive website that meets none of these three conditions is more expensive than a cheap one that does.
What such an offer looks like in concrete terms, which packages exist and what each includes, I’ve summarised here:
Frequently asked questions
What does a simple website for a trade business cost?
A one-page presence with a contact option usually runs between €800 and €1,500. It moves up from there with the number of pages and special features.
Isn’t a builder like Wix cheaper?
At first glance, yes – €10 to €30 a month. Factor in your own working time (20–40 hours) and the weaker load time of many builders, and the picture shifts.
Do I need an ongoing maintenance contract?
No, not necessarily. Reputable providers hand over all the access credentials so you can decide freely. Maintenance should be an option, not a condition.
How long does building a website take?
For a trade business, realistically two to six weeks – depending above all on how quickly text and photos are available.
Does the website really belong to me afterwards?
Only if you receive all the access credentials to the domain, hosting and the website itself. Clarify this before awarding the job – with subscription models it is often not the case.