Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five numbers between £300 and £30,000. Both ends are honest. They are selling different things.
The bands, honestly
£0 to £150 — DIY builders. You do the work. Fine if your time is free and your standards are flexible. The hidden cost is the fifty hours you spend fighting a page builder instead of running your business.
£350 to £900 — small professional build. A handful of pages, done properly by someone who does this for a living. Custom design work within sensible limits, mobile-first, basic SEO foundations, contact forms that actually arrive. This is where most sole traders and small trades should be looking.
£1,500 to £4,000 — full business site. Ten to twenty-five pages, proper service and location pages, copywriting help, structured data, integrations like booking or CRM, and real attention to search. This is the band that usually pays for itself fastest for an established business with enquiries to win.
£5,000 to £15,000 — bespoke or commerce. Custom functionality, e-commerce with real catalogue complexity, membership areas, multi-location, integrations with systems you already run.
£15,000+ — you are buying software, not a website, and the conversation should be about scope documents and phases.
What you are actually paying for
Design is the visible part and the smallest part of the cost. The money goes into decisions: information architecture, what goes above the fold on each page, how the enquiry flow works, how fast it loads, how it behaves on a six-year-old Android. A cheap site and an expensive site can look similar in a screenshot and perform ten times differently in enquiries.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions upfront
- Domain: £10 to £20 a year
- Hosting: £5 to £30 a month, or included
- SSL: should be free and included
- Maintenance: £20 to £100 a month for updates, backups, security and small changes
- Content changes: either included, hourly, or you do them yourself
Get all five in writing before you pay. The most common nasty surprise is not the build price, it is discovering that a text change costs £75 a time.
Questions to ask before you pay a deposit
- Do I own the domain, the hosting account and the site files?
- Can I edit text and images myself without paying you?
- What happens if I want to leave — can the site move?
- Is there a written scope with a page count and revision limit?
- Can I see the site before I pay in full?
That last one matters more than the price. A studio confident in its work will show you something real before it asks for the balance.
The honest answer
For most UK small businesses, the right number is between £350 and £3,000, and the deciding factor is not how fancy you want it to look. It is how many pages you need to compete for search, and how much of the writing you want to hand over.