Published 5 November 2026 · By Coelho Branco
The short answer
If you run a small business in Portugal, a website will cost you anything from nothing to about €1,500, and most local agencies quote somewhere in that range. Our prices are published, so you can check how much a website costs with us before talking to anyone. What separates a fair website price from a bad one is what you pay in years two and three, and that's rarely written in the quote.
There are three routes, and none of them costs quite what it seems to.
A website builder such as Wix charges nothing to build, but to use your own domain and drop the platform's advertising you'll need a paid plan, every month. The rest of the cost is your time: picking a template, writing the pages, sorting out photos, then working out why nobody finds the site on Google.
A freelancer is the widest range. On Zaask's price guide (checked November 2026), website creation is listed at €30 to €125 an hour, and a WordPress site anywhere from €300 to €6,800. That spread tells you more about how different freelancers are than about the work.
A local agency usually charges €400 to €1,500 for a presentation site, plus yearly hosting. Our prices, excluding VAT:
| Website | Pages | Ready in | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visita | 1 page | 5 days | €390 |
| Negócio | up to 6 pages | 7 days | €790 |
| Alargado | up to 15 pages + 1 extra language | 14 days | €1,490 |
| Grande | up to 50 pages | up to 3 weeks | €3,490 |
Every site includes a mobile version, WhatsApp and call buttons, basic SEO, a privacy and cookie policy, a .pt domain registered in your name and 12 months of hosting.
Small business website cost: what pushes the price up
Page count is the obvious factor and rarely the important one. What each page has to do matters more.
A salon that wants online booking needs a booking system wired into the site. A shop needs payments, shipping and invoicing. A holiday let needs a calendar and bookings. Each of these adds set-up time and, more than that, testing time.
Then there's language. In the Algarve, a site only in Portuguese misses everyone searching in English: tourists, villa owners and many of the foreigners who live here. A second language doesn't double the price, but it isn't free either, because the pages have to be written for that reader rather than run through a translator. That's the difference between a professional website and a template filled in on a Friday afternoon.
And there's content. If your texts and photos arrive ready, the site goes live faster. If nobody has them, someone has to produce them, and that's where many cheap quotes stall for weeks.
Website price: work out the three-year cost
Say a barber in Portimão wants a one-page site with prices, a map and a WhatsApp button. They can buy the Visita site for €390, with hosting included for the first year, then pay €119 a year for hosting and maintenance. Or they can have the same site on subscription at €49 a month, with a 12-month minimum.
After three years, buying comes to €628 and the subscription to €1,764. For a Negócio site the gap grows: €1,028 bought, against €3,204 on subscription.
Buying is almost always cheaper. Subscription makes sense in one situation: cash is tight before the season and you don't want to pay everything at once. You'll pay more over three years, but you start now with nothing upfront.
The same sum works for any quote you get. Add the first payment, hosting, the domain and the cost of each change, then compare three-year totals rather than the headline price.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
A .pt domain renews every year. Depending on the registrar it costs roughly €10 to €40 a year (DomainOffer price comparison, November 2026), and some designers only cover the first one.
Hosting and the SSL certificate are often "free" in year one and billed from year two, at a price nobody mentioned. It's worth reading what hosting and maintenance should include before you compare quotes.
Changes billed by the hour are the hardest cost to predict. Updating a price or your opening hours looks like a five-minute job and shows up on the invoice as a minimum hour.
The most expensive one is a domain registered in the designer's name. If the relationship ends badly, you lose the address printed on your van, your cards and your Google profile. On our sites the domain is always registered under the client's NIF.
A free website builder: when it's the right call
If you have the time, you enjoy this sort of thing and the business doesn't need the site to bring in customers this month, a builder is fine. A photographer starting out can put a portfolio together and learn as they go.
It stops making sense once you count the hours. Twenty hours building a site instead of serving customers is an expensive free website. And a builder won't write pages that answer what people search for, or connect the site to your Google profile for you.
How to read a website quote
Whoever you hire, these questions separate a solid quote from a problem:
- Whose name will the domain be registered in?
- What do I pay in year two, and what does it cover?
- How many changes are included after launch?
- Who writes the text and who sorts out the photos?
- How many days until launch, and counted from when?
- Is the price with or without VAT?
If the answer to any of them is "we'll see", ask for it in writing. Already have a site and not sure it's worth rebuilding? The Free audit shows what to fix first.