How much should a website cost in the UK?

Why we will not quote you an industry average

Search this question and you will find dozens of agency articles confidently stating the average cost of a UK website. Almost all of them are quoting each other, and every one is published by a company whose pricing happens to sit comfortably in the range it just described.

So rather than add another unsourceable number, here is something more useful: what actually drives the price, and what you should expect at each level. Our own published prices are in this article because they are ours to state. Anything else would be marketing dressed as research.

What each price band actually buys

Roughly, and with the honest caveat that every agency draws these lines slightly differently.

• £0, £300, a template, a website builder subscription, or somebody doing it as a favour. Fine for proving an idea. It will look like a template, it will be slow, and structural changes later are usually a rebuild.
• £500, £1,000, a real, custom-built small business site. Several pages, written around what your customers search for, fast, mobile-first, search-ready. This is where most local businesses should be.
• £1,000, £2,500, the same, with more depth: more pages, custom forms, richer design work, a booking or enquiry flow, integrations with tools you already use.
• £2,500, £10,000, you are buying software now, not pages. Accounts, dashboards, payments, complex logic, or an online shop with real operational needs behind it.
• £10,000+, a platform. Multi-user, multi-role, custom workflows. Priced against scope, and it should come with a written specification before anyone starts.

The five things that genuinely change the price

Almost every legitimate difference between two quotes comes down to one of these.

• Whether it is built from a template or from scratch. Templates are faster and cheaper up front and more expensive to change later.
• How many genuinely different page layouts there are. Twenty pages sharing three layouts is a much smaller job than six pages that each look different.
• Whether anything has to log in. The moment there are user accounts, you have a database, permissions, password resets and a security surface, that is software pricing, not website pricing.
• Whether money changes hands on the site. Payments bring tax, delivery rules, refunds and reconciliation with them.
• Who writes the content. Copy and photography are real work. If you supply them the project is cheaper and faster; if the agency writes them, that is a line item and should be visible as one.

What should never be an extra

Some things get itemised as upgrades that are simply part of building a website properly in 2026, and seeing them on a quote as paid extras tells you something about the supplier.

Working on a phone is not a feature. An SSL certificate is free and automatic. Basic search structure, sensible page titles, descriptions, headings, a sitemap, is part of building the page, not an SEO package. Reasonable loading speed is not an optimisation service. If these appear as chargeable add-ons, the base price is not the real price.

The costs that appear after the invoice

A build price is not the cost of having a website, and the gap between the two is where people feel misled a year later.

The domain is typically £10 to £15 a year. Hosting is somewhere between a few pounds a month for something basic you manage yourself and £30 or more for managed hosting where someone else is responsible when it breaks. If the site uses paid plugins or a platform like Shopify, those are monthly. And someone has to apply updates: either you, or a care plan, or nobody, and nobody is how sites get hacked.

Ask any quote to state year two. A supplier who has not thought about it has not thought about you after launch.

How to compare two very different quotes

When one quote is £600 and another is £4,000 for what sounds like the same thing, these questions usually expose the difference.

• Is it built from a template or from scratch, and what happens when I want something the template does not do?
• Who owns the site and the domain at the end, and what happens if I want to move it elsewhere?
• What does the price include that I have not asked about, and what is explicitly excluded?
• What will this cost me in year two, including hosting, licences and updates?
• Can I see three sites you built that are still live now, and can I open them on my phone?
• Who actually does the work, and will I be talking to them or to an account manager?

What we charge, and why we say it out loud

Our sites start at £500 for a focused one-page build, £750 for a full small-business site, £1,000 for a larger one, £1,500 upward for online shops, and £5,000 upward for platforms with custom functionality. Care plans covering hosting, backups, updates and small changes run from £30 a month.

Publishing this is unusual and deliberate. An agency that will not indicate price until it has qualified your budget is deciding what to charge you based on what it thinks you can pay. You can judge from the numbers above whether we are worth talking to, without a discovery call.

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