Costs
How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?
A UK small business website costs from about £150 a year if you build it yourself on a template, £800 to £3,000 from a freelancer, and £8,000 upwards from a mid-sized agency. From a one-person studio, a single page starts at £495 and a multi-page site runs £1,795 upwards, then roughly £200 a year to keep it online. What moves the number is how many unique templates you need, who writes the copy and whether anything has to talk to another system, not the page count.
You have three quotes open and, as far as you can tell, they describe the same website: £900, £4,200 and £11,000. The gap is real, and this is what sits inside it. Most owner-managed businesses land between £1,795 upwards for a multi-page site built properly by one experienced person, and a single-page site starts at £495.
The spread is that wide because "a website" covers at least four different products. A five-page site for a heating engineer, a twelve-page site with location pages and online booking, a shop with 400 products, and a portal where customers log in all get called the same thing. What you pay tracks decisions, writing and build hours. It does not track page count, which is why the "how many pages?" box on most enquiry forms tells a designer almost nothing.
What people actually pay in 2026
These bands come from quotes I have written and from published UK builder, freelance and agency pricing I check them against. All ex-VAT, all for a business site rather than a hobby project.
| Route | Typical cost | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder Wix, Squarespace, Shopify | £150 to £600 a year, all-in | A template, hosting and SSL. You supply the design decisions, the writing and the weekends. |
| Freelancer | £800 to £3,000 one-off | One person, often part-time or early on. The widest quality range of any route. |
| One-person studio Specialist, full-time | From £495 for a single page, £1,795 upwards multi-page | Strategy, copywriting, bespoke design, hand-built pages, launch and search setup. |
| Mid-sized agency | £8,000 to £25,000 | A designer, a developer, an account manager, a project manager, and the cost of keeping them. |
| Large or enterprise agency | £25,000+ | Discovery phases, custom platforms, procurement, contractual support terms. |
DIY is cheap in cash and expensive in hours
Squarespace's business plan is around £17 a month, Wix's core plan nearer £13, Shopify Basic about £25 before you install a single app. Add £12 a year for a.co.uk domain and you are live for under £350 a year. As software, that is good value and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The invoice hides the part that costs most. A first-timer needs 30 to 60 hours to get a builder site to a state they are not embarrassed by, and that is with the template doing the design work. If you charge £300 a day, you have spent several thousand pounds of your own time on something you will still want to change. Some people enjoy it. A plumber losing four Saturdays generally does not.
Freelancer, £800 to £3,000: judge the work, not the number
This band holds the best value on the list and most of the horror stories. £800 usually buys a template with your logo dropped in and your text pasted over the demo content. £3,000 buys somebody who thinks before they build. On paper, both quotes say "five-page responsive website".
So look at the output instead. Ask for three sites they built more than a year ago, then check whether those sites are still live, still quick on a phone, and ranking for anything besides the business name. If two of the three have disappeared, you have learned more than any proposal will tell you.
One-person studio, £1,795 upwards
This is the band I work in, so treat me as a biased witness. The difference from the freelancer band is not more pages. It is that somebody decides what the site has to make happen before deciding what it looks like, writes the copy instead of asking you to "send over some words", and builds the pages around the phrases your customers actually type. The aim is a site that brings in enquiries from search rather than one that sits there looking tidy, and the timeline for a multi-page build is agreed at quote stage rather than promised up front.
Agencies at £8,000 to £25,000 are not a rip-off
They are a different product. You are buying a designer, a developer, a project manager, cover when one of them is off sick, and a process that survives staff turnover. If you have a marketing lead, three internal stakeholders and a sign-off meeting, that structure earns its money. If you run two vans and a mobile number, you are paying to coordinate people you do not need.
Above £25,000 you are into custom platforms, procurement and contractual response times. Almost nobody reading this needs that, and the few who do already know it.
What actually moves the price
The most useful thing to understand before you compare anything: templates cost money, pages do not. Twenty service pages sharing one layout is a small job. Six pages that each need their own layout is a big one. Rough impacts, taken from quotes I write:
- Extra unique template: £150 to £400 each. Homepage, service, location, contact and article layouts cover most small businesses.
- E-commerce: £800 to £3,000 on top. Driven by catalogue size, product variants, shipping rules, and whether stock has to sync with something you already run.
- Copywriting: £75 to £250 a page. The most under-bought line on every quote, and the one that decides whether the site sells anything.
- Photography: £400 to £900 for a half or full day. Worth it for trades, food, interiors and anything physical. Skippable for consultants.
- Integrations: £200 to £1,500 each. Booking system, CRM, Stripe, Xero. A documented API is an afternoon; a system with no API is a fortnight.
- Migration and redirects: £250 to £795. Forty old URLs is an afternoon. Nine hundred, with ten years of blog posts, is not.
- SEO scope: a one-off audit and fix list from £495. The technical groundwork is already in the build price. Technical basics belong in any build. Ongoing content and local work is a separate, continuing cost.
- Animation and scroll work: £150 to £2,000. Small transitions sit at the bottom of that band, a bespoke scroll sequence at the top. The easiest line here to overspend on.
That last one needs a warning, because it is the line people are most often talked into and least often need. Motion earns its money when the product is hard to picture: a development that has not been built yet, a service nobody can see happening. On a boiler-repair site, a headline that slides in does nothing a phone number in the right place does not do better, and it adds weight to a page that has to load on one bar of signal.
