Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five numbers between £300 and £15,000. None of them is lying. Here is what actually sits behind those numbers, and where our own prices fall.
The short answer
For a small business in the UK, a professionally built website is usually £500 to £1,500 as a one-off. Below £300 you are buying a template filled in by someone who has not asked about your business. Above £3,000 you are paying for custom functionality — booking systems, memberships, integrations with software you already run — and that is a fair price when you genuinely need those things.
What you are actually paying for
Almost nobody is paying for "the design". You are paying for the hours: the conversation about what your customers need to see first, the writing, the build, the testing on four browsers and three screen sizes, and the day after launch when something turns out to behave differently in the real world.
A quote that looks suspiciously cheap has usually removed the first and the last of those. You get a template, filled with the text you supplied, live on a Friday, with nobody answering on Monday.
Where our prices sit
We publish them, so you can compare before you speak to anyone:
- Standard — £495. Up to five pages: home, about, services, contact and one more. Right for a business that needs a credible presence and a contact form that works.
- Professional — £895. Up to twelve pages, blog, gallery, enquiry forms and Google Analytics. The usual choice for an established service business.
- Platinum — £1,495. Larger sites, e-commerce with WooCommerce, booking or membership features, content in more than one language.
Every price is a fixed one-off cost. Work outside a package is £60 an hour, or £90 when you need it the same week. Page copy written for you is £75 a page.
What makes a website more expensive
Four things move the number, and only one of them is design:
- Number of pages. Not because pages are hard, but because each one needs text that someone has to write.
- Selling online. A shop is not a page — it is products, delivery rules, tax, payment provider and a checkout that has to work on a bad phone connection.
- Anything that books, calculates or logs people in. Every one of those is software, not a layout.
- Content in more than one language. It doubles the writing and adds the technical part that most builders get wrong.
The costs nobody mentions at the quote stage
The build is a one-off. Running the site is not:
- Domain — around £10 to £20 a year.
- Hosting — ours is £15 to £50 a month depending on the size of the site. Free hosting exists and you will meet it the first time your site is slow at 9am.
- Looking after it — updates, backups, security. Our care plans start at £39 a month. You can also do it yourself; the point is that somebody has to.
- Text and photographs. The most common reason a website is three months late is that nobody wrote the About page.
When you should not pay us at all
If you need one page with your phone number, opening hours and a map, and you have no plans to grow it — use Squarespace or Wix and spend an afternoon on it. Paying an agency £500 for that is money you could put into advertising instead. We would rather tell you that now than build something you did not need.
The moment it stops being true is when the site starts doing work for you: taking bookings, ranking in search, running in two languages, feeding a CRM. That is where a template builder starts charging you in workarounds.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Put both providers in front of the same five questions:
- How many pages, and who writes the text?
- What happens after launch — for how long, and at what cost?
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the admin password?
- Can another developer take this site over, or is it locked to your platform?
- What is explicitly not included?
The answers will explain the gap between £400 and £1,400 faster than any portfolio.
If you want a number for your case
Tell us how many pages you need, whether you sell online, and in how many languages. We will give you a fixed price before any work starts, and we will say so if a package is more than you need.