Website pricing is opaque because most of the cost is labour and most of the labour is invisible. The same brief produces quotes of £800 and £12,000, and both can be honest.
Here are the bands I see in the UK market in 2026, what sits inside each, and the ongoing costs that get left out of every proposal. The build price is usually the smaller half of the five-year figure.
Quick Info
DIY
£200 to £600 in year one, plus your time
Freelancer
£1,200 to £5,000 for a small business site
Agency
£6,000 to £30,000 and up
Annual running cost
£300 to £1,500 for a typical small business site
Where money is best spent
Copywriting, photography and structure
Where it is usually wasted
Custom design on pages nobody visits
What you are actually paying for
A website quote covers up to seven separate jobs, and the cheapest quotes cover two of them.
01Discovery: who the customers are, what the site must make happen, what pages exist.
02Copywriting: the words. Usually the largest determinant of whether the site works.
03Design: layout, type, colour, the visual system.
04Build: turning the design into a working, fast, accessible site.
05Content population: putting the real material in, which always takes longer than expected.
06Technical setup: analytics, forms, redirects, search console, structured data.
07Launch and handover: testing, training, documentation.
When somebody quotes £700, they are doing build and a template. That can be exactly right if you have the words and the photographs ready.
The DIY band: £200 to £600 in year one
Squarespace or WordPress with a template, your own copy, stock or phone photography. A weekend of your time if you are decisive, two weeks if you are not.
—Right for: new businesses, testing an idea, trades whose customers arrive by referral.
—Wrong for: anyone whose website has to compete for search traffic against established competitors.
—Hidden cost: the forty hours you spend, which at any realistic value of your time exceeds the freelancer band.
—Common outcome: perfectly adequate, slightly generic, and it works.
The freelancer band: £1,200 to £5,000
Where most small business sites should sit. At the lower end you get a good template build with your content. At the upper end you get discovery, custom design, proper copywriting input and a build that considers search from the start.
—£1,200 to £2,000: five to eight pages, a template adapted properly, you supply the words.
—£2,500 to £3,500: custom design, ten to fifteen pages, some copy help, technical setup done properly.
—£4,000 to £5,000: the above plus real copywriting, structured content, and a migration with redirects handled.
The variable that matters most in this band is not price, it is whether the freelancer asks about your customers before they ask about your colour preferences.
The agency band: £6,000 and up
You are buying a team: strategy, design, copy, development, project management, and accountability. Worth it when the website is a primary revenue channel and the cost of it being mediocre is measured in tens of thousands.
—£6,000 to £12,000: a substantial brochure site with strategy and copywriting, professionally project-managed.
—£12,000 to £30,000: complex sites, integrations, e-commerce, multiple stakeholders, ongoing optimisation.
—Above that: platforms rather than websites, and the conversation is about systems, not pages.
The failure mode in this band is paying agency prices for freelancer work. Ask who specifically does the writing, the design and the build, and what happens after launch.
The costs nobody quotes for
This is where budgets break, because they are annual and they start the month after launch.
—Hosting: £100 to £500 a year. Managed WordPress hosting sits at the upper end and is usually worth it.
—Domain: £12 to £30 a year. Keep it in your own account.
—Licences: theme and plugin renewals, £50 to £300 a year.
—Maintenance: updates, backups, security monitoring. £200 to £1,200 a year, or your own time.
—Content: somebody has to write the new pages and posts. This is the largest ongoing cost and the one always omitted.
—Photography: £400 to £1,500 for a session that saves you from stock images for three years.
Budget the five-year cost, not the build cost. The build is usually less than half of it.
Where the money is well spent
01Copywriting. The words decide whether visitors enquire. Nothing else on the list changes conversion as much.
02Real photographs of the real thing. Stock photography quietly tells visitors you are interchangeable.
03Structure and navigation. Getting the page architecture right costs a day and pays for years.
04Speed and accessibility done at build time, which costs almost nothing then and a lot to retrofit.
05Redirects on a migration. Skipping this is the most expensive saving available.
Where it is usually wasted
—Bespoke design on pages with no traffic. Two templates cover most small sites.
—Animation and scroll effects that add weight and no enquiries.
—A blog nobody has planned to write. An empty blog is worse than no blog.
—Features for the business you might be in three years. Build for the business you are in.
—A rebuild every two years because nobody agreed what the site was for the first time.
How to brief so the quotes are comparable
01State what the site must achieve, in numbers if you have them.
02List the pages you expect and say who is writing them.
03Say who supplies photography.
04Say whether you have an existing site with rankings to protect.
05Ask each quote to separate build, copy, design and ongoing costs.
06Ask what happens after launch and what it costs.
Quotes that vary by a factor of ten almost always mean the brief was vague, not that one supplier is dishonest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I get a decent website for under £1,000?
Yes, if you supply the words and photographs and accept a well-adapted template. What you cannot get for that is strategy, copywriting and custom design.
Why do agency quotes cost so much more than freelancers?
You are paying for a team, project management and accountability rather than one person's hours. That is worth it when the site is a primary revenue channel and not otherwise.
What should I budget annually after launch?
£300 to £1,500 for hosting, licences and maintenance on a typical small business site, plus whatever content production costs you.
Is a website still worth it if I get all my work by referral?
Yes, because referred customers look you up before calling. It does not have to be an expensive site; it has to exist and look current.
Should I pay monthly for a website?
Only if you understand whether you own the site at the end. Some monthly arrangements are leases, and leaving means starting again.
How long should a website last before a rebuild?
Four to six years with maintenance and content updates. Sites that need replacing after two were usually built without a clear purpose.
Before You Go
The most expensive website is the one you rebuild in eighteen months because nobody decided what it was for. Spend the first money on that decision and on the words, then buy the cheapest build that does the job properly.
If you are choosing where to build it, the platform comparison is the next question, and if you are replacing an existing site, the redesign checklist will save you the rankings.
Budget five years. Spend it on words first.
WRITTEN BY TARIQ SALLAM
Marketing Consultant. Entrepreneur. Content Creator.
I'm a marketing consultant, entrepreneur and content creator. I help businesses grow through practical marketing, websites, SEO, content and AI.
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