Web Development
THE SHORT ANSWER
Website development cost in India in 2026 falls into four broad bands. A basic business website runs ₹20,000–₹50,000. A corporate site with custom design lands between ₹40,000 and ₹1,20,000. An ecommerce store costs ₹35,000–₹2,50,000, Shopify entry to full custom. And a custom web application starts around ₹2,00,000, climbing with complexity.
Those bands assume a professional build on WordPress, Shopify, or a custom stack — not a template with your logo swapped in. The rest of this guide shows where the money goes inside each band, the recurring charges that surprise owners in year two, and when a freelancer, an agency, or a DIY builder is genuinely the smarter buy.
BY SITE TYPE
Every serious quote you receive should fit one of these boxes. If it doesn't, ask which box it thinks it's in.
Five to seven pages — home, about, services, contact, gallery — on a well-customised template, mobile-ready, with WhatsApp click-to-chat. Right for shops, clinics, and trades that need a credible address online. Bikram Printers in Rajpura runs on exactly this footprint.
Ten to twenty-five pages with original design, a separate page per service, blog setup, and proper lead forms. This is the band where design stops being a template and starts being yours.
WooCommerce or Shopify with payment gateway, shipping rules, and GST-ready invoicing. Product count and catalogue photography decide whether you land at the bottom of this band or the top.
Booking engines, customer portals, dashboards. You're paying for engineering hours and testing rather than page count, which is why quotes here vary the most. Insist on a written feature list before comparing prices.
COST DRIVERS
Page count matters less than owners assume. What matters is how many pages need unique design and unique writing — twenty pages sharing one clean layout cost less than eight pages that each demand their own.
A quality template customised properly saves ₹20,000–₹50,000 against ground-up design, and for most small businesses that trade is worth it. Custom design earns its fee when your brand is the product — architects, boutiques, premium services.
Every moving part adds hours: payment gateways, booking calendars, CRM connections, a Punjabi or Hindi version alongside English. Separate the features you need on day one from the ones that can wait for phase two — phasing is the easiest way to cut a quote without cutting quality.
WordPress remains the economical choice in India because every city has people who can maintain it. Shopify charges a monthly fee but removes hosting headaches for stores. A fully custom stack gives total control and ties you to the developer who built it — budget for that dependency honestly.
Most quotes silently exclude copywriting. Then the site sits half-finished for months because nobody wrote the service pages. Ask upfront whether writing, photography, and product entry are included — the answer changes both the price and the delivery date.
BUDGET FOR THESE
Screenshot this list and ask any developer which items their price includes.
THE REAL QUESTION
DIY builders (Wix, Hostinger, Shopify). Plans run roughly ₹500–₹2,000 a month, and for testing a business idea this weekend they're genuinely fine. The catch arrives later: by year three the subscription has usually crossed the one-time cost of a basic custom build, you still don't own the platform, and technical SEO control is limited. Build here to validate an idea, not to scale one.
Freelancers. Typically ₹10,000–₹50,000 for a business site — the cheapest professional route, and often excellent value when you find someone good. The risk is a single point of failure: one person carries your design, development, and post-launch support, and if they move on, so does your maintenance plan.
Agencies. Usually ₹30,000 upwards for the same brief. The premium buys process — design, development, and copy under one roof, a team that survives any one person leaving, and accountability when something breaks at 9 pm before a campaign goes live. We've built 17 client websites across 6 countries on exactly that model, including Colony Ortho RX, an ecommerce brand in California.
If you're weighing options, see what our website development company in Ludhiana includes in every build, or check current pricing on our packages page.
One last budgeting note: a website with no traffic plan is a brochure in a locked drawer. Before the build swallows the whole budget, read our breakdown of SEO cost in India so the site has a job to do after launch day.
Send your requirement on WhatsApp — pages, features, deadline — and you'll get a fixed quote with a delivery date, usually the same day. No forms, no callback queue.
FAQ
For a template-based WordPress build with mobile optimisation and a contact form, expect ₹15,000–₹40,000 as a one-time cost in 2026. Below roughly ₹15,000, you're usually buying an unedited template with your logo dropped in. Budget another ₹4,000–₹17,000 a year for domain, hosting, and licences.
In year one, yes — builder plans cost roughly ₹6,000–₹24,000 annually. By year three that subscription usually exceeds what a basic custom build costs once, and you still can't move the site or fully control its SEO. Builders suit idea-testing; a business planning to rank on Google outgrows them fast.
Plan for domain renewal, hosting, plugin licences, and maintenance — typically ₹8,000–₹45,000 a year combined, depending on the stack. Treat marketing as a separate line: the build gets you a shop, but footfall is a different budget, whether that comes from SEO, Google Ads, or both.
Founder, Sahil Media Group — the Ludhiana agency behind 17 client websites in 6 countries. More about Sahil · WhatsApp him