Type "how much does a website cost" into Google and you'll get answers ranging from £300 to £30,000, which is technically true and completely useless if you're the one trying to budget for a new site.
The honest answer is that it depends on what the site actually needs to do, but that's not much help either, so let's break down what drives the number up or down and what you should realistically expect to pay in the UK in 2026.
A website is not one product.
A single-page site for a sole trader and a fifty-page B2B site with a client portal, a blog, and integrations into a CRM are both "a website," and they cost wildly different amounts for good reason.
The variables that actually move the price are the number of pages and their complexity, whether it's built on a template or designed from scratch, what it needs to integrate with, whether the copy and photography are provided or need creating, and what happens after launch in terms of hosting and maintenance.
Most quotes that seem suspiciously cheap or expensive make sense once you know which of these variables were included or left out.
A £500 website and a £15,000 website aren't really the same category of product being sold at different prices, they're different products.
A simple small business site: roughly £800 to £3,000. This covers a template-based build, typically five to ten pages (home, about, services, contact, maybe a blog), built on WordPress, Squarespace, or a similar platform.
You'll usually provide most of the copy and images yourself, or pay a bit more to have basic copywriting included.
This tier suits a business that needs a credible online presence and a way for people to find and contact them, without needing anything custom.
A mid-size B2B or service business site: roughly £3,000 to £10,000.
This is a semi-custom build, typically fifteen to thirty pages, with proper copywriting, some custom design work rather than a stock template, basic SEO setup, and simple integrations such as a booking form, a newsletter signup, or a CRM connection.
Most established small and medium businesses that take their marketing seriously land in this band.
A bespoke, lead-generation-focused build: roughly £10,000 to £25,000+. This is a fully custom design built around a specific strategy, not just a set of pages.
Expect proper UX research, custom illustration or photography, marketing automation integration, a content strategy baked into the structure from the start, and ongoing conversion rate optimisation built in rather than bolted on later.
This is the tier where the website is being treated as a genuine growth asset, not just a digital brochure.
Anything beyond that, e-commerce with complex product catalogues, membership platforms, custom web applications, moves into bespoke software development territory and the pricing conversation changes entirely.
| Site type | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Simple small business site | £800–£3,000 | Template-based build, 5–10 pages, on WordPress or Squarespace; you provide most copy and images |
| Mid-size B2B or service business site | £3,000–£10,000 | Semi-custom build, 15–30 pages, proper copywriting, custom design, basic SEO and simple integrations |
| Bespoke, lead-generation-focused build | £10,000–£25,000+ | Fully custom design and UX research, marketing automation integration, content strategy and CRO built in from the start |
A website isn't one product - page count, complexity and integrations are what actually move the price, not the word "website" itself. In the UK that means roughly £800-3,000 for a simple small business site, £3,000-10,000 for a semi-custom mid-size build, and £10,000-25,000+ for a bespoke, lead-generation-focused site.
Page count and complexity. Ten simple pages cost far less than ten pages that each need custom layouts, interactive elements, or dynamic content pulled from a database.
It's not just about how many pages, it's how much thinking and building each one requires.
Custom design versus a template. A well-chosen template dressed up with your branding is a perfectly respectable, cost-effective option for plenty of businesses.
Fully custom design, where every layout is built from scratch to match your brand and your specific conversion goals, costs more because it takes more design and development hours, but it's also the option that tends to differentiate you from competitors using the same three popular templates.
Integrations. Connecting your website to a CRM, a booking system, a payment gateway, or marketing automation software adds development time, and the cost scales with how many systems need to talk to each other and how cleanly they do it.
A simple contact form is trivial. A form that creates a lead in your CRM, triggers an email sequence, and notifies your sales team in Slack is not.
Copywriting and photography. If you're supplying professional copy and images yourself, you save money.
If you need a copywriter to interview your team and write persuasive, SEO-aware page content, and a photographer to shoot your premises, products, or people, that's a real cost that a lot of initial quotes quietly exclude, only to surface later as an add-on.
E-commerce functionality. Even a modest online shop adds complexity: product pages, a cart, checkout, payment processing, inventory management, and often accounting software integration.
This alone can add several thousand pounds to a build that would otherwise sit in the mid-size band.
What drives the cost up isn't just page count - it's how much custom design, thinking and integration each page needs. Beyond the build price, budget for the recurring extras that get forgotten: hosting, maintenance, stock imagery and licences, and ongoing SEO beyond the basics.
A quote significantly below the ranges above usually means one or more of the following.
None of it makes a supplier a scam — plenty of businesses genuinely don't need more than this — but go in knowing what you're buying.
A website built without understanding what it needs to achieve is a website that will probably need rebuilding sooner than you'd like.
The businesses that get the best return on a website spend don't think of it as a one-off cost to minimise, they think of it as an asset that needs to earn its keep.
If your website is a core part of how you generate leads, and for most service businesses it is, the right comparison isn't "what's the cheapest option that technically works," it's "what will this actually generate in leads and revenue against what it costs."
