How much does a website cost in the UK?

It is the first question almost everyone asks, and the one most agency websites refuse to answer. “It depends on scope” is true and completely useless when you are trying to work out whether to have the conversation at all.

So here are real numbers, what moves them, and the costs that tend to appear after you have signed.

The short answer

Published UK pricing guides broadly agree on these bands for a small business marketing site:

Who builds it	Typical upfront cost
You, on Squarespace or Wix	£240–£360 a year including domain and email
A freelancer	£800–£3,000, with most simple 4–5 page builds around £1,200–£2,000
A regional agency	£3,000–£8,000
A London agency	Usually from £8,000, often well above
Ecommerce	£3,000–£20,000+ depending on complexity

Then add running costs. Estimates vary between roughly £800 and £2,500 a year for a small business site once you include hosting, domain, email, SSL and some maintenance.

These are market observations from published UK guides, not quotes. Most of those guides are written by agencies, so read them as indicative rather than authoritative. What matters more is understanding what moves your number within those bands.

What actually drives the cost

Page count is the least important factor

Most people assume a 20-page site costs four times a 5-page site. It does not. Once the templates exist, additional pages are content work. What costs money is the number of distinct templates — a service page, a case study, a blog post and a pricing page are four designs; forty blog posts are one.

If you are being quoted per page, ask how many unique templates that covers.

Content is usually the real bottleneck

The single most common reason a website project runs late is that the copy never arrives. Agencies price for the build; they do not always price for writing. Check whether your quote includes copywriting, and if it does not, budget either money or a realistic amount of your own time.

A site with placeholder text is not a finished site, and it will not rank.

Integrations

A booking system, an EPOS link, a CRM, a payment gateway, a stock feed. Each one is a dependency on someone else’s API and someone else’s support team. These are where estimates slip, because nobody can fully scope an integration until they are inside it.

Who maintains it afterwards

This is the decision that quietly sets your five-year cost. A site built on a platform your team can edit is cheaper to own than one that requires a developer for every text change — even if the second one is cheaper to build.

Ask: what can we change ourselves, and what will need you?

The costs most quotes leave out

One UK agency estimates that unaccounted-for extras typically add 30–50% to a quoted price. The usual suspects:

• Photography. Stock imagery is obvious and it undermines a premium brand. Real photography for a restaurant or a product business is often the single highest-impact spend on the project.
• Copywriting, as above.
• Licences. Premium plugins, fonts, a Shopify plan, an email platform. Individually small, collectively a few hundred a year.
• Migration and redirects. If you have an existing site with traffic, mapping old URLs to new ones is not optional. Skipping it is the most common way businesses lose their search rankings overnight.
• Analytics and conversion tracking. If this is not set up before launch, you will spend the first quarter unable to tell what is working.
• Accessibility. Cheaper to build in than to retrofit, and in the UK the Equality Act applies to service providers online as well as offline.

How to compare two quotes properly

Quotes are rarely comparable as written. Normalise them by asking each supplier the same five questions:

1. What is in scope, template by template? Not page count — templates.
2. Who writes the copy, and who sources the images?
3. What happens to our existing URLs and rankings?
4. What can we edit ourselves after launch, and what needs you?
5. Who owns the code, the domain, the hosting and the analytics?

That last one matters more than people expect. Some arrangements leave you renting your own website, where leaving means starting again. Get the answer in writing before you sign.

When cheap is the right answer

If you need a credible online presence, you have no immediate plan to compete in search, and your enquiries come from referrals — a well-set-up Squarespace site is a perfectly sensible decision. Spending £6,000 to replace it would buy you very little.

The case for a custom build is specific: you are competing for search traffic, you are running paid campaigns that need fast, tailored landing pages, you have integrations a template cannot handle, or the site is a meaningful part of how you sell. If none of those apply yet, keep the money.

When cheap gets expensive

The failure mode we see most often is a site that was cheap to build and is now impossible to change. Rankings are flat because the underlying structure was never set up to rank. Nobody can edit it without breaking something. And the rebuild costs more than doing it properly would have, because now there is a migration to manage as well.

The honest test is not “what does this cost” but “what does this cost over three years, including what it will take to replace.”

What we charge

See our pricing page for our own bands. If you want a number for a specific project, book a 30-minute call — you will leave with a range and a timeline whether or not you work with us.