Advice
How much should a small business website cost in the UK?
Quotes for the same website vary enormously. Here is what actually drives the price, and the four questions that tell you whether one is fair.
It is the first question everyone asks and the one the industry is worst at answering. Search it and you will find plenty of pages that talk around it for a thousand words and land on “it depends”. It does depend, but not on anything mysterious, and you can get to a useful number in about five minutes.
The honest ranges
Across the guides published by UK agencies and freelancers, the numbers cluster fairly consistently:
- DIY on a builder platform: £150–£400 a year in subscription, plus your own evenings. The software is cheap; your time is not.
- A freelancer or small studio: broadly £500–£3,000 for a straightforward small business site, with most simple builds landing in the lower half of that.
- A regional agency: commonly £2,000–£6,000 for the same brief.
- Anything with real functionality, such as a shop, bookings, a searchable database or an integration: £3,000 upwards, and genuinely open-ended.
Those overlap heavily, which tells you something important: the same website can be quoted at £800 and at £4,000, and the difference is often not the website.
What actually moves the price
The number of pages, but less than you would think
Once a design exists, adding a page is not a large job. This is why the jump from five pages to ten costs less than double almost everywhere. The expensive part is the first page, not the tenth.
Who writes the words
This is the single biggest hidden variable in any quote, and the one to ask about first. Writing a ten-page website properly is a couple of days of work. If the quote assumes you will supply the copy, you are being quoted for roughly half a project, and if you are like most business owners, that half will sit unwritten for six months while the site waits.
Two quotes, one at £900 including copy and one at £700 without, are not £200 apart. The second one is more expensive and slower.
Custom design versus a template
A template configured for you is faster and cheaper. A design made for your business takes longer and looks like you rather than like the eleven thousand other businesses using the same theme. Both are legitimate; just know which you are buying, because the price gap between them is real and so is the difference in the result.
Functionality
This is where budgets actually break. A site that describes your business is a known quantity. A site that does something, that takes payments, manages bookings, holds a searchable stock list or talks to software you already use, is software development, and it should be scoped and quoted properly rather than bolted onto a website price.
The overhead behind the quote
An agency quote covers an account manager, a project manager, premises and a sales process. Sometimes that is worth every penny. On a complex project with many stakeholders, that structure is exactly what stops it going wrong. On a five-page website for a two-person business, you are largely paying for a structure you will never use.
The costs that are not in the headline price
- Domain: roughly £10–£15 a year for a .co.uk. Non-negotiable, and it should be registered in your name.
- Hosting: anywhere from £5 to £50 a month. Cheap shared hosting is usually the reason a site is slow.
- Maintenance: updates, backups and security. Either you do it, or you pay someone, or it does not happen, and the third option is how sites get hacked.
- Changes: ask what a small edit costs before you need one, not after.
The question that saves the most money
“What is the total cost in year one, and what is it in year two?” A cheap build with expensive hosting and £90 an hour for changes can cost more over three years than a build that was twice the price up front. Get both numbers before you decide.
Is cheap always false economy?
No, and the industry is a little too fond of implying it is. A £400 website built properly for a business that needs five pages is not a compromise. It is the right size of solution.
Cheap becomes false economy in specific, recognisable ways: when the site is slow, when nobody wrote the words so half the pages say nothing, when it was built on something you cannot edit, when the domain ends up registered to the designer, or when it looks so obviously thrown together that it makes a good business look like a risky one. Those are the failure modes worth avoiding, and none of them is really about the number on the invoice.
A sensible way to decide
- Work out what one customer is worth to you. If a customer is worth £2,000, a website that brings two a year has paid for itself several times over. If a customer is worth £30, the maths is entirely different and you should spend accordingly.
- Decide what the site actually has to do. Look credible, generate enquiries, take bookings, sell things. Each of those is a different budget.
- Get three quotes and compare like with like. Ask each one: is copywriting included, is the design custom, who owns the domain, what does a change cost, and what is the year-two cost.
- Ignore the highest and lowest unless one of them explains itself. A big outlier in either direction usually means somebody has understood the brief differently.
You do not need to become an expert. You need four questions and the willingness to ask them.
