How much does a website cost in Cork in 2026?
A straight, local answer on website pricing for Cork and West Cork businesses, and what actually drives the number.
Straight answer first: for most Cork SMEs a professional website costs between €1,500 and €6,000 in 2026. A clean brochure site sits at the lower end. Add online booking, e-commerce or custom features and you move up. Genuinely bespoke builds run well beyond €6,000, but most businesses in Skibbereen, Clonakilty or Bantry never need one.
Quotes vary wildly because a website is not a single product. It is five things bundled together, and each one moves the number up or down.
The five things you are actually paying for
Before you compare two quotes, understand what sits inside them:
- Design: a stock template lightly tweaked is cheap. A layout built around your brand, your own photography and how your customers behave costs more, and it earns more.
- Development: the build itself. Five tidy pages go quickly. Logins, multi-step booking or a live stock system take real engineering hours.
- Content: the words and the structure. Write it yourself and you save. Have it written and organised properly and that is skilled time someone spends.
- Functionality: card payments, table booking, quote forms, calculators, a link to your till or CRM. Every feature adds cost because every feature adds work.
- Support: updates, security patches, backups and a human to ring when something breaks. This part is ongoing, not once-off.
What this looks like around West Cork
A Kinsale restaurant that wants a mobile menu, two-tap table booking and a gallery of the room is usually a €2,500 to €4,000 job. The booking integration and the photography carry the cost, and both pay back fast on a busy summer weekend.
A Clonakilty shop selling online needs product pages, stock, payments, shipping rules and a way to manage orders. That is real e-commerce and sits around €3,500 to €6,000 depending on the size of the range.
A Skibbereen tradesperson who needs a sharp, trustworthy brochure site with a quote form and strong local search is often €1,500 to €2,500. It is smaller, but done right it brings in work for years.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions
The build is once-off. Keeping the site alive is not. Budget for hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate and, ideally, a care plan covering updates, security and backups. For a typical West Cork SME that is roughly €15 to €60 a month depending on how much hand-holding you want.
Skip the care plan and you save a little now. You pay for it later, when the site goes down the week of your busiest event and nobody is watching it.
Why a suspiciously cheap quote should worry you
If someone offers you a full site for €300, ask what is missing. Usually it is a locked template you cannot edit, no real content work, no mobile testing, no SEO groundwork, no backups, and no one to call in six months. Cheap sites are cheap because the invisible work was skipped, and that invisible work is exactly what makes a site earn its keep.
DIY, freelancer or studio?
DIY builders like Wix or Squarespace can work for a very simple site if you have the time and patience. You trade money for hours, and the result often looks like a template because it is one.
A freelancer is a solid middle option: more polish, lower overhead, but you are relying on one person being free when you need them.
A studio costs more up front and gives you design, development, content and ongoing support in one place, with cover when someone is away. For a business that depends on its website for bookings or sales, that reliability is usually worth the difference.
The honest truth is that the right number depends on what the site has to do for your business. Put in your requirements for a realistic figure with our website cost calculator, then tell us what you have in mind and we will give you a straight quote with no padding.
Let’s make your digital match your work.
Tell us about your business and what you are trying to do. We come back within a day, with a straight answer and clear next steps.