How much does a website cost in the UK is a question with an unhelpfully wide answer, because a website can mean a five page brochure site or a booking platform. This post breaks the market into the four bands a small business will actually be quoted in, explains what drives the price inside each one, and covers the ongoing costs that quotes routinely leave out.
The four bands
Under £500. Template based, built fast. A small WordPress or page builder site on a proven template, with your content, your branding and a contact form. Five to ten pages. This is the right band for a trade or service business that needs a credible, fast, mobile friendly site that ranks for its own name and town. It is what our own website design service is built around, at £299 to launch.
£1,000 to £3,000. Custom design on a standard build. A designer produces layouts specific to your brand rather than adapting a theme, and the build follows. More pages, more considered structure, usually some copywriting included. Sensible if you are competing against established firms who look more professional than you do.
£5,000 to £15,000. Custom build with functionality. Booking systems, member areas, integrations with your CRM or job management software, multi language, or ecommerce with real product complexity. The cost is in the functionality, not the appearance.
£20,000 and above. Bespoke application development rather than a website. If someone quotes this for a brochure site, ask precisely what is being built.
What actually drives the number
- Page count. Not linear, but a fifty page site takes materially longer than a ten page one.
- Who writes the content. This is the most common hidden cost. If you supply the words, the build is cheaper and faster. If the agency writes them, add to both.
- Functionality. A contact form is trivial. A booking calendar tied to your availability is not.
- Design originality. Adapting a template versus designing from nothing is the single biggest jump between band one and band two.
- Migration. Moving an existing site with rankings requires redirect mapping. Skipping it is how businesses lose their traffic overnight.
The costs quotes leave out
The build price is not the total. Budget for these separately.
- Hosting. Roughly £5 to £30 a month for a small business site. Cheap shared hosting is a common cause of slow load times.
- Domain renewal. Usually £10 to £20 a year for a co.uk.
- Maintenance. WordPress core, theme and plugin updates. Skipping these is the most common route to a hacked site.
- Backups. Cheap, and the thing everyone regrets not having.
- Content updates. Either your time or someone else’s.
A website is not the same purchase as visibility
This is where most of the disappointment in the market comes from. A new site does not bring traffic by itself. It gives you something worth sending traffic to. Getting found is separate work, and it is ongoing rather than a one off build. We wrote about the decision point in whether Luton businesses need a new website, and about the trade off between channels in social media against a website.
If you are choosing between spending £3,000 on a beautiful site and spending £500 on a decent one plus a year of SEO, the second usually produces more enquiries. The exception is when your current site is actively costing you credibility in front of customers who already found you.
How to compare two quotes that look the same
Two agencies quote £1,200 for a ten page site. One will take four weeks and hand you a site you can edit yourself. The other will take three months and leave you paying for every text change. The quote does not tell you which is which, so ask these five questions.
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the site files at the end? The answer should be you, in writing, with logins handed over.
- Can I edit page text without paying you? If the answer is no, add a change budget to the real cost.
- Is redirect mapping included? Only relevant if you have an existing site, and critical if you do. Without it you lose whatever rankings you had.
- What is the page speed target? A specific answer means someone will test it. A vague one means nobody will.
- What happens after launch? Updates, backups and security are either included, quoted separately, or nobody’s job. Find out which.
The cheapest quote that answers all five well is almost always better value than the most expensive one that does not.
Frequently asked questions
Are Wix and Squarespace cheaper overall?
They lower the build cost and raise the monthly. They are perfectly capable of ranking. The real trade off is portability, because moving off them later means rebuilding rather than migrating.
Should I pay monthly for a website instead of upfront?
It spreads the cost, which helps cash flow. Check one thing before signing: who owns the site and the domain if you stop paying. If the answer is not you, you are renting.
How long should a build take?
A template based small business site should take one to two weeks once content is ready. Custom design work runs four to eight. The delay is almost always content approval rather than build time.
Getting a real figure
How much a website costs in the UK depends on page count, who writes the content, and whether you need functionality beyond a contact form. Tell us those three things and we will price it without a discovery call, including telling you honestly if a cheaper build plus visibility work would serve you better. Get in touch for a fixed quote.