How much does a website cost in the UK?

It’s the first question almost everyone asks, and the honest answer is “it depends”, which is useless when you’re trying to set a budget. So here are real ranges, what moves a project from one end to the other, and how to get a quote you can actually compare.

These are typical UK prices for a business website. Your project might land outside them, but if a quote is wildly above or below, it’s worth asking why.

The short answer

• DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix, Shopify starter): from a few hundred pounds a year in subscriptions, plus your own time. Great for testing an idea or a very simple site.
• Freelancer, template-based site: roughly £1,500 to £5,000. A theme adapted to your brand, a handful of pages, and a CMS you can edit.
• Small studio, custom-designed site: roughly £5,000 to £15,000. Designed around your business rather than a template, built to be fast and easy to update.
• Larger or more complex sites: £15,000 to £50,000 and up. E-commerce with integrations, multiple languages or regions, bookings, customer accounts, or lots of different page types.
• Big agency projects: often £50,000 and well beyond, once strategy, research and multiple teams are involved.

What actually drives the cost

Page count matters less than people think. What matters is how many different things the site has to do.

1. Number of page types, not pages

Fifty blog posts built from one template cost about the same as five. What adds cost is each distinct layout: a home page, a service page, a case study, a product page, a booking flow. Count the page types you need, not the pages.

2. Template or custom design

A good template gets you to launch quickly and cheaply. Custom design costs more but fits your brand, your content and your customers, rather than bending your business around someone else’s layout. If you compete on trust or quality, it usually pays for itself.

3. Content

Who writes the words and supplies the photos? Content is the most common cause of delays and extra cost. If you’ll need copywriting or photography, budget for it separately and early.

4. Integrations

Anything the site has to talk to adds work: payment providers, CRMs, booking systems, stock management, email marketing, a customer portal. Each one is small on its own. Together they are often the difference between a £6,000 site and a £20,000 one.

5. E-commerce

Selling online adds products, variants, checkout, delivery rules, tax, emails and returns. A small Shopify shop can be affordable. A custom storefront with complex catalogue rules, or integration with your warehouse, is a much bigger job.

6. Performance, SEO and accessibility

A site that loads in under two seconds, passes Google’s Core Web Vitals and works for people using screen readers doesn’t happen by accident. Cheap builds often skip this, and you pay for it later in lost enquiries and search rankings. Ask what’s included.

The running costs nobody mentions

The build is a one-off. These aren’t:

• Hosting: from almost nothing for a simple static site to a few hundred pounds a month for high-traffic or complex platforms.
• Domain and email: usually small, but don’t forget them.
• CMS or platform subscriptions: Shopify, some headless CMSs and premium plugins charge monthly.
• Maintenance: security updates, fixes and small improvements. Budget a monthly retainer or a pot of hours. A site nobody looks after slowly breaks.

As a rule of thumb, plan for 10 to 20% of the build cost each year to keep a site healthy.

How to get a quote you can compare

Quotes vary so much because every supplier is guessing at a different project. Make them all quote the same thing by sending a short brief:

1. What the business does and who the site is for
2. What the site must do (sell, take bookings, generate enquiries)
3. The page types you think you need
4. Anything it needs to connect to
5. Who is providing the content
6. Your budget range and deadline

Sharing a budget feels risky, but it’s the fastest way to get useful answers. A good developer will tell you what’s realistic for that money rather than just filling it.

When cheap is expensive

The most expensive website is the one you rebuild eighteen months later. Watch out for quotes that don’t mention performance, accessibility or who owns the site afterwards. Make sure you own your domain, your content and your code, and that you can move to another developer without starting again.

If you’d like a straight answer for your project, tell us what you’re building and we’ll give you a realistic range, even if that means pointing you towards a template.