How much does a website cost in the UK? Real 2026 prices

What a small business website actually costs in the UK

There is a real answer, and it is a set of bands. Here is what each route costs in 2026.

Most UK small businesses paying a professional in 2026 spend between £500 and £3,000. Above £6,000 you are buying scope, content production and account management rather than a better looking site. Below £400 you are buying a template with your logo on it, which is fine as long as you know that.

The seven things that move the price of a website

Price your own brief against these before you ring anybody.

1. Unique page designs, not the number of pages

A thirty page site built from six templates costs less than a ten page site drawn from scratch. Ask how many unique designs a quote covers, because that is what is being priced.

2. Whether the words already exist

Copy is the biggest hidden cost and the usual reason a build stalls for months. Supply finished copy and expect a lower number. Otherwise budget £60 to £150 a page.

3. Photography

Stock images are cheap and look it. Half a day with a UK photographer is £250 to £600, and on a trade or hospitality site that beats another £1,000 of design.

4. Anything beyond a contact form

Booking against a live diary, payments, customer logins and quote calculators are each their own piece of work. One typically adds £300 to £2,000.

5. How much you sell, and from where

Ten products is a page. Six hundred with variants, stock levels and a courier integration is a project. Multiple locations pull the same way, since each needs its own page and local search setup.

6. What it has to talk to

A site that posts enquiries into a CRM, pulls stock from your accounts or writes bookings into a diary is being integrated, not just built. This is where fixed prices quietly become estimates.

7. How many people have to approve it

Nobody quotes for this and everybody pays it. One decision maker is fast. Four people with opinions about the shade of green double the hours without adding a feature.

What you get for under £1,000, and what you do not

At the bottom of the professional market, roughly £470 to £1,000, a realistic scope is:

• four to eight pages, designed rather than pulled from a theme
• copy written from a conversation with you, not filler
• an enquiry form with bot protection that reaches you reliably
• a mobile first layout that loads quickly on a phone on 4G
• titles, heading structure, schema, sitemap and HTTPS done properly
• analytics, Google Business Profile, and domain and hosting in your name

Not in that band, and never worth promising in it: a bespoke booking engine, a large catalogue, translations, a photoshoot, an ongoing search campaign, or twelve rounds of revisions with a committee. If someone quotes £600 and includes all of that, the promise is the problem, not the price.

Why "from £470" is a real starting figure and not a hook

Our own websites start at £470 plus VAT. That is the price of a small custom site, not the price of every project, and we would rather say so plainly.

It is that low for structural reasons. No sales team, no office, no account manager, and no marketplace taking the twenty per cent Fiverr and PeoplePerHour charge sellers. We are new this year and we want the work.

What stops it being a hook is the sequence. One fixed price and one delivery date, in writing, before anything starts. If your brief needs more, you hear the real figure on the callback with the date attached and decide then. Nothing is discovered after you have paid, and there is nothing to pay until you have seen the site working. See our fixed pricing and what it includes.

One-off cost versus monthly cost, and which one you are signing up to

A £470 build is £564 including VAT, paid once. A £19 a month site on a 48 month term is £912 before it renews. A Squarespace Business plan at about £17 a month is £204 a year with no end date, and the price is not yours to control: UK plans rose by up to 26% in July 2026, unannounced, at renewal.

The number that matters is not the monthly figure. It is one question, asked in writing: what do I keep if I cancel? On many pay monthly contracts the answer is nothing, because the provider holds the site and it comes down when payment stops. Under UK law, copyright in commissioned code stays with whoever wrote it unless the contract assigns it to you, so ask for the ownership clause and the buyout figure. Ask us and the answer is shorter: domain, hosting and every login in your name at launch.

Running costs after a one-off build are small and predictable. Budget £10 to £15 a year for a .co.uk domain, £60 to £200 for hosting, and £50 to £70 per user for business email. We have set out what a website costs to run each year separately.

What tends to be quoted separately, and what should already be included

Any professional quote in 2026 should already contain all of this, at any price:

• a responsive layout that works properly on a phone
• HTTPS with a certificate that renews itself
• titles, meta descriptions, clean URLs and a sensible heading structure
• structured data, an XML sitemap and a robots file
• reasonable page speed and accessible markup
• a working enquiry form with bot protection
• analytics installed and Google Business Profile connected
• every login handed to you at launch

Fair to quote separately, because they are different jobs: photography, brand identity, an ongoing search campaign as distinct from the technical setup, ad management, product data entry, third party licences, and support after launch.

If a quote sells you search as a month three upgrade while the build ships with no schema, no sitemap and slow pages, you are being charged twice for one job.

How to compare two web design quotes line by line

Two quotes for "a website" are rarely for the same thing. Put both providers through these eight questions.

1. Is this a fixed price or an estimate, and what exactly triggers a change?
2. How many unique page designs, and how many pages in total?
3. Who writes the copy, and what happens to the date if I am slow?
4. Who owns the design, the code, the domain and the hosting after launch? In writing.
5. What is the delivery date, and what happens if it moves?
6. What will I pay in year two, and to whom?
7. How many rounds of changes are included, and what counts as one round?
8. When it breaks on a Sunday evening, who do I contact, and is that included?

Line the answers up and the cheaper quote is often the more expensive one. There is a longer version in the questions to ask before you sign.

Working out what your website needs to earn back

One calculation settles the budget question. Work out the average profit from one new customer, not the turnover, then divide the first year cost by it. That is how many customers the site must bring in before it has paid for itself.

A £470 site is £564 with VAT, plus roughly £150 in year one for domain, hosting and email. Call it £714. A plumber clearing £300 a job needs three jobs in twelve months. A kitchen fitter making £1,200 a job needs one. A £6,000 build needs twenty jobs at £300, a different bet that should be judged as one. See what a trade website usually needs.

Two honest conclusions follow. If your average customer is worth a lot, stop shopping on price, because the gap between a £600 site and a £2,500 site is trivial next to two extra enquiries a month. And if your customer is worth £30, your diary is full and every job arrives by word of mouth, a website is not urgent. A cheap builder site so people can check you are real is the sensible answer, and we will say so on the call.