What a small business website actually costs

Ask what a website costs and you usually get "it depends, let's book a call". It does depend. It also has a range, and anyone who has quoted a few hundred of these knows roughly what that range is. Withholding it wastes your time and ours.

Figures below were checked on 12 August 2026 against published UK price guides. Prices move, so treat anything older than about a year with suspicion, including this page if you are reading it much later.

The short answer

For a small business in the UK in 2026, a professionally built website is usually somewhere between £500 and £10,000. That is a wide band because it covers two genuinely different things: a handful of pages that explain what you do, and a site that also runs part of your business.

Roughly how the market splits:

• DIY builders such as Wix or Squarespace: about £240 to £360 a year once you include a domain and a business email address. Your time is the real cost.
• Freelancers: commonly £25 to £120 an hour, with most small business projects landing between £1,500 and £5,000.
• Small and specialist agencies: roughly £2,000 to £10,000 for a standard small business site.
• Larger agencies: typically start around £10,000 and go well beyond it. London pricing for the same specification is often noticeably higher.

The overlap between those tiers is the important part. A £3,000 quote could come from a good freelancer or a mediocre agency, and the price alone will not tell you which.

What actually moves the number

Page count matters less than people expect. Five pages instead of three is an afternoon. These are the things that genuinely change a quote:

• Whether anything has to work. A page that describes your booking policy is cheap. A booking system that takes deposits, blocks double-bookings and emails a confirmation is a different project, and it is where most of the cost sits.
• Integrations. Anything that has to talk to your calendar, your accounting software, your payment provider or your existing database. Each connection is somebody else's system with its own rules and its own bad days.
• Content. Who writes the words and sources the photographs. This is the single most common reason a project runs late, and if the studio is doing it, it is a real line on the quote.
• How custom the design is. A template adjusted to your colours is not the same job as a design drawn for your business, and both are legitimate choices.
• Languages. A second language is not double, but it is not free either. Translation, per-language URLs and the tagging that stops search engines treating them as duplicates all take time.

The running costs nobody mentions in the quote

The build is a one-off. Keeping it alive is not. Budget roughly £100 to £300 a year for the domain, hosting and basic maintenance, more if you want someone on call for changes.

Ask specifically whether hosting is billed separately, what happens when something breaks at the weekend, and what a small text change costs after launch. A cheap build with an expensive support contract attached is a common shape, and it is not always disclosed up front.

What we charge

Our published bands, for the same work the market ranges above describe. These are the numbers on our pricing section, not a special rate for people who read guides:

• A marketing site, one to five custom pages with enquiry forms:£500 to £2,000.
• A site with one working system, such as booking, quoting or a simple dashboard: £2,000 to £4,000.
• An internal web app, the sort of thing that replaces a pile of spreadsheets: from £4,000, with most landing between there and £8,000. A large platform goes beyond it.

You get one fixed number in writing after a free scoping call, and it does not move unless the scope does. Mobile apps, automation and AI work sit outside these three shapes and are priced to the job.

When you should not pay for a custom site

There are cases where hiring anyone, us included, is the wrong call:

• You need one page and you need it this week. A builder will do that better than a custom build, and you can replace it later once you know what you actually need.
• You are testing whether the business works at all. Spend the money on finding out. A beautiful site for a service nobody wants is an expensive way to learn something a fortnight of phone calls would have told you.
• What you have already works and only looks dated. Sometimes the honest answer is new photography and rewritten copy on the existing site. We have said this to people who arrived ready to spend.
• Your real problem is that nobody can find you. Rebuilding a site that already converts will not fix a traffic problem, and the rebuild often loses the ranking you had.

How to compare two quotes properly

When the numbers are far apart, the specification usually is too. Worth asking both parties, in writing:

• Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting when we are finished?
• Is the price fixed, or an estimate that moves?
• What is explicitly not included?
• Who writes the content?
• What does a change cost after launch, and how quickly do you make it?
• What happens if I want to work with somebody else next year?

The ownership question is the one that catches people out, which is why it has a guide of its own.

Getting a number for your own project

Our estimator on the contact page will give you a rough band in about a minute, and every combination it can produce falls inside the published prices above. If you would rather just describe the problem in your own words, do that instead. Send the messy version.

Get a free quote