How much does a small business website cost in the UK?

We’ve written before about why nobody gives you a straight number for a website. The short version: “a website” covers everything from a one-page card to a full shop, so the honest answer is always “it depends”.

But “it depends” doesn’t help you budget. So here are the numbers we see in the UK market. Every one of them shifts with the job.

The four price bands

Do it yourself on a site builder: £10 to £30 a month. Wix, Squarespace, and the like. No upfront cost worth mentioning, but you’re doing all the work, and the monthly fee runs for as long as the site exists. Over five years that’s £600 to £1,800 for a site you can’t take with you if you leave. Fine for testing an idea. Expensive as a permanent home.

A freelancer filling in a template: £500 to £2,000. Usually WordPress with an off-the-shelf theme. You get online quickly and it costs little upfront. The trade-offs are the usual template ones: the site ships heavier than it should, it looks like what it is, and the maintenance bill starts the day it launches. More on that in bespoke vs WordPress.

A hand-built site from a small studio: £2,000 to £7,000. This is the work we do. Design, words, and code made for one business. The range inside the band depends mostly on how many genuinely different pages you need and whether we’re writing the content or you are. A five-page site for a trades business sits at the lower end. A ten-page site with case studies, custom photography direction, and content written from interviews sits at the top.

A full-service agency: £10,000 and up, sometimes well up. You’re paying for a team: strategy workshops, brand work, content, build, and account management. For most small businesses this is more machine than the job needs. For a business where the website is the main sales channel, it can be worth it.

Anything with real functionality, bookings, accounts, a shop, is a different conversation and a different budget. That’s a web app, not a website, and it’s priced on what it does, not how it looks.

The running costs nobody mentions in the quote

The build price is not the whole price. Every site carries running costs, and they vary more than people expect.

• Domain name: £10 to £15 a year. Non-negotiable, and it should be registered in your name, not your developer’s.
• Hosting: anywhere from free to £30 a month. A static site like the ones we build can be hosted for nothing on Cloudflare Pages. A WordPress site needs proper managed hosting, typically £10 to £30 a month, because there’s software running on the server that has to be kept fed.
• Email: £2 to £6 per inbox per month for something professional like Google Workspace or a hosting bundle.
• Maintenance: this is the big variable. A static site needs essentially none. A WordPress site needs updates applied regularly or it becomes a security problem, and a maintenance plan runs £30 to £100 or more a month.

Run those over five years and the “cheap” option often overtakes the “expensive” one. A £4,000 hand-built site with free hosting costs about £4,100 over five years. A £1,000 WordPress site with £20 hosting and a £50 maintenance plan costs £5,200 over the same period, and at the end of it the theme is dated and you’re quoted for a rebuild.

What moves the price

If you want to keep a quote down, these are the levers that matter:

• Content. Writing the words is often a third of the real work. Turn up with clear, finished copy and photos of your actual business and the price drops.
• Unique page designs. Ten pages that share three layouts cost much less than ten pages that each need their own design.
• Functionality. The moment the site takes bookings or payments, you’ve left brochure territory and the price reflects it.

What doesn’t move the price much: number of pages on its own, and most of the things that sound expensive but aren’t, like a contact form or a map.

The only bad number

A high quote isn’t a red flag and neither is a low one. The red flag is a number with nothing behind it: no breakdown, and no explanation of what’s included and what isn’t.

If you want a real figure for your situation rather than a band from a blog post, tell us what you’re trying to do. We’ll give you a number and show the working.