Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five answers between nothing and twenty thousand pounds. All five can be honest. "Website" describes a one-page menu for a takeaway and a booking system for a twelve-chair salon, and those are not the same job.

So rather than give you one number, here is the whole range, what genuinely changes as you move up it, and the questions that decide where your own business sits.

The four price bands, and what actually changes

Broadly, a UK small business has four options. The difference between them is not how the site looks on the day it launches - a good designer and a good template can both produce something handsome. The difference is who does the work, who owns the result, and what happens six months later when you need it changed.

  1. Do it yourself: £0 to around £200 a year

    Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and similar. You get a template, a drag-and-drop editor and a monthly bill. The software is genuinely good now. What it costs you is time - realistically a few evenings a week for a month - and the ceiling is low: when you need something the template does not do, there is no way through. Right for a brand-new business testing whether the idea works at all.

  2. A freelancer: roughly £500 to £2,500

    One person, usually building on WordPress or a page builder. This is where most small businesses land, and it can be excellent value. The risks are the obvious ones of hiring one person: availability when you need a change, and what happens to your site if they move on. Ask who holds the domain and hosting logins before you pay anything.

  3. A small studio: roughly £1,500 to £6,000

    A team that designs and builds to your business rather than to a template, and is still there afterwards. You are paying for judgement as much as for production - what your site should say, in what order, and what to leave out. This is the work this studio does, priced well below the band: our packages run from £199 to £399.

  4. A full agency: £8,000 upwards

    Account managers, strategists, a design team, a development team. Genuinely the right answer for a business with a marketing budget, several stakeholders and a site that has to integrate with other systems. For a restaurant or a barber it is mostly paying for the process around the work rather than the work.

What makes one website cost more than another

Once you strip out the sales language, almost the entire price difference between two quotes comes down to five things.

  • How many pages, and how different they are from each other. Five pages that share a layout is a fraction of the work of five pages that each do a different job.
  • Whether anything has to happen. A page that displays your prices is a page. A page that takes a booking, checks it against your availability, emails you and confirms to the customer is a small piece of software.
  • Whether the content exists. Photography, menus, service descriptions and staff bios take longer to gather than to build. A project where the client has everything ready is genuinely faster than one where it has to be written from scratch.
  • Whether it has to be fast, findable and accessible - or just has to exist. This is the invisible half of the price and the half that decides whether the site ever brings you anybody.
  • Whether anyone is on the hook afterwards. A build with support behind it costs more than one handed over and forgotten.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

The build price is not the whole cost, and being surprised by the rest a year in is the most common bad experience small businesses have with websites. Budget for these separately.

  • A domain name: roughly £10 to £20 a year for a .co.uk or .com. Buy it in your own name, on your own account.
  • Hosting: anywhere from nothing to £30 a month depending on the site. Ours are hosted on infrastructure that costs most clients nothing at their traffic level.
  • Maintenance: updates, backups, security and the small changes every business needs. Our care plans start at £75 a month. If you are on WordPress, treat this as non-negotiable - an unmaintained WordPress site is a security problem waiting to happen.
  • Content changes: ask what is included and what is billed. "Unlimited revisions" and "a change costs £75" are both workable; not knowing which you have is not.
  • Email, if you want yours at your own domain rather than a Gmail address. A few pounds per mailbox per month.

So what should you actually spend?

The useful way to decide is not to ask what a website costs. It is to ask what one customer is worth to you, and how many the site needs to bring in before it has paid for itself.

A barber whose average client spends £20 a month and stays two years is looking at a customer worth several hundred pounds. Three of them justify a serious build. A restaurant that stops losing one table a week to a menu nobody could find on their phone has covered the cost inside a season. Run that number for your own business and the right band becomes obvious quickly - and it is usually higher than the one you were about to pick on price alone.

The one thing worth avoiding at every budget is a site that exists so you can say you have one. That is the version that costs money and returns nothing, and it happens at £300 and at £8,000.

Our three packages, what is in each, and the price in your own currency.

See what each package includes

How our own pricing works, since you are here

Three packages. Standard from £199, Business from £299, Premium from £399. Projects are split in two - 50% to start, 50% on completion - so nothing is paid in full before you have seen it. Every project starts with a free website audit, and the recommendation that comes out of it is the smallest package that genuinely covers what you need, which is regularly not the one somebody arrived asking for.