Ask three web designers what a website costs and you will get three wildly different answers. Quotes for the same job can differ by a factor of ten, and the expensive one is not automatically the better one. Here is an honest breakdown of small business website cost in the UK: what you are paying for, what moves the number, and how to tell a fair price from a bad one.
The rough ranges in the UK
- Do it yourself on a site builder – around £10 to £25 a month, plus a lot of your evenings.
- Small business site, built for you – typically £500 to £1,500.
- Online shop – usually £1,500 upwards, depending on how many products you sell.
- Design agency – £3,000 to £10,000 and up, usually with a strategy and branding process attached.
Most tradespeople and small businesses sit comfortably in the second band. Above that you are generally paying for bespoke design work rather than a better result for your customers.
What you actually get at each price
Under £500. Usually a template with your text dropped into it. It can look perfectly smart. What you tend not to get is anyone writing the words for you, and that is the part most people get stuck on.
£500 to £1,500. A proper small business site: five to ten pages, written for you, your photos tidied up, a working enquiry form, mobile-first, and set up so Google can find it. For most trades this is the sensible band.
£1,500 to £3,000. Online shops, booking systems, or sites with a lot of pages. The extra cost is nearly always functionality rather than looks.
£3,000 and up. Agency territory. Bespoke design, brand work, sometimes a content strategy. Worth it for some businesses. Rarely necessary for a local trade.
What actually moves the price
The number of pages. More pages means more writing, and the writing is most of the work. A five-page site and a fifteen-page site are not the same job.
Who writes the words. This is the big one. If you write them it is cheaper. Almost everybody says they will, and then does not, and the project stalls for months. Be honest with yourself about this before you agree a price.
Photographs. Good pictures of your own work make an enormous difference to whether people ring you. Sorting, cropping and compressing them properly takes time, and stock images of somebody else’s kitchen fool nobody.
Selling online. Payments, delivery rules, tax settings and product uploads roughly double the work compared with a brochure site.
Bespoke design versus a proven layout. A custom design costs more and is not usually what wins you work. What wins work is a fast page that says what you do, where you do it and how to reach you.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions
Every website has two unavoidable running costs:
- A domain name – roughly £10 to £20 a year.
- Hosting – roughly £60 to £150 a year for a small business site.
A security certificate, the padlock in the address bar, should be included at no cost. If somebody is charging you separately for one, ask why.
Everything beyond that is optional. Updates, backups and small content changes can be a paid service or something you do yourself. Neither is wrong, but it should be your choice rather than a condition of having the site at all.
Monthly website packages: read the small print
You will see offers along the lines of “no upfront cost, just £49 a month”. Sometimes these are fine. Often they are a rental agreement dressed up as a purchase.
Before you sign one, get clear answers on three things. Who owns the domain name. What happens to the site if you stop paying. And whether there is a minimum term. If the answer to the second question is that the site disappears, you are not buying a website, you are renting one indefinitely, and after three years you will have paid more than a one-off build would have cost.
Warning signs
- A monthly fee with no end date and no ownership of the finished site
- Not being given your own domain and hosting logins
- Guaranteed first place on Google – nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is either guessing or lying
- A quote with no page count and no completion date
- Being asked to pay the full amount before anything has been shown to you
- No mention of who writes the content
Is a cheap website worth having?
A cheap website that loads quickly, says what you do, shows your work and makes it easy to ring you will beat an expensive one that does not. Price is not the thing that matters. Whether it answers the questions your customers are actually asking is.
What a very cheap site usually lacks is the writing, and that is what people read before deciding whether to call you.
What to ask before you pay
Ask for a fixed price in writing that states the number of pages, who writes the content, how many rounds of changes are included, when it will be finished, and who owns the domain at the end. If a designer will not put that in writing, keep looking.
Ours is a fixed price agreed before we start, with the words written for you and no compulsory monthly fee – you can see exactly what we charge, or read how our website design service works. If you would rather just ask, tell us about your business and we will come back with a plan and a price, free of charge.