How much does a small business website cost in the UK?
Real price bands for 2026, what actually changes as you go up them, and the ongoing costs nobody mentions until the invoice arrives.
How much does a website cost in the UK?
For a small local business in 2026: nothing if you build it yourself, £500–£1,000 for a small site built on a template and fitted properly, £1,000–£2,000 for a design drawn for your business with the content written for you, and £3,000 upwards once you need booking, payments or anything custom-built behind the pages. Anything under £300 or over £10,000 needs explaining.
Here’s what a website costs in the UK at each level, and what changes as you move up.
| What you get | Typical price | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself (Wix, Squarespace) | Free to about £300, plus your evenings | Tight budget, time to spare |
| A template, fitted and written for you | £500–£1,000 | Most trades starting out |
| A design made for your business, more pages | £1,000–£2,000 | Trades wanting to grow, with several services |
| Booking, payments, logins | £3,000 and up | Not really a marketing website |
This table is our own view of the going rates for small local websites in 2026. It isn’t survey data or an official price list. For what it’s worth, our own packages are £650, £1,000 and £1,750, one-off, and all three sit inside these bands.
Free to about £300: you build it
Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and the rest genuinely work. The templates are good, and a careful owner can produce something respectable in a few weekends.
What you’re paying instead of money is time — realistically 20 to 40 hours, and it’s your evenings. The other cost is that nobody writes the content for you, and content is the part that decides whether you get found. Most DIY sites end up as four pages of pleasant, vague text that doesn’t mention a single thing anyone searches for.
Sensible if money is genuinely tight and you have time. A false economy if you’re already working six days a week.
£500 to £1,000: a template, fitted properly
The realistic bottom of the professional market.
You get an existing design framework applied to your business, usually around five pages, with the copy written for you and your photos and details put in the right places. Set up properly, with the pages structured around the jobs you actually want, this is enough to compete locally in most trades.
Count your services before you choose this band, though. A roofer who does flat roofs, pitched roofs and guttering needs three service pages, which is where a five-page site starts to feel tight.
What you don’t get is a design anyone would call distinctive. If that matters to you — and for some businesses, like a salon or a restaurant, it genuinely does — this band will disappoint you.
Expect the basics to be included rather than extra: the words written for you, a way to edit them afterwards, and the site structured so it can be found. Anyone charging £800 and handing you a blank page to fill in yourself is charging £800 for a template.
The top of this band is where it blurs. At £1,000 some studios are still fitting a template and some are designing for you, so ask which one you are getting — it is the difference worth more than any other detail on the quote.
£1,000 to £2,000: designed for you
The jump here isn’t really visual, though it looks that way. It’s scope.
More pages, which means a proper page for each service rather than a paragraph on a shared one. Copy written around how people actually search. A design drawn for your business rather than adapted to it. A blog or news section if you want one. Motion and detail that a template can’t give you.
At the top of this band you’re into a design built from scratch as its own system rather than a layout fitted to you — which is worth knowing, because some studios will tell you that starts at three or four thousand.
For most local service businesses that want to grow, this is the band where the money starts doing something measurable.
£3,000 and up: things that aren’t really a website
Booking systems, payments, customer logins, product catalogues, stock, multiple locations, anything custom-built behind the pages.
That’s a different job to a marketing site, and the price reflects building software rather than designing pages. Perfectly legitimate — but ask exactly which part costs that much. A five-page site for a local trade does not cost £6,000, and some agencies charge it because they’ve always charged it.
What decides how much a website costs
The honest answer to “how much does a website cost?” comes down to four things, in order of how much they matter:
Pages. The single biggest factor. Every page needs designing, writing and checking.
Copywriting. The most underestimated line on any quote. Writing pages around what people actually search for takes real time, and it’s the first thing quietly dropped from cheap quotes — which is how you end up filling in a spreadsheet of your own website text.
Design origin. Template, customised template, or drawn from scratch. Three very different amounts of work.
Groundwork. Site structure, page titles, speed, mobile, forms that actually deliver. Invisible, and the difference between a website and a brochure nobody reads.
The costs nobody mentions
Ask about these before you sign anything:
- Domain. Around £10–£15 a year. It should be registered in your name, not the agency’s.
- Hosting and maintenance. £100–£300 a year for a small site, usually covering the security certificate, backups and updates. Ask whether it also covers the login you edit the site with, because on most setups that is what it is really buying.
- Form handling and email. Someone has to make sure enquiries actually arrive, and keep working when they stop.
- Changes. What counts as a minor edit, what counts as new work, and how long after launch you can still ask.
How much does a website cost per month?
For a one-off build, the ongoing cost is mainly hosting, at about £100 to £300 a year for a small site, plus about £10 to £15 a year for the domain. That’s it. There’s no rule that says a website has to come with a monthly bill.
If someone quotes a monthly fee, ask what it covers, line by line, and whether you own the site if you stop paying. Some agencies add a monthly SEO fee on top. If you’re offered one, ask what work gets done each month and how you’d check it yourself.
For comparison, our hosting and maintenance is £250 a year, billed once a year. It covers hosting, security certificates, updates, backups and checking that your enquiry form is still delivering. It’s optional with Basic and Professional, and the first year is included with Sky Is The Limit. We don’t sell monthly SEO: the search groundwork is built into the site, and Search Console is handed to you at launch.
Two things to walk away from
“Free website” offers tied to a monthly contract. You don’t own it, you can’t take it anywhere, and the total over three years is usually more than buying one outright.
Anyone who won’t put a price in writing. If a quote depends entirely on what you look like you can afford, that’s what’s happening.
How to tell whether you’re being overcharged
One question does most of the work: what do I own at the end of this, and can I take it elsewhere?
If the answer is the domain, the content and the site itself, you’re dealing with someone straight. If the answer is vague, the price is the least of your problems.
Our prices are on the pricing page, publicly, for the same reason.
Which leads somewhere more useful
Notice that the biggest cost driver above was pages — and the real difference between the bottom of the professional range and the middle of it is how many of them you get.
That isn’t a billing quirk. It’s the single most important structural decision on a small business website, and it’s why two sites that cost the same can perform completely differently.