How much does a website cost in the UK?
In 2026, a small business website in the UK typically costs £500–£2,000 from a freelancer, £1,000–£5,000 from a small studio, and £5,000–£25,000+ from an agency. Building it yourself on a site builder runs about £200–£400 a year. E-commerce usually starts around £2,000 and reaches £15,000.
Those are build costs only. Budget separately for a domain (£10–£15 a year), hosting (£0–£30 a month) and, if you want to be found, SEO (£200–£2,000 a month).
The short version, by route
"Website" describes jobs that have almost nothing in common, which is why quotes vary so wildly. Here's what each route actually costs in the UK right now.
| Route | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| DIY site builder | £200–£400 a year | Testing an idea, very tight budgets |
| Freelancer | £500–£2,000 | Simple brochure sites, one-off jobs |
| Small studio | £1,000–£5,000 | Most small businesses and trades |
| Agency | £5,000–£25,000+ | Larger firms, complex requirements |
| E-commerce build | £2,000–£15,000 | Selling products online |
| Custom / bespoke | £25,000+ | Software-like builds, integrations |
For transparency: we sit in the small studio band and start at £995 for a brochure site. We're telling you the whole range rather than just ours, because knowing where a quote sits is more useful than another sales page.
What actually moves the price
Five things account for nearly all the variation between quotes. If you understand these, you can read any quote properly.
1. How many pages
A five-page site is a different job to a fifty-page one. Most small-business sites need fewer pages than people expect: usually a home page, a page per service, an about page and a contact page. Extra pages are worth paying for when they target specific searches, not when they pad the site out.
2. Whether it sells online
E-commerce roughly doubles the work. Products, variants, stock, payments, delivery rules, tax and returns all need building and testing, and every one of them is a place things can go wrong later.
3. Custom design or template
A template costs less and can look perfectly good. Custom design costs more and is worth it when you're competing on brand, or when a template genuinely can't do what you need. Plenty of businesses pay for custom when they didn't need to.
4. Who writes the words
This is the most commonly underestimated line in any quote. If you write the content, you save money and it usually takes longer than you think. If the designer writes it, expect a few hundred pounds upward. Projects stall on content far more often than on design.
5. What it connects to
Booking systems, CRMs, payment providers, stock systems, calendars. Each integration adds cost, and each one adds something that can break when the other side changes.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions
The build price is rarely the whole cost, and this is where people get caught out twelve months in.
| Item | Typical cost | Needed? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10–£15 a year | Always |
| Hosting | £0–£30 a month | Always |
| SSL certificate | Usually free | Always |
| Maintenance / updates | £20–£200 a month | Depends on build |
| SEO | £200–£2,000 a month | If you want to rank |
| Content changes | £50–£150 an hour | As needed |
A site built on a heavy platform with a stack of plugins needs ongoing maintenance or it degrades and eventually breaks. A lighter, hand-built site needs much less. That difference is worth asking about before you commit, because it changes the real cost over three years far more than the build price does.
Is a cheap website worth it?
Sometimes, genuinely. A £500 site that loads fast and explains clearly what you do will beat a £5,000 site nobody ever finds. Price alone tells you very little.
The risk with the cheapest end isn't the price, it's what quietly gets skipped:
- Speed. Heavy templates that take five seconds to load on a phone, which is where most people will see you
- Search foundations. No structure, no schema, nothing telling Google what the pages are about
- Content. Filler text that says nothing specific, so nothing ranks and nothing convinces
- Ownership. The domain registered to someone else, or a proprietary platform you can't leave
That last one deserves its own conversation before you sign anything.
Do you actually own it?
Ask three questions of anyone quoting you, and the answers matter more than a few hundred pounds either way:
- Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be yours. This is the single most common way small businesses get stuck.
- Can the site be moved elsewhere? Some platforms are deliberately hard to leave.
- What happens if we part ways? A straight answer here tells you plenty about how the relationship will go.
Plenty of arrangements where the designer holds the domain and hosting are perfectly fine, and often genuinely easier for you. The thing that matters is that it's transferable on request and that you're told up front, not that you hold every login yourself from day one.
What we'd suggest budgeting
For a typical UK small business or trade wanting a site that brings in work rather than just existing:
- £1,000–£2,500 for the build, from a freelancer or small studio
- £150–£400 a year for domain and hosting
- £200–£500 a month for SEO, if being found matters, and it usually does
Below about £500 you're generally buying a template with your logo on it. Above about £5,000, ask hard what the extra is buying, because for a small business it's often complexity you don't need.
One more thing worth factoring in now: an increasing share of people don't search at all any more, they ask an AI assistant for a recommendation and take the two or three names it gives them. Being one of those names is a different job to ranking on Google, and almost nobody has done it yet. If you're spending on a site in 2026, it's worth asking whoever builds it whether they've thought about that.
If you want a straight answer about your own situation, tell us what you're after and we'll tell you roughly what it should cost, even if that means saying you don't need us.
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