How much should a small business website cost in the UK?
Real bands, what moves you between them, and the costs that never make it onto the quote. Including ours, which are published.
Four bands, and what separates them
These are the bands we see quoted in the UK for a small business brochure site. They are ranges from observation, not survey data, and any individual quote can sit outside them for good reasons. What matters more than the number is what changes as you move up.
Do it yourself on a hosted builder
A subscription, plus your own time
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and the rest. The subscription is modest and predictable. The real cost is your weekend, and the ceiling on how good it can get: you are working inside a template, and the parts that need judgement, such as what the page says and where the enquiry route goes, are still your job. Genuinely fine for testing an idea, a very simple brochure, or a business where the website is not the main way people find you.
A freelancer working from a template
Roughly £500 to £1,500
Someone else does the assembly on WordPress or a builder, using a bought theme adapted to your brand. You usually supply the copy and photos. Quality swings enormously in this band, and the swing is not about the price, it is about whether the person thinks about what the site is for. Ask to see three sites they built, then open them on your phone.
A small studio building custom
Roughly £1,500 to £6,000
Design done for your business rather than adapted from a demo, copy written rather than filled in, structure chosen around how people actually buy from you, and the technical groundwork such as schema, redirects and tracking done properly. This is the band where a website starts behaving like a sales asset rather than a brochure.
A full agency engagement
£6,000 upwards, often well upwards
Discovery, brand work, original photography, professional copywriting, a CMS your team is trained on, accessibility auditing, and a team rather than a person. Worth it when the website carries serious revenue, when you have many services or locations, or when brand consistency across channels is a real business problem. Overkill for a four-page site for a single-site clinic.
Up and down
Pushes it up
- →Page count, especially one page per service or per location
- →Copywriting from scratch rather than editing what you supply
- →Original photography, which is often the single largest line
- →Integrations: booking systems, CRM, payments, memberships
- →A second language, which is roughly a second site to build and maintain
- →Regulated content that needs clinical or legal review before it ships
- →Ecommerce, in every case, by more than people expect
- →A CMS your team can safely edit without breaking the design
Brings it down
- →Knowing what you want the site to do before you ask for a quote
- →Having your logo, colours and fonts already settled
- →Supplying decided content rather than content you will finalise later
- →Fewer unique templates, reused well, instead of every page bespoke
- →Linking out to a booking tool rather than embedding a custom flow
- →One decision-maker, available, who can approve a draft
The two that surprise people most are content and decisions. Waiting on copy and waiting on approval are the reasons projects run long, and time is what you are actually buying.
Costs that are not on the quote
- →Domain renewal, annually, and worth owning in your own account rather than your builder's
- →Hosting, which on a static site can be very cheap and on a heavy platform is not
- →Booking, form, CRM and email tools, each with its own subscription
- →Stock photography licences, if you are not shooting your own
- →Ongoing search work, which is a separate discipline from building the site
- →Content: someone has to write the next service page, and that someone is paid
- →Maintenance, which on WordPress means plugin and core updates that occasionally break things
A useful way to sanity check a budget: the build is a one-off, being found is a monthly cost, and the second one is the one that decides whether the first was worth it.
The one to read carefully: monthly website deals
A growing number of quotes are structured as a low monthly fee with no upfront cost. Sometimes that is a fair deal, when the fee buys genuine ongoing work. Often it is financing dressed as a service.
The question that settles it: at the end, who owns the code, and who owns the hosting account? If the answer is the agency, you are renting. The payments do not stop, and if you leave, you leave with a domain and nothing to point it at. Ask before signing, get the answer in writing, and price the deal over five years rather than one.
What we charge
Published, flat, and on the site rather than in a proposal. We sit in the small-studio band above.
- →Starter, £599 flat. A 4 to 5 page custom site, live in under a week, built around one clear lead-capture path.
- →Growth, £1,499 flat. Everything in Starter, more pages, plus on-page SEO and schema, Google Business Profile setup, GA4 and lead tracking.
- →Get Found, £449 per month. The ongoing side: profile management, reviews and AI search visibility, monthly reporting.
You own the code and it is handed over on your own hosting account at launch. There is no platform fee and nothing to keep paying for the site to stay up.
See what is included →Seven questions that make quotes comparable
- 1.Who owns the code and the hosting account when we are finished?
- 2.Is the copy written for me, edited from what I send, or my job entirely?
- 3.How many revision rounds, and what counts as a revision rather than new scope?
- 4.Are 301 redirects from my existing URLs included?
- 5.What is the launch date, as a date?
- 6.What does a change cost after launch, and how quickly does it happen?
- 7.What is deliberately not included?
Question four is the one people skip and regret. Launching a new site without redirecting the old URLs is the most common way a business loses rankings it spent years earning.
Common questions
Is a cheap website worth it?
It depends entirely on what got cut to reach the price. A cheap site built on a good template, with your own copy and photos, that loads fast and has one clear enquiry route, is a perfectly good website. A cheap site with stock photography, filler copy nobody read back, no tracking and no thought about what the visitor is meant to do next is expensive at any price, because it costs you the enquiries it fails to capture. Ask what is included rather than what it costs.
How much does a website cost per month to run in the UK?
For a static brochure site the running costs are small: a domain renewal once a year, and hosting that is often free or close to it on modern static platforms. Costs appear when you add tools. A booking system, a CRM, an email marketing platform, a review widget and a form service each carry their own subscription, and together they usually outweigh the hosting by a wide margin. Budget for the tools, not the hosting.
Should I pay monthly for a website instead of a one-off fee?
Monthly website deals spread the cost, which genuinely helps cash flow. Read what happens at the end. In many of these arrangements you are renting: the agency owns the code and the hosting account, the payments never stop, and if you leave you leave without the site. That can still be the right call if the monthly fee buys real ongoing work such as content, SEO or support. It is a poor deal when it is only financing, because you pay indefinitely for something you never come to own.
Does a more expensive website get more customers?
Not on its own. Above a certain floor, extra budget buys craft, research, original photography and copy that has been thought about, and those things do influence whether a visitor trusts you enough to get in touch. What extra budget does not buy is traffic. A beautiful site nobody finds and a plain site nobody finds perform identically. If enquiries are the goal, the spend has to cover being found as well as being built.
What questions should I ask before accepting a website quote?
Who owns the code and the hosting account at the end. Whether copywriting is included or expected from you. How many revision rounds, and what counts as a revision. Whether 301 redirects from your existing URLs are included, because skipping them is how sites lose their rankings at launch. What happens after launch, and at what cost. And what the timeline is, with a date rather than an estimate.
Want a straight number?
Fifteen minutes and we will tell you which band your project sits in, including when that band is below ours.
Book a 15-min call →