Nobody actually wants a cheap website. People searching for cheap website design — or for the same thing under its politer name, affordable website design — all want one outcome: to pay a fair price, get something that works, and not discover six months later that they have been quietly paying for nothing.
So here is what your money actually buys at three different price points, written by somebody who sells one of them. I will tell you where the other two are the better choice.
What £0 gets you: the free website builders
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and half a dozen others will let you build a site for nothing. Let us be honest about this: they are good products. The drag-and-drop editors genuinely work, the templates look fine, and if you are testing whether a business idea has legs, you should absolutely use one rather than pay anybody.
The catch is what free actually means.
Your web address will be something like yourbusiness.wixsite.com/plumbing. Customers read that the way you would read a van with a mobile number painted on in marker pen. It says temporary.
Most free tiers also put the builder’s own advert on your site. You are paying for their marketing with your shop window.
And the real cost is not money. It is the three weekends you spend learning the editor, fighting the mobile layout, and writing the words — which, for most people, is the hardest part by a distance. If your Saturday is worth anything to you, free is not free.
What a builder really costs once you are serious
To lose the adverts and use your own domain, you are into a paid plan. Across the main builders that lands somewhere around £10 to £25 a month, depending on what you need.
Call it £15. That is £180 a year, every year, for as long as the site exists. Over three years you have spent north of £500 and you still built it yourself.
That is not a scandal — it is a fair price for the software. But it is worth doing the sum before you assume DIY is the cheap option. If you are wondering how much a website costs once everything is counted, we went through the wider numbers in what a small business website should cost.
What around £199 gets you
This is roughly where a one-page site built for you starts, and it is what we charge for a landing page, so take it with the appropriate pinch of salt.
What you are buying at that price is somebody else doing it: the page built, the words written, your own domain, the contact form and tap-to-call button wired up, and the thing live in a day or two. You are not buying a lot of pages. You are buying one page that exists to get the phone ringing.
What it is not is a ten-page website, an online shop, or a bespoke design nobody else has. If somebody offers you all of that for £199, look very carefully at what happens in month two.
What £2,000 and up gets you
At an agency you are paying for time and thinking, not just pages. Properly done, that means somebody sits down with you first, works out what the site needs to do, designs something specific to your business, writes it, builds it, and tests it.
Here is the honest part: sometimes that is exactly what you should buy.
If you have a genuinely complicated business — bookings and availability, a lot of services that each need explaining, stock, several locations, something that has to talk to software you already use — then a cheap site will not do it, and trying to save money there will cost you more than it saves.
If you are a sole trader who needs five pages, some photos of your work and a phone number that rings, you do not need to spend two grand. Affordable website design exists precisely for this, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling.
The “responsive” trap, and what mobile friendly really means
You will see “fully responsive design” on quotes, usually as a bullet point meant to sound impressive.
Responsive and mobile friendly are the same promise in two different words. Both mean the site changes shape to fit whatever screen it is on, so it works on a phone as well as a laptop. That is it.
Every site built in the last decade should do this as standard, and most of your customers will never see your site on anything but a phone. If somebody quotes “responsive design” as a paid extra, you are being read from a price list written in about 2014. It is not an upgrade. It is the floor.
The thing actually worth checking is simpler and you can do it yourself: pull the site up on your own phone. Can you read it without pinching? Is the phone number a button you can tap? Does it load before you lose interest? That is what matters, and it is covered properly in our business website checklist.
What cheap actually costs you later
The price is the bit everyone looks at. The bit that hurts is usually somewhere else.
Whose name is on it? If the domain is registered to whoever built the site rather than to you, you do not own your own address. People find this out at the worst possible moment, which is roughly what happened to everybody in your web designer has disappeared.
Can you leave? This is the real cost of a builder. A site built on Wix stays on Wix. There is no export, no moving it somewhere cheaper, no taking it with you. You are renting, and the rent does not stop.
Can anybody find it? A cheap site that nobody ever sees is not a bargain, it is a waste of £199. Being findable is a separate job from having a website, and it is mostly free — it just has to actually be done. Start with getting your business onto Google Maps.
Five questions to ask before you pay for any website
These work on us, on an agency, and on the bloke in the pub who says his nephew does websites.
Whose name will the domain be registered in? The only right answer is yours.
If I want to move it elsewhere in two years, can I? If the answer is complicated, that is the answer.
Is this price fixed, and what is not included? Get it in writing before anything starts.
Who writes the words? If the answer is you, budget a weekend you had not planned on.
What happens when I need a change in six months? Find out what that costs now, not then.
Cheap website design, or good value?
They are not the same thing and it is worth being clear about the difference.
Cheap is a low number today with something unpleasant attached — a domain in somebody else’s name, a monthly fee that never ends, a site you cannot take anywhere.
Good value is knowing exactly what you are paying, owning everything at the end, and having the thing earn its money back in work.
By that measure a free Wix site can be excellent value, and a £5,000 agency build can be a terrible one. It depends entirely on what you actually need.
Paying for leads instead? The same maths applies — see which lead site is actually worth it.
If you are not sure which of the three you are, ring us and ask. We will tell you honestly, including when the answer is that you should go and build it yourself on a free plan this weekend. You can see exactly what we charge before you speak to anyone.