The range you'll find online is absurd. From $200 DIY templates to $10,000 agency proposals. Both can be the wrong answer. Here's what the numbers actually mean, and how to figure out what your business genuinely needs.
The three tiers
DIY builders. $200 to $500 a year.
Squarespace and Wix have made this tier easy to sell. You get a site up in a weekend, it looks passable on mobile, and the billing is predictable. The problem isn't the price. It's what you're not getting.
These platforms are built for everyone, which means they're optimised for no one. Your SEO is generic, your gallery is slow by default, and the moment you stop paying, everything disappears. You don't own the code, the structure, or the rankings. Couples comparing photographers will sense the sameness even if they can't name it.
Freelancer build. $800 to $2,500 one-off.
A step up in design, but often a step sideways in strategy. A freelancer will typically hand you a good-looking site, take the final payment, and move on. No SEO research informing the copy, no structure built to rank for "wedding photographer [your city]", and no one to call six months later when something breaks or Google rewrites the rules again.
Many photographers in this tier end up with a site that looks better than Squarespace but performs the same. Because the technical foundation was never part of the brief.
Specialist agency. $1,500 to $3,000 setup plus monthly retainer.
This is where a site stops being a brochure and starts being a business asset. A specialist who builds exclusively for photographers knows what gallery load times do to bounce rates, how to structure schema markup for local search, and which keywords actually convert in your market.
The retainer isn't a fee for keeping the lights on. It's ongoing optimisation, copy refinement, and someone with skin in the game if your rankings slip. This tier costs more upfront. It earns more back.
What actually drives the price
Not all custom builds are equal. Four things separate a site that ranks from one that merely exists.
Custom design. Stock templates share DNA with thousands of other sites. A bespoke build is designed around how couples move through your portfolio, not a generic user journey borrowed from a lifestyle brand.
SEO infrastructure. Title tags, schema markup, page speed, internal linking, image alt text, local signals. This has to be wired into the build from the first line of code. Retrofitting SEO onto a poorly structured site rarely works.
Gallery performance. Wedding photography sites live and die on image presentation. Lazy loading, WebP conversion, responsive sizing. Done wrong, your gallery is the thing killing your rankings and your first impressions at the same time.
Ongoing updates. Search is not a one-time event. Google's understanding of your site evolves, competitors publish new content, and your own work changes with each season. A site that isn't maintained slowly slides back down the results page.
What most photographers get wrong
They buy on price, not on return.
A Squarespace subscription at $300 a year feels like the responsible choice. But if that site generates zero organic leads, and most do, then it's $300 a year for a business card nobody finds. Meanwhile the photographer two miles away with a properly built site is showing up every time a couple searches for someone in their city.
One booked wedding from a single organic enquiry typically covers years of a specialist retainer. The question isn't how much does a website cost. It's what is a new client worth to me, and what am I doing online to earn them.
When you frame it that way, the calculation changes entirely.
The photographers winning on Google right now aren't there by accident. They invested in a site built to rank, and they kept investing. The cost of doing that properly is a fraction of what most photographers leave on the table every year by staying invisible.
If you're tired of watching enquiries go to someone else, that's the only number that matters.
Ready to see what a site built to rank looks like?
Book a Free Discovery Call