How much does a small business website cost in the UK?

Our websites run from £3,500 to £15,000, and a single landing page, built around the one thing you want visitors to do, is a fixed £3,500 and takes about three weeks. Those are our prices, published on the websites service page before you speak to anyone.

A website's real cost is more than the build. There are running costs every year you own it, and the most expensive website is often the cheap one that loses enquiries. This guide covers the ways to get a site built, what drives the price, what it costs to run, the three-year cost of owning a site, and the questions that stop a website project overrunning. If you are still deciding whether you need a website at all, start with whether Instagram alone is enough.

Four ways to get a website

The last route is easy to overlook. If your current site works well enough but its most important page does not, a single well-built landing page can do more for enquiries than a full rebuild, for a fraction of the cost.

What drives the price

The number of pages that need designing and writing. A five-page site and a fifty-page site are very different jobs, especially when every page needs its own words.

Who writes the words. Copywriting can be left out of website quotes, on the assumption that you will supply it. If you do not have the time, or the words are the problem, budget for it. In our view, on most small-business sites the words matter more than the design.

Custom design or a template. A well-chosen template, adapted properly, can look professional and cost far less than a design from scratch. A custom design makes sense when the site has to do something a template does not, or when how it looks is central to how you sell.

What it has to do. Online booking, payments, a shop, membership areas, integrations with your other systems, multiple languages: each adds design, build and testing time.

Moving an existing site. Rebuilding means moving content, and mapping every old page address to a new one so visitors and search engines are not sent to dead pages. Google's guidance on site moves with URL changes recommends permanent redirects, such as 301 or 308, and warns to expect temporary ranking fluctuations while it recrawls the site. Make redirects part of the quote, not an afterthought.

Accessibility and speed. A site should be usable by everyone, including people using screen readers or with low vision, and fast on a phone. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C, set out what that means in practice, and Google's Core Web Vitals set out what counts as fast. Building both in from the start costs less than fixing them later.

Photography and video. Real photos of your work, premises and people are worth more than stock images, but they cost money to commission.

What our websites cost, and what they include

Our websites run from £3,500 to £15,000 and typically take a few weeks, depending on the number of pages and whether a developer is involved. The work covers:

• where your current site loses people, page by page, with the reasons;
• pages rebuilt around what you want the visitor to do next;
• dedicated pages for campaigns, so ad money lands somewhere that earns its keep;
• two versions of the important pages tested against each other, so the decision is evidence rather than taste;
• the build or rebuild itself, with a developer alongside where one is needed.

Our landing page sprint is a fixed £3,500 and takes about three weeks: where your current page loses people and why, one page planned around the next step you want visitors to take, the words written and the page designed and built, and two versions of the key section tested against each other.

Choosing a platform

The platform affects the build cost, the running cost and how easily you can make changes yourself. Broadly:

There is no single best choice. The right one depends on what the site has to do, who will update it, and how much you want to depend on one supplier. Ask whoever quotes for the build why they have chosen the platform they recommend, and how you would move away from it if you ever needed to.

What to put in a website brief

A clear brief gets you better quotes, and quotes you can compare. It does not need to be long:

1. What the site is for: the one or two things you most want visitors to do, such as enquire, book or buy.
2. Who it is for: your main customers, and what they need to know before they act.
3. What you have now: the current site, what works and what does not, and roughly how many visitors it gets.
4. The pages you think you need, and any features, such as booking, payments or a members' area.
5. Who will write the words and supply the photos.
6. What you will need to update yourself, and how often.
7. Your budget range and your deadline, with the reason for the deadline.
8. How you will judge success, for example more enquiries from the same number of visitors.

If you have a one-sentence description of what you do, put it at the top. It shapes everything else.

The running costs people forget

Every website has costs after launch. Individually they are small; over the years you own the site they are not.

• Domain name. Renewed every year or every few years, with the registrar you use.
• Hosting or a platform subscription. On a website builder, this is the monthly or annual plan. On a self-hosted site, it is the hosting account. Current prices are on each platform's own pricing page, for example Squarespace, Wix and Shopify.
• Paid plugins, themes and licences, which often renew yearly.
• Maintenance and security updates. Someone has to keep the software up to date and check the site still works afterwards.
• A cookie consent tool, if you use analytics or advertising cookies that need consent.
• Content updates. New services, prices, photos and posts. Either your time, or someone else's.
• Email, if it comes with or alongside your hosting.

The three-year cost of owning a site

Comparing quotes on the build price alone misses most of the picture. A fairer comparison is the cost of owning the site over a fixed period, say three years.

Work it out like this:

1. Build cost, including copywriting, photography and redirects if they are extra.
2. Plus 36 months of running costs: platform or hosting, plugins, maintenance and support.
3. Plus the value of your own time spent maintaining it, if you are doing that yourself.

An illustration with round numbers, to show the method rather than to suggest the figures: a site with a £4,000 build and £60 a month in running costs and support costs £4,000 + (36 × £60) = £6,160 over three years. A site with a £1,500 build and £150 a month in support costs £1,500 + (36 × £150) = £6,900. The cheaper build is the dearer site.

Then weigh it against what the site does. A site that brings in a few more enquiries each month than the one it replaces can pay for itself quickly. That is why we start with where your current site loses people, before quoting for anything new.

Questions to ask before you agree a website quote

Many website overruns come from things nobody asked about at the start. Ask these first:

• What exactly is included: how many pages, how many designs, how many rounds of changes?
• Who writes the words, and who supplies the photos?
• Will you set up redirects from every old page to its new address?
• What platform will it be built on, and why that one for my business?
• Who owns the domain, the hosting and the logins? They should be in my business's name.
• How will it be tested on phones, for speed and for accessibility?
• Is tracking included, so I can see enquiries from the new site from day one?
• What happens after launch: what support is included, for how long, and what does it cost after that?
• Can I update it myself without breaking it?

We go through choosing who to build it in how to choose a web designer, what a fixed price should cover in what a fixed-price project actually includes, and the mistakes that cost enquiries in nine homepage mistakes. For every other service, see what marketing costs in the UK.

Before you sign

Tick these off before agreeing a website quote. The ticks are saved in this browser.

• I know the number of pages, designs and rounds of changes included.
• I know who writes the words and who supplies the photos.
• Redirects from old pages are included.
• The domain, hosting and logins will be in my business's name.
• It will be tested on phones, for speed and for accessibility.
• Tracking of enquiries is included and will be tested before launch.
• I know what support is included after launch, and what it costs after that.
• I have worked out the three-year cost, not just the build price.
• I know what the new site needs to achieve, and how we will measure it.

If you would like a site, or a single page, built around what you want visitors to do, see our websites service. Full sites run from £3,500 to £15,000, and the landing page sprint is a fixed £3,500.