The words on your website cost either almost nothing or more than the design, and nobody explains why. Here are the real 2026 rates for website copy, what the money actually buys, and how to tell a copywriter from a content mill.
By John Traugott, founder of RankFrost · Updated July 2026
The short answer
Website copy is usually priced per page or per project. The honest ranges:
Budget writers and content mills: $25–$100 per page. You get what you pay for.
Experienced freelance copywriter: $300–$1,000 per page.
Conversion and specialist copywriters: $1,000–$2,500+ per page.
Full small-business site (5–6 pages): $1,500–$5,000 is typical.
You'll also see per-word rates ($0.10–$0.50, mostly for articles) and hourly consulting ($50–$150). Why the enormous spread for "the same" deliverable? Because writing the words is the last and smallest part of the job.
A $1,000 page and a $50 page can be the same length. The difference is everything that happened before the typing started.
The billing model tells you a lot about how the writer thinks about the work.
One price for the whole site: research, strategy, every page, and revisions. Everyone knows the scope, and the writer is paid to make the site work, not to produce words. Typical: $1,500–$5,000 for a small-business site.
$300–$1,000 per page in the experienced-freelancer range. Easy mental math. Just confirm what counts as a page and whether research and revisions are inside the number or extra.
$0.10–$0.50 per word for experienced writers. It works for blog content, but for sales pages it rewards padding and punishes clarity. Your homepage shouldn't get more expensive by getting worse.
$50–$150 an hour, best for punch-ups, second opinions, and coaching you through writing it yourself. Whole websites billed hourly tend to drift; get a project price instead.
No questions about your customers. The biggest one. If they can start writing today, they're not writing about your business.
Per-word pricing on your homepage. It pays the writer to be long-winded exactly where you need them to be sharp.
AI-generated copy at human prices. If every sample reads polished but interchangeable, you're paying $600 a page for a prompt.
“Unlimited revisions.” Sounds generous; means no strategy. A writer with a plan needs two rounds, not twenty guesses.
Samples are walls of text. Website copy is scanned, not read. If their portfolio pages look like essays, your visitors will bounce off them.
All about your company, not your customer. "We're passionate about excellence" sells nothing. Good copy makes the customer the hero and your business the guide.
The RankFrost answer
Copywriting is one of the three things I do, and it's built into every website project rather than bolted on. If you only need the words, I quote that on its own. Either way:
Your customer is the hero. Every page is written around what they're trying to fix, in the words they use.
Research first. I interview you and mine your reviews before I write a sentence.
Written to be found. Pages are built around real searches, so the copy earns rankings too.
An exact quote up front. Free call, written proposal, no hourly meter running.
$300 to $1,000 per page from an experienced freelance copywriter is the standard 2026 range. Content mills charge $25 to $100 per page, and specialist conversion copywriters run $1,000 to $2,500 or more. For a typical 5-to-6-page small-business site, expect $1,500 to $5,000 for the full set.
Roughly $0.10 to $0.50 per word for experienced writers, though per-word pricing fits blog articles better than website copy. A homepage is judged by what it makes visitors do, not by its word count. Some of the best-converting pages are the shortest.
Because the writing is the last step. The real work is research: interviewing you, mining your reviews, and learning the exact words your customers use, then deciding what each page needs to say and in what order. A cheap page skips the research, and it reads like it.
You can, and for a first draft it's genuinely useful. The catch: AI writes from averages, so left alone it produces the same polished, interchangeable copy as everyone else who left it alone. Copy that converts is built from your customers' actual words and a clear strategy, and it still needs a human who knows what to keep.
An exact quote after a free call. Copy is included in my web design projects rather than sold as an add-on, and I write it so your customer is the hero and every page has one clear job. If you only need the words, I quote copywriting on its own too.
About the author
I run RankFrost, a web design, copywriting, and SEO business in Grand Junction, Colorado. This is the third pricing page I've published (see SEO costs and website costs) because I think "it depends, book a call" is a cop-out answer to an honest question.
Want a quote for your site's copy? Request a free call or ring me at (970) 536-2438. I'll read what you have now and tell you honestly whether it needs a rewrite or a tune-up.