What a Website Actually Costs in the UK

Anyone who gives you a firm price before understanding what the site has to do is guessing. They may be guessing from experience, and the guess may turn out close, but it is still a guess — and the gap between the guess and the reality has to go somewhere. It goes into scope arguments later, or into corners cut quietly.

That said, “it depends” is a useless answer, so here are bands. They reflect what UK studios and freelancers were charging when this was written. Treat them as orientation, not as a quote.

The bands

Template site, minimal customisation — roughly £500 to £1,500. A recognised theme, your logo and colours, your text dropped into an existing layout. Usually a freelancer or a very small studio. Perfectly reasonable for a business that needs a credible online presence and nothing more. You are buying assembly, not design.

Small custom brochure site, five to ten pages — roughly £2,000 to £6,000. Design work specific to you, a properly structured set of service pages, a content management system you can actually use, sensible technical setup and someone accountable at launch. This band covers the majority of UK small business sites, with freelancers towards the bottom and agencies towards the top.

Larger site with structure and content work — roughly £6,000 to £15,000. More pages, a proper information architecture, copywriting rather than “send us your text”, photography, integrations with the software you already run, and thought given to how the site earns its keep rather than just existing.

Ecommerce — starts around £5,000 and goes up steeply. A small catalogue on a hosted platform sits at the bottom. Anything involving stock synchronisation, complex variants, trade pricing or a connection to your accounting system moves quickly into five figures.

Bespoke applications — no useful band exists. If the site has accounts, dashboards, booking logic or anything that behaves like software, it is priced by the week and estimated from a specification. Anyone giving you a number for this from a phone call is not estimating.

London tends to sit above these figures and regional studios below, though the spread within a city is wider than the spread between cities. Add VAT where the supplier is registered.

The five things that move a quote

Page count, but less than you think. Twenty pages using four templates is not five times the work of four pages. Twenty genuinely different layouts is. Ask how many unique templates are in the estimate, not how many pages.

Who writes the content. This is the single most underestimated line. Writing eight service pages properly takes days, and it needs someone who can interview you and turn the answers into something worth reading. Sites stall for months at this exact point, and it is usually the client side that stalls. If the quote says “client to supply copy”, be honest about whether you will.

Design originality. Adapting a strong template is a fraction of the cost of designing from nothing. Both are legitimate. Only one is expensive.

Integrations. Booking systems, CRM connections, payment flows, stock feeds. Each one is a small project with its own testing and its own capacity to break.

Migration and redirects. Moving from an existing site means mapping old addresses to new ones. Skipping it is cheaper on the invoice and expensive afterwards, because it is how businesses lose their accumulated search visibility overnight.

The costs that appear after launch

A website is not a purchase, it is a small ongoing obligation. Budget for these separately or they will surprise you.

• Hosting. From a few pounds a month for something basic to a few tens of pounds for managed hosting that is actually monitored. The cheapest option is rarely the saving it appears to be.
• Domain renewal. Small, annual, and the thing people forget until the site goes dark.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security. Either you do it, or you pay a monthly fee, or you gamble. A modest monthly retainer for this is normal and worth it.
• Licences. Premium plugins, form services, booking tools. These renew.
• Changes. You will want them. Agree an hourly rate up front rather than discovering it.

Why cheap quotes are cheap

There are honest cheap quotes and dishonest ones, and they are distinguishable.

An honest cheap quote is narrow. Template-based, small page count, you supply the text, limited revisions, no content work. That is a real product at a real price and it suits plenty of businesses.

A dishonest cheap quote is broad and vague. It promises a full custom site with content and SEO for a figure that could not cover the hours. Something has to give, and it is usually the content, which arrives as filler, or the aftercare, which does not arrive at all. Occasionally the price is low because you are being locked into a proprietary platform you cannot leave, with the real cost in monthly fees over three years.

The test: ask what is explicitly excluded. A confident supplier answers immediately. A vague one changes the subject.

Questions that expose the real price

• What is not included in this figure?
• Who writes the copy, and what happens to the timeline if I am slow supplying it?
• How many rounds of revision, and what happens after them?
• Who owns the site, the domain and the hosting account at the end?
• What is the monthly cost to keep it running and updated?
• Can I edit the pages myself, and will you show me how?
• What happens to the existing URLs?

If a supplier cannot answer those, the number they gave you is not a price. It is an opening position.

What we would tell you if you rang

If your budget is under £1,000, use a good template and spend the difference on decent photography and writing. That combination beats a cheap custom build every time.

If you are between £2,000 and £6,000, you can have a properly built site — but decide now whether the budget includes the writing, because that decision is what determines whether the site is finished in eight weeks or still half-empty at Christmas.

And if the website is not the constraint on your business, do not spend on it. A better site does not help a business whose problem is that nobody knows it exists. That is a different conversation, and often a cheaper one.

Tell us what the site needs to do on the get started page, or read how we approach website development before you ask anyone for a number.