How much does a website cost in the UK?

The short answer

For a typical small business site (a home page, your services, contact details, done properly), this is what the four routes cost in the UK today:

Everything below unpacks where those numbers come from and which costs tend to be missing from the headline price.

What you're actually paying for

Two quotes for "a website" can differ by thousands because they're quoting different work. The price moves with a handful of things:

• How many pages, and whether each needs its own design or follows a pattern
• Who writes the words. Copywriting is often the biggest hidden line item
• Whether you have photos, or need photography or stock images
• An online shop with stock, payments and deliveries multiplies the work
• Integrations: booking systems, invoicing, anything that talks to other software
• Who owns the domain and the content afterwards, which decides what leaving costs

A local business usually needs none of the expensive items. What it needs is to be found on Google, to look right on a phone, and to be easy to contact. That's a modest amount of work, which is why the honest price for it is in the hundreds, not the thousands.

Doing it yourself: the real cost of "free"

Wix, Squarespace and similar builders advertise low monthly prices, roughly £10 to £35 a month for a business plan once you leave the free tier (which puts adverts on your site and keeps your domain theirs). Over three years, a £20 plan is £720, more than many professionally built sites, and it never stops.

The bigger cost is time. The tool is the easy part; the words, the structure and the design decisions are the work. Most business owners get it done over several weekends, and a large share never finish at all. Value your evenings at anything and DIY stops being the cheap option.

It's still the right route for some people: if you have the time, enjoy it, and have a decent eye, a builder gives you full control for a known monthly cost.

Freelancers: £300 to £2,500, and why the range is so wide

On platforms like PeoplePerHour and Fiverr, or through recommendations, UK freelancers typically quote somewhere between £300 and £2,500 for a small business site. The range is wide because experience varies wildly, and so does what's included: some quotes cover copywriting and basic SEO, others are strictly design.

The risks aren't really about price. They're the project stalling when the freelancer gets a bigger client, and the handover: who hosts it, who can change it, and whose name the domain is registered in. Ask to see two or three sites they delivered over a year ago that still work, and get domain ownership in writing.

Agencies: £2,000 to £10,000 and up

A UK agency will rarely quote under £2,000 for even a simple site, and £5,000 to £10,000 is normal once discovery workshops, brand reviews and project management are on the invoice. Timelines run to weeks or months, and ongoing retainers of £100 to £500 a month are common.

For the right project, that money is well spent: a large online shop, integrations with your stock or booking systems, or paid campaigns that need fine-grained tracking. For a local business that needs to be found on Google and contacted easily, you're paying for process you don't need.

Fixed-price services: the middle ground

A fixed-price service does what the freelancer or agency does, but for a defined scope at a published price, which removes the two things small businesses hate most about buying a website: not knowing what it will cost, and not knowing when it will be done.

Business Builder by JKRB works this way. The Launch Plan is from £249 as a one-off payment: a professional site designed around your business, a .co.uk domain in your name, optimisation for Google and for AI assistants, and delivery in 7 days or less, with most sites live within 48 hours. You approve the design before paying anything.

The optional care plan is £19 a month (or £190 a year) and covers hosting, your domain, SSL, unlimited content changes over WhatsApp, and the ongoing SEO work. No contract, cancel whenever you like. If you'd rather host and maintain it yourself, the site is yours either way.

The hidden costs nobody quotes

Whichever route you take, check whether the headline price includes these. They're small individually and add up:

• The domain: roughly £10 to £20 a year for a .co.uk or .com renewal
• Hosting: roughly £5 to £30 a month if it isn't bundled
• An SSL certificate: often free now, but some hosts still charge for it
• Email at your domain: a few pounds per mailbox per month
• Stock photos, fonts or plugins the design quietly depends on
• Changes after launch: the difference between "included" and "£60 an hour" is enormous over a year
• Your own time, the one cost that never appears on any invoice

What a website costs to run per year

The build is a one-off; the running costs are forever, so they matter more than most people think:

Price red flags, in both directions

• "Free website" offers that lock you into expensive hosting or keep the domain in their name. The exit cost is the real price.
• Suspiciously cheap builds that are a template with your logo dropped in, invisible to Google and impossible to maintain.
• Quotes that can't tell you who owns the domain and content afterwards. If it isn't you, walk away.
• Long contracts for "maintenance" that amounts to keeping the lights on. Paying monthly is fine; being trapped isn't.
• Prices that only exist after a sales call. If a service is genuinely fixed-price, the price is published.

A reasonable test for any quote: does it say what you get, what you'll own, what it costs to run, and what changes cost later? Any route that answers all four plainly, at any price point, is being straight with you.