How much does a website cost in the UK?

If you search this question you will find a lot of price bands. Most of them are made up, or copied from someone else who made them up, and none of them are for your business. We do not publish prices either, because every site we quote is different. What we can do is explain what moves the number, what gets quietly left out of a cheap quote, and how to tell a fair quote from a poor one.

There are three ways to pay for a website

Every option comes down to one of these, and the honest answer to “how much” depends on which you choose.

Do it yourself on a site builder. You pay a subscription, pick a template and build it in your evenings. The subscription is the smallest number on this page. The cost is your time, and the result depends on how good you are at writing, layout and photography. We compare the main builders in Wix, Squarespace or Shopify.

Hire a freelancer. One person, usually cheaper than a company, sometimes excellent. The risk is not the price, it is what happens in a year when you need a change and they have moved on, gone quiet, or taken a full-time job.

Hire a company. More expensive than a freelancer, because you are paying for more than one person’s time: design, writing, build, and someone to answer the phone afterwards. The thing you are buying is accountability.

Within each of those, the price moves with the same handful of things.

What moves the price

How many pages, and who writes them

A site for a plumber might be five pages: home, services, areas covered, reviews, contact. A site for a clinic with eight treatments, three practitioners and a booking system is a different job. Count the pages you actually need, not the ones you think a website should have.

Then ask who writes the words. This is the single biggest hidden cost. If the quote assumes you will supply all the copy, and you have never written a page of marketing text in your life, the project will stall for months waiting on you. A quote that includes writing will be higher and will finish sooner.

Photography

Stock photos of handshakes make a site look like every other site. Real photos of your premises, your work and your team make it look like yours. A half day with a local photographer is often the best money in the whole project, and it is almost never in the first quote you get. Ask.

A shop, bookings or anything that takes money

A brochure site shows what you do and gets people to call. The moment a site takes payments, takes bookings, or holds stock, it is a different category of work: there is a checkout to get right, legal pages to write, email receipts, delivery rules and VAT handling. A shop on Shopify still needs those things set up, even though the platform does the heavy lifting.

Moving from an old site

If you already have a site, the old addresses have to be redirected to the new ones so you do not lose the search ranking you have built up. Anyone who has run a site for a few years has pages that bring in enquiries without them knowing. Redirects are dull, invisible work, and a cheap rebuild skips them.

The deadline

A build that has to be live for a trade show in three weeks costs more than one that can take six. Our own builds go live in four to six weeks once a design is chosen, and that assumes you have time to answer questions along the way. Time is part of the price: a project that drags on costs you in lost enquiries even when the invoice does not change.

What cheap quotes leave out

When one quote is a third of another for what sounds like the same site, the difference is almost always one of these.

• The words. “Content to be supplied by the customer.” Read that line twice.
• The photos. Stock imagery, or whatever you have on your phone.
• The domain and the email. Who registers the domain, in whose name, and does your email come with it? See who owns your website.
• Hosting after launch. A site has to live somewhere. If hosting is not mentioned, it is either extra or it is a cheap shared server you will be moved off when the freelancer stops paying for it.
• Changes after launch. The first thing every owner wants, two weeks after launch, is to change something. Is that included, hourly, or ignored?
• Being found locally. Setting up and linking your Google Business Profile, writing page titles that match what people search, and making the site fast on a phone. These are the job, not add-ons, but on a cheap quote they are add-ons.
• Legal pages. Privacy notice, terms, cookie wording, and the company details a limited company has to show.
• VAT. A sole trader who is not VAT registered can quote a lower number than a company that has to add VAT. If you are VAT registered yourself you claim it back and the difference disappears; if you are not, it is a real cost to you. Quotes to businesses are normally shown before VAT, and the standard rate is listed on GOV.UK, currently 20%. Always ask whether a number includes it.

None of these make a cheap quote dishonest. They make it a quote for a smaller job. The point is to compare the same job.

The running costs after launch

A website is not a one-off purchase, whichever route you take. Budget for these every year.

• The domain. A yearly renewal to the registrar. It is small, and it is the one thing you must never let lapse, because when it lapses the site and your email stop together.
• Hosting. Where the site lives. With a site builder it is inside the subscription. With a freelancer or company it is either a separate line or part of a care plan.
• Care. Keeping the site secure, backed up and up to date, plus small changes when you ask. We explain what that covers, and when you do not need it, in hosting and care, explained.
• Email. Business email at your own domain is usually a separate subscription per mailbox.
• Anything you plug in. A booking system, a review widget, a mailing list tool. Each one is usually a subscription of its own.

Ask for a single sheet listing every monthly and yearly cost before you sign anything. If a supplier cannot produce one, that tells you something.

How to compare two quotes

Put the quotes side by side and answer these questions for each.

1. Does it include writing the copy, or am I writing it?
2. Does it include photography, or stock, or my own photos?
3. Will the domain be registered in my name?
4. What happens on the day after launch when I want a change?
5. What are the monthly and yearly costs, in one list?
6. Who do I phone when the site is down on a Saturday, and will they answer?
7. If I stop paying for hosting, can I take the site elsewhere?
8. Is the price fixed, or an estimate?

That last one matters more than the number. An estimate is a number that will go up. A fixed price in writing is a number that will not, and it puts the risk of getting it wrong on the supplier rather than you. It is how we work: you describe the business, we send a fixed quote within one working day, and if you do not love any of the mockups we send, your deposit comes back in full.

So what is the number?

For your business, we do not know yet, and neither does anyone who has not asked you the questions above. Anyone who quotes a figure before asking about pages, copy, photos, payments and your old site is guessing. The useful thing is not a band off the internet; it is a short conversation and a fixed figure in writing.

If you want ours, the form takes about a minute. If you want someone else’s, take the questions with you.