How much does a website
cost in the UK?

It's one of the most searched questions in small business, and most answers dodge it. So here is the direct version, then the detail behind it.

UK website costs at a glance

DIY builders — Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy

These platforms are genuinely fine for testing an idea or getting something online tonight. There is no build fee, templates look polished at first glance, and you can publish without hiring anyone. At the time of writing, entry plans sit around £10–£15 a month and business tiers around £25–£35, on Wix's published plans and Squarespace's pricing.

The trade-off arrives later. Template sites carry code you never asked for, which shows up as slow mobile loading. Layout changes get awkward once you want something the template did not anticipate. And you are renting: stop paying, and the site goes down.

The honest maths is that £15 a month is £180 a year, or £900 over five years, for a site you never own. That is not a reason to avoid DIY — it is a reason to be clear about what stage you are at. If the website is a placeholder, DIY is correct. If enquiries depend on it, the missed work usually costs more than the fees saved.

Freelancers and independent studios

Most UK freelancers and one-person studios sit between £500 and £5,000 depending on experience, page count and whether ecommerce is involved. You get someone who understands the brief rather than a template, but quality varies enormously and there is no meaningful qualification standard in this industry.

What separates the good from the bad is rarely the price. It is whether they ask what the site needs to achieve before quoting, whether they can show live sites that load fast on a phone, and whether SEO foundations are part of the build or an upsell afterwards.

What do byMichael packages cost?

For transparency, my own website packages are fixed and published on the pricing page:

Shopify and WooCommerce stores start from £2,000. Scope is agreed before work begins, with a 50% deposit to start.

Agencies

Agencies typically quote from £8,000 upward because you are paying for a team: account manager, designer, developer, project manager, plus overheads. For a company with a brand to protect, multiple stakeholders and a marketing department to coordinate with, that structure earns its cost.

For a local trade, a restaurant or a two-person professional firm, it is usually overkill. You are funding coordination you do not need. The same site from an experienced independent costs a fraction and you speak directly to the person building it.

What does a website cost per year to run?

The build price is the number everyone asks about. The running cost is the one that surprises people, so here it is separately.

• Domain name: £10–£15 a year for a .co.uk or .com. Renew it, and keep it in your own account.
• Hosting: £0–£30 a month. A static site can be hosted free on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. WordPress needs proper managed hosting, realistically £10–£30 a month — cheap shared hosting and a business site are a bad combination.
• SSL certificate: free. If anyone quotes you for one, ask why.
• Maintenance: £0 for a static site with nothing to patch; £40–£100 a month for managed WordPress care covering updates, security and backups.
• Platform fees: Shopify from £19 a month, plus card processing on every sale.
• Email: around £5–£10 per user per month for a professional address on your own domain.

For most small businesses that lands between £100 and £400 a year on a brochure site, and £400 to £1,200 on ecommerce. Anyone quoting a build price without telling you the annual running cost has given you half a quote.

What actually changes the price

Six things move a quote more than anything else:

• Page count — but only loosely. Five thin pages are cheaper than one complex one.
• Who writes the content. The most common reason quotes differ wildly. Copywriting is real work; if you supply finished copy, expect to pay less. If the designer writes it, expect £150–£400 per page of proper commercial writing.
• Ecommerce, bookings or payments. Any transaction adds testing, configuration and edge cases.
• Custom functionality beyond a normal brochure site — calculators, portals, integrations with software you already run.
• Whether SEO is built in. Structure, schema, performance and metadata done at build time cost far less than retrofitting them.
• Photography. Stock images are free to cheap and look it. A half-day of real photography is £300–£600 and changes how the whole site reads.

Where you are based barely matters. London, Manchester, Kent — the scope drives the number. A clear five-page service site costs about the same whether you trade in Ashford or Aberdeen, because the work is the same. Regional pricing differences exist at agency level, not at independent level.

What does a website cost for my type of business?

Rough guides, assuming a properly built bespoke site rather than a template:

• Trades and sole traders — £500–£1,250. What you need is credibility, a clear service list, photographs of real work and a tappable phone number. Anything more is usually premature.
• Hospitality and leisure — £1,250–£2,500. Menus or session listings, opening hours that are correct everywhere, and a booking route that survives being tapped one-handed.
• Professional firms — £900–£1,500. Depth matters here: service pages that answer real questions, named people, and credibility that stands next to a bigger competitor.
• Product businesses — £2,500–£6,000. Platform choice, product structure, payments, shipping and tax. See Shopify vs WooCommerce before you commit.
• Anything with a workflow — from £3,000. Booking engines, client portals, internal tools. Priced on the process, not the page count.

How to compare two quotes properly

When one quote is £600 and another is £4,000, they are almost never for the same thing. Ask both:

• Who writes the copy, and how many pages of it?
• Is it a template or built for me? If a template, which one, and can I see it?
• What is included for SEO — structure and schema, or just a plugin installed?
• What does it cost to run per year, and who holds the domain and hosting accounts?
• How many rounds of changes are included, and what happens after that?
• Who owns the finished site, and can I take it elsewhere?

That last one catches people out. On some cheap monthly deals you never own anything, and leaving means starting over.

Is a cheap website worth it?

A cheap website is only cheap if it works. If it loads slowly, fails to explain what you do, or never appears in search, it costs you enquiries every month — and that cost compounds quietly, because you never see the people who bounced.

The test is not the price. It is whether the site loads fast on a phone on mobile data, states plainly what you do and who for, and makes the next step obvious. A £500 site that does those three things beats a £5,000 site that does not.

So what should a UK small business budget?

For most independents and service businesses: Launch (£500), Growth (£900) or Premium (£1,500), plus around £200 a year for support. For ecommerce, from £2,000. Full package detail is on the pricing page; if you are in Kent, also see the Kent pricing guide.

The practical advice is to buy the simplest thing that can win the enquiry, then grow it when the business genuinely needs more. Businesses over-buy websites constantly — ten pages when three would do, a blog nobody updates, features nobody uses. A focused site you keep current will outperform a large one you abandon, every time.