A £3,000 site that converts poorly and needs a full rebuild in eighteen months is more expensive in the long run than a £8,000 site built properly around your actual sales process and updated incrementally over time.
Before you commit to a budget, it's worth reading our piece on designing a B2B website that converts, because the build quality only pays off if the underlying structure is built to convert visitors into enquiries in the first place.
If you want to see how we approach this ourselves, our website design and development service is built around exactly this kind of transparent, needs-first pricing conversation rather than a one-size-fits-all package.
One area worth flagging honestly: accessibility. Beyond being the right thing to do, UK public sector bodies have specific legal accessibility requirements, and increasingly, larger private clients expect suppliers' websites to meet recognised accessibility standards too.
Building to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the outset costs a little more upfront in design and development time, but retrofitting accessibility into an existing site later almost always costs more than building it in from day one, so it's worth asking any agency you're quoting whether this is factored into their number.
A quote well below the usual bands often means an unmodified template, no real strategy, and little support after launch - not necessarily a scam, but worth knowing before you buy. Think of your website as a growth asset rather than a cost to minimise: a cheap site that needs rebuilding in eighteen months usually costs more in the long run than one built properly around your sales process.
It's worth addressing the elephant in the room: platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify let you build a website yourself for the cost of a monthly subscription, often £15 to £40 a month with no build fee at all.
For a genuinely simple site, a sole trader's portfolio, a local shop's basic online presence, this can be a perfectly sensible choice, and we'd rather tell you that honestly than push you toward a paid build you don't need.
Where DIY builders fall short is anywhere the website needs to do real commercial work: converting visitors into enquiries, ranking competitively in search, or integrating cleanly with other business systems.
Template limitations become obvious the moment you want something the platform wasn't designed for, and the SEO capabilities of most builder platforms, while improved in recent years, still generally lag behind a properly built WordPress or custom site.
If your website is meant to actively generate business rather than just exist, the professional build tends to pay for itself through better conversion and search performance within the first year or two.
A reasonable middle ground for budget-conscious businesses is a semi-custom build on a flexible platform like WordPress, using a professional theme as a starting point rather than building everything from nothing, which keeps costs down while still allowing proper customisation, decent SEO foundations, and room to grow as the business does.
Getting an accurate quote depends on how much homework you’ve done first. A short bit of prep before you contact anyone makes the numbers you get back far more comparable:
DIY builders are a genuinely sensible choice for a simple site, but they fall short the moment a website needs to convert, rank competitively, or integrate with other systems. Before requesting a single quote, write down what the site needs to do, gather your brand assets, and set your own budget range so you're not anchored by the first number you hear.
Take a typical UK professional services business, an accountancy firm, a small law practice, a consultancy, needing a proper site: home page, about, five to eight service pages, a team page, a blog, and a contact page with a booking form, around fifteen pages in total.
Semi-custom design on WordPress, professional copywriting for the core pages, basic SEO setup, and a simple CRM integration for enquiries.
Realistically, this sits at around £4,500 to £7,000 depending on how much of the copywriting and photography the agency handles versus what the business supplies itself.
Add a content strategy with monthly blog posts, deeper SEO work, and conversion rate optimisation testing after launch, and the ongoing monthly cost typically runs another £500 to £1,500 a month, separate from the build itself.
This is where a lot of businesses get their budgeting wrong: they save aggressively on the build and then have nothing left for the ongoing work that actually makes the site perform, when a slightly smaller upfront build with a properly funded ongoing programme almost always outperforms it over a two-year horizon. A website is never really finished once it goes live, either - our website maintenance checklist covers the ongoing costs most UK businesses forget to budget for.
When you're comparing quotes, make sure you're comparing like for like.
Ask each supplier to confirm: how many pages, whether copywriting and photography are included, what integrations are covered, what ongoing hosting and maintenance costs, and what SEO work is genuinely included versus what's an upsell.
A cheaper headline number that excludes half of what you need isn't actually cheaper once you add everything back in.
It's also worth asking what happens if your needs change during the build, a common and reasonable thing to happen once you see early designs and realise you want something slightly different.
A fair quote structure has some flexibility built in, or at least is upfront about how change requests are priced, rather than treating every adjustment as a surprise additional invoice.
If you're weighing up a new website or a rebuild and want a straight answer on what your specific project should realistically cost, that's exactly the kind of conversation worth having before you start collecting quotes.
Get in touch through our contact page and we'll talk you through a free, no-obligation discovery call, no sales pressure, just a clear view of what your project actually needs and what that's likely to cost, based on what we've built for businesses like yours.
A typical 15-page professional services site realistically runs £4,500-7,000 to build, plus £500-1,500 a month for ongoing content, SEO and CRO - budget for both, not just the build. When comparing quotes, check they cover the same pages, copywriting, integrations and SEO, since a cheaper headline number that excludes half of what you need isn't actually cheaper.
