Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five numbers between £400 and £15,000 for what sounds like the same thing. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because “a website” describes an outcome, not a product, and the work behind two sites with the same page count can differ by a factor of ten.
Here is what the bands actually mean, and what genuinely moves a quote.
The price bands, and what sits inside them
£0–£500 — you build it. Squarespace, Wix, Shopify or a WordPress theme, put together by you or a relative who is good with computers. Costs a monthly subscription. This is a perfectly reasonable choice for a brand new business with no budget and nothing to lose, and anyone who sneers at it has forgotten what starting out feels like. The cost shows up later, in your time, and in a site that looks like a template because it is one.
£400–£900 — a template, configured. A freelancer installs a bought theme, replaces the images and text with yours, and hands it over. You get something presentable quickly. What you usually do not get is anything written for search, structured data, a considered mobile experience, or a layout that is yours rather than shared with four hundred other businesses.
The exception at this price is a genuinely bespoke small site from a solo developer with no overhead to cover — which is what the starter builds here are. The page count is small; the work behind each page is not.
£900–£3,500 — a proper small business site. Bespoke design, five to ten pages, real copy written for the searches your customers use, forms that work, structured data so Google can display your hours and phone number, tested properly on phones. This is where most sole traders and small firms should be, and it is where a well-built site starts to pay for itself.
£3,500–£7,000 — the volume band for established businesses. Ten to twenty pages, a service catalogue, individual pages per service and per town, case studies, a blog structure, more thorough SEO. Multiple locations or a genuinely complex offering land here.
£7,000–£15,000+ — custom functionality. Bookings with live availability, customer accounts, payments, integration with the systems you already run, a content system built around how you actually work. At this point you are commissioning software, not a brochure, and the work is priced accordingly.
For context, published UK surveys in recent years have put “what a small business typically pays for a professional site” somewhere around £3,500–£7,000, and freelance developers at £2,000–£8,000. If a quote sits a long way outside that, ask what makes it different — in either direction. A much lower quote is either a template or someone with very little overhead, and those are not the same thing; ask which.
The five things that actually move the price
1. How many genuinely different pages there are
Not how many pages, but how many different ones. A site with twelve pages built from three templates is far less work than a site with six pages that are all bespoke. When you compare quotes, compare the number of distinct layouts.
2. Whether the content exists
This is the one nobody warns you about, and it delays more projects than every technical problem combined. If you have the text, the photos and the prices ready, a build runs to schedule. If the developer has to write your copy — which they should quote for — add both time and cost. If nobody writes it, the project sits at 90% complete for three months. I have watched it happen to other people’s projects more often than I can count.
3. Whether anyone is doing SEO, or just saying the word
Every quote says “SEO included”. Ask what that means. Keyword research for your actual market, a defined target per page, structured data, page speed work and a Google Business Profile audit is several days of work. Ticking a plugin’s green light is twenty minutes. Both get described the same way.
4. Functionality, which is where estimates go wrong
Contact forms are trivial. Bookings with live availability, payments, logins, or anything that talks to software you already run are not — those are the features that turn a three-week project into a three-month one. If you need them, say so on the first call. Adding them halfway through is where fixed prices break down and relationships sour.
5. Who is actually doing the work
An agency quoting £8,000 for a site a freelancer quotes £3,000 for is not necessarily overcharging. You are paying for an account manager, a project manager, a designer, a developer and an office — plus the cover for when one of them is ill. That is worth real money to some businesses. What you should not pay is agency prices for work that is being quietly subcontracted anyway. Ask who writes the code. The answer tells you a lot.
What ongoing costs are reasonable
- Domain — about £10–£15 a year. It should be registered in your name.
- Hosting — £0–£20 a month for a static site. Ours run on Microsoft Azure and most sit on the free tier.
- SSL certificate — free. Anyone charging you for one separately is charging for nothing.
- Care plan — £45–£95 a month typically, covering updates, monitoring and small changes. Optional, and it should be.
Be wary of any arrangement where the site stops working if you stop paying, unless you have deliberately chosen a hosted platform and understand the trade. And insist the domain is in your name. It is the single most common way small businesses get held hostage by a former web developer, and it is entirely avoidable.
What a website will not do
It will not create demand that does not exist. If nobody in your area searches for what you sell, ranking first for it changes nothing — that is an advertising and content problem.
It will not outrank an established competitor in a month. Realistic movement is eight to twelve weeks, with meaningful results at six.
And for most local service businesses, it will not out-earn your Google Business Profile. That listing drives more calls than the website does, it is free, and almost nobody keeps theirs current. If you have £500 and a neglected listing, spend it there first. I will tell you that on the phone before I quote you for anything.
The short version
If you are a small business wanting a site that looks professional and brings in enquiries, budget £750–£3,000 depending on how many pages you genuinely need, and expect three to five weeks. Get the scope in writing, get the domain in your name, and ask every quote the same two questions: what exactly is included, and who is doing the work?