You have three quotes on your desk. One agency wants ₹18,000, the second wants ₹1.4 lakh, and a Shopify partner wants ₹85,000 plus a monthly retainer. Nothing in the quotes explains the gap, and none of them tells you what you will still be paying in month 24. That is the question worth answering — not what a website costs to build, but what it costs to own and what it earns back.
How much does a business website actually cost in India in 2026?
A five-to-eight page business website from an Indian agency typically costs ₹15,000 to ₹40,000. Professional builds with custom design and copy land between ₹25,000 and ₹1,00,000. Above ₹1.5 lakh, you should be buying functionality, not more design polish.
Indian web development pricing surveys published this year put the ranges roughly here:
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Basic brochure site: ₹5,000–₹25,000. Template-based, a few pages, no custom integrations.
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Professional business site: ₹25,000–₹1,00,000. Custom layout, written copy, enquiry forms, basic SEO setup.
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Small online store: ₹15,000–₹55,000 for the build, on top of platform fees.
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Freelancer vs agency: ₹10,000–₹80,000 for a freelancer, ₹20,000–₹5,00,000+ for an agency. The gap is usually accountability, copywriting and post-launch support, not code quality.
What genuinely moves the number: page count, whether copy is written for you or supplied by you, payment gateway and logistics integrations, multilingual versions, and how many revision rounds are included. Ask for those five things line by line before comparing quotes.
What does each platform really cost over two years?
Software is the smaller number. Over 24 months, Wix Studio typically runs ₹1,500–₹5,000 a month all-in, Shopify Basic is ₹1,994 a month on monthly billing before 18% GST and a 2% transaction fee, and WordPress starts near ₹500 a month for hosting and then bills you in developer hours.
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Wix / Wix Studio. Forbes Advisor India lists Wix plans from ₹199 a month (Lite) up to ₹1,599 a month (Business Elite). Hosting, SSL and the editor are bundled, so the monthly figure is close to the true figure. Predictability is the point.
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Shopify India. Starter ₹399, Basic ₹1,994, Shopify ₹7,447 and Advanced ₹30,164 a month on monthly billing. Annual billing cuts that to roughly ₹1,499, ₹5,599 and ₹22,680. Add 18% GST, plus transaction fees of 2% / 1% / 0.6% if you do not use Shopify Payments, plus paid apps — which is where most Indian stores quietly add ₹3,000–₹8,000 a month.
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WordPress + WooCommerce. Hosting from around ₹500 a month, but a realistic first year including managed hosting, premium plugins and setup lands near $1,200–$1,600, roughly ₹1.05–₹1.4 lakh. Cheapest sticker price, highest maintenance load.
The line item nobody quotes is maintenance. Plugin updates, broken checkouts, security patches and “can you just change this banner” requests are real hours. Budget either a retainer or an internal owner. A site with no maintenance owner degrades within about six months.
Which platform should you choose — Wix Studio, WordPress or Shopify?
Choose on who maintains the site and what you sell, not on features. Wix Studio suits service businesses and small catalogues. Shopify suits real inventory and multi-channel selling. WordPress suits teams with a developer on call or heavy content operations.
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Service business, enquiry-led, under 40 products → Wix Studio. Fastest to launch, one predictable bill, and your team can edit pages without raising a ticket.
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50+ SKUs, variants, COD, marketplace sync → Shopify. The app ecosystem for Indian logistics, COD verification and WhatsApp recovery is the strongest reason to pay the premium.
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Developer in-house, 200+ content pages, custom logic → WordPress. You own the stack, which is only an advantage if someone is actually looking after it.
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Marketplace, subscriptions, ERP integration → custom build. Budget above ₹3 lakh and plan for ongoing engineering. Do not force this onto a page builder.
Does the platform affect your Google rankings?
Not directly. Google ranks pages, not platforms. All three let you control titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, redirects and structured data. What differs is how quickly you can publish new pages and how fast those pages load — and both of those do affect rankings.
The bigger shift is that search results are no longer only blue links. If you want to appear inside AI answers as well as classic results, the structure of your pages matters more than the platform they sit on — we covered the practical method in our guide to getting found on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Pick a platform that lets you ship a page a week without calling a developer.
Why does site speed matter more than the design?
Because speed is measurable revenue. Deloitte and Google’s “Milliseconds Make Millions” study, covering 37 brands, found that improving mobile load time by just 0.1 seconds lifted retail conversion rate by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. In travel, conversion rose 10.1%.
That matters more in India than almost anywhere, because mobile now accounts for roughly 76.5% of e-commerce visits while converting at about 2.3% against 2.6% on desktop. Indian category conversion rates sit around 2.0–2.4%, and Baymard Institute’s analysis of 50 separate studies puts average cart abandonment at 70.22%. Every one of those numbers gets worse on a slow page.
Practical consequence: a ₹40,000 site that loads in 1.8 seconds on a mid-range Android will out-earn a ₹1.5 lakh site that loads in five. Before you approve any design, ask what the mobile performance budget is.
What should you actually be paying an agency for?
Not pixels. You are paying for the decisions that make the site earn: what pages exist, what each one says, how fast it loads, and whether you can prove it worked. A quote that only lists page count and design rounds is incomplete.
Insist that these appear in writing:
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A sitemap with a target search term mapped to each page
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Written conversion copy, not placeholder text you fill in later
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A stated mobile speed target and a PageSpeed Insights report at handover
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Analytics and conversion tracking configured, with events for every enquiry form and checkout step
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Schema markup for organisation, products or services, and reviews
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Full admin, domain and hosting access in your own name at handover
Red flags: a quote with no revision limit, “SEO included” with no listed deliverables, the domain registered in the agency’s name, and no answer to the question “who pays the hosting bill in year two?”
A one-week checklist to decide without overpaying
Work through these seven steps in order. It takes a few hours in total and usually saves a five-figure mistake.
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Count your SKUs and your enquiry types. Under 40 products and enquiry-led sales rarely justify Shopify’s cost stack.
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Write down the single action a visitor must take. Every page gets built to serve it.
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Send the same one-page brief to three agencies — page count, revision rounds, copy ownership, hosting owner. Identical briefs make quotes comparable.
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Run your current site and your two closest competitors through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Note the gap.
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Name the person who will update the site after launch. If that person is not technical, rule WordPress out.
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Calculate 24-month total cost: build fee + (monthly plan × 24) + GST + transaction fees on projected sales + app subscriptions. Compare that number, not the build fee.
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Agree the handover pack in the contract: admin access, analytics, speed report, source files.
One last thing worth checking before you sign: know what it will cost to send traffic to the finished site. A beautiful website with no acquisition plan is an expensive brochure — our breakdown of Meta ads cost in India and what you pay per lead is a sensible companion to this one.
Build it once, build it properly
AdiAnsh Media is a Pune-based digital marketing agency working with Indian and international brands. We build Wix Studio websites and Shopify stores that are quoted transparently, load fast on mid-range Android phones, and ship with analytics, conversion tracking and schema already in place — then we handle the SEO and the Google and Meta ads that bring people to them. If you are holding three quotes you cannot compare, send them over and we will tell you honestly what each one is missing.
Ready to start? get in touch with us and we will map the pages, the platform and the 24-month cost before you spend a rupee.