Ask this question online and you get a wall of “it depends”. It does depend. That is not a reason to dodge the number. The real reason nobody names one is simpler: most of what you are paying for is somebody's time, and nobody wants to say their rate first.
So here are the ranges other people have collected from real quotes, the running costs almost nobody itemises, what actually pushes a price up, and what we charge, because it would be strange to write all this and stay quiet about our own prices.
The short answer: in the UK a small business site is roughly £300 to £1,000 from a freelancer and £2,000 to £7,000 from an agency. A website builder is about £200 a year, forever. Keeping any site online costs very little: a domain is around £10 a year and hosting a small site can be free. Nearly everything above that is somebody's time, and the useful question is how much of it your job actually needs.
What people actually pay
Bark, which handles quote requests from UK customers, puts a freelancer at £300 to £1,000 for a simple site and £1,000 to £3,000 for a small business site. Agencies come in at £2,000 to £7,000 for much the same brief. Hourly rates run from about £35 for a junior to over £150 for someone experienced.
Checkatrade's cost guide, put together by chartered estimators, lands higher again: an average of £7,747 across everything it tracks, with a typical WordPress build averaging £3,700 and ranging from £400 to £7,000.
Those numbers look wild next to each other, and both are honest. “A website” covers a one-page site for a gardener and a fifty-page site with online booking, staff logins and a payment gateway. The words are the same. The jobs are not.
The costs nobody itemises
Underneath every quote is what it actually costs to keep a site on the internet, and it is small.
- A domain is about £8 to £15 a year. A .co.uk sits at the lower end.
- Hosting a small business site can be free. Not a trial, free. The free tiers from the big providers are more than enough for a few pages and normal local traffic. If you ever outgrow one, it is a few pounds a month.
- The padlock in the address bar, the SSL certificate, is free and has been for years. Any decent host includes it. Checkatrade's guide still lists it at £50 a year, which was true once. If somebody bills you for it today, ask why.
That is the whole running cost. Everything else on an invoice is work: design, writing, setup, and someone being around afterwards.
Renting versus owning
A website builder is a different shape of deal. Independent UK pricing puts Squarespace at £12 to £79 a month on annual billing and Wix at £9 to £119. A middle plan on either is around £16 or £17 a month if you pay for the year upfront.
Call it £200 a year. Over five years that is a little over £1,000, and at the end you own nothing. Stop paying and the site goes.
In fairness to them, that £1,000 is not pure rent. It covers hosting, security, updates, a support team, and the ability to change something yourself at midnight without asking anybody. For plenty of owners that is a fair deal and worth saying so.
But it is a different question from the one people think they are asking. It is not cheap against expensive. It is renting against owning, and which of those suits how you like to run things.
What actually pushes the price up
How many pages. The first page is the expensive one. It sets the design, the layout and the way everything behaves on a phone. Pages four and five cost far less than page one.
Who writes the words. This is the big hidden one. Most quotes assume you will supply the text, and most owners never quite get round to it, so the job stalls for months. Ask whether writing is included. If it is not, that work has landed on you.
Anything that takes money or bookings. Payments, online booking, customer accounts, a menu that changes weekly. Each one adds a system that has to be set up, tested and kept working.
Custom design against a proven layout. A design drawn from scratch takes days and several rounds of opinions. A layout that already works for your kind of business takes hours. The second is not the worse option. For most local businesses it is the better one, because it has already been tested on people like your customers.
Changes after launch. Ask what a change costs once the site is live, and how many rounds are included before then. This is where two quotes that looked identical stop being identical.
Five questions before you pay anybody
- Is the price fixed in writing, and what would make it go up?
- Whose name is the domain registered in, and whose account is the hosting in?
- If I stop paying you, what happens to my site?
- What exactly does “SEO” include here? Ask for the list.
- How many rounds of changes are included, and what is the rate after that?
Those five answers will tell you more about somebody than their portfolio will.
What we charge
It would be odd to write all this and hide our own numbers. £149 for a one-page site, £299 for three pages, £499 for five, and from £800 for anything bigger. One-off, fixed before we start, no monthly fee to us. The domain is registered in your name and costs you about £10 a year. Hosting for a site this size is currently free and sits in your own account.
We can price like that because it is one person with almost no overheads, using layouts that already work for local businesses, and writing the words in from your notes rather than waiting for you to send them. It is not a trick. If your job genuinely needs custom design, a booking system and a team behind it, an agency quoting £5,000 is not robbing you. They are quoting for a different job.
What nobody should be doing is refusing to tell you the number.
Still deciding whether you need a site at all? The numbers on that are in the first post. Already have one and want to be found? That is the second.
Clear prices, live within days, and you own everything.
See pricesQuestions first? The FAQ covers cost, timings and ownership, or send us a message.