What a £4,200 quote is actually made of
Take a service business with three locations. £2,200 for strategy, design and four templates. £700 for copy across nine pages. £450 for a booking integration. £350 for the location pages and their content. £500 to migrate an old WordPress site and map its redirects.
Ask for that breakdown on every quote you receive. It turns "is £4,200 reasonable?" into "do I need the booking integration?", and the second question is one you can answer about your own business. If a quote arrives as a single number with nothing underneath it, that is information too. My own stages are set out on the process page if you want to see what each one involves before you compare.
Two lines get cut first and cause most of the regret: the writing and the redirects. Cut the copy and you own a good-looking shell that persuades nobody. Cut the redirect work on a rebuild and you are throwing away rankings you already paid for, which is the most expensive saving available in this trade.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
None of these are large. All of them are permanent, and a cheap build often hides an expensive year.
| Item | Realistic UK cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | £8 to £15 a year (.co.uk) | Register it yourself, in your business name, on your own card. |
| Hosting | £0 to £360 a year | Free on static hosts like Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. £15 to £30 a month for managed WordPress. |
| SSL certificate | £0 | Let's Encrypt is free and standard. Anyone billing £80 a year for this is billing you for nothing. |
| Business email | £60 to £120 per mailbox, a year | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Not part of web hosting. |
| Care plan | £49 to £150 a month | Updates, backups, monitoring, small changes. Optional on a static site, sensible on anything with plugins. |
| Image licensing | £0 to £300 | Check the licence covers web and social and does not expire. "Royalty free" is not the same as "yours forever". |
| Content changes | £60 to £95 an hour | Ask the rate before you need it, not the week you do. |
A £900 site nobody finds is the most expensive item on this page. Run the arithmetic on a trade with a £600 average job: ten enquiries a month, half of them converting, is £3,000 of work a month. Those figures are an assumption rather than a measured result, but the shape holds. A quiet year costs more than the few thousand pounds saved on the build, and most "my site doesn't rank" problems trace back to how the site was built, not to a missing keyword.
How to compare quotes fairly
Once the numbers are in front of you, the number is the least useful part. Six questions separate three quotes faster than anything else I know.
- What exactly is included? Itemised: templates, page count, who writes the copy, who sources the images, forms, analytics, search setup, launch checks. "Included" is doing heavy lifting in most proposals.
- Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting account? You, on all three. If leaving means losing the site, you are renting it.
- What happens to my existing rankings? A good answer describes a redirect map, URL by URL, written before launch. A vague answer means your traffic is the thing being gambled.
- How many rounds of revisions, and then what? Two structured rounds of feedback is the industry norm, and it is what I work to. What matters is what happens when you are still not happy after them.
- What does a small change cost in a year's time? £60 to £95 an hour is the going rate. A cheap build with £120-an-hour aftercare and a five-day turnaround is not cheap.
- What happens if I leave? Do you get the files, can the hosting be pointed elsewhere, could another developer pick up the CMS, and how much notice does the care plan need? If the site sits in a proprietary system with no export, your exit price is a full rebuild.
If a quote cannot tell you who owns the code and what happens to your rankings, the number on it is not comparable to anything.
What I charge, and why
At the entry end there is a fixed one-page build at £495 with unlimited revisions, which exists precisely because the scope is pinned to a single page and the uncertainty that inflates most quotes is removed. Multi-page builds start at £995 and rise with complexity.
Werehouse Media is one person in England. That is the entire staff list, and it explains the price in both directions. A single-page site starts at £495 and takes days. A multi-page build runs from £1,795 upwards, with the timeline agreed at quote stage, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.
I can sit under agency pricing and still write the copy and do the search work because there is no account manager, no office and nobody billing you to coordinate me. The trade-off is real and worth saying out loud. One person takes a limited number of builds at a time, one person goes on holiday, and one person cannot promise a support rota with a two-hour response. If your business genuinely needs that cover, an agency is the better buy.
I also turn work down. If your budget is £900 I will tell you, rather than build a thinner version of a £3,000 site and let you find out in six months. What each service actually includes, with prices, is on the services page.
When a £14-a-month builder is genuinely the right call
Often. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Use a builder if you are pre-revenue and still finding out whether anyone wants the thing. A Squarespace site costs a fortnight of evenings and tells you exactly what a £4,000 site would about demand. Use one if nearly all your work already arrives through your Google Business Profile and word of mouth, because your next £500 belongs in reviews and photographs, not in a rebuild. What should not decide it is a round-number budget threshold. A tidy template beats a rushed bespoke build every time, but designer-built single pages start around £495, so the real question is whether the business is proven enough to justify spending on it at all.
Builders start costing you at the point search becomes your main source of enquiries. Thirty location pages, a booking flow shaped like your actual diary, fast loading on a weak signal, anything that has to talk to another system: that is where the platform begins working against you, and the monthly fee becomes the cheapest part of the bill. The longer version of that argument, including the parts that are unflattering to me, is in Wix, Squarespace or a web designer.
Whatever route you take, decide what the site has to make happen before you spend a penny on how it looks. If you want to know which band your project belongs in, tell me what the business does and I will tell you straight, including the times when the answer is that you do not need me.