How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK? Honest Prices, Not “It Depends”

You’ve asked two or three people what a website costs and come back with numbers that don’t agree. One was a few hundred. One was a few thousand. Nobody explained the gap, and the answer you got most often was “it depends”, which is true and completely useless to somebody trying to set a budget.

So here are mine, in public, with no form to fill in first. I’m Luke. I build websites for small businesses in Sunderland and across the North East, and I’d rather you knew the numbers before you rang me than after. Then I’ll explain what actually moves a quote, so you can test anybody’s price against it.

My prices, on the page

A single-page site is £599. That’s the page itself, a contact form, a gallery, SSL, basic SEO, the site submitted to Google Search Console so Google knows it exists, Analytics so you can see who turns up, and weekly backups. Suits a trade or small service business needing one solid page to do the shopfront’s job.

A standard site is £1,200. Five to eight pages, UK hosting, a contact form with booking, enhanced SEO with real keyword research behind it rather than guesswork, your social accounts wired in, weekly backups again. That’s the one most small businesses land on.

Ten pages or more, or anything with a shop attached, I price to spec after a call. Not to be cagey. A shop with fifteen products and one payment method is a different job from one with hundreds of lines and trade pricing, and quoting either off a two-line email means guessing at your expense.

Most projects land between £500 and £4,000. Same bands are written on my web design page, and they don’t move depending on how your business looks on the phone.

Why two quotes come out miles apart

Everyone says “it depends” because it does. The problem is stopping there instead of saying what it depends on. Five things move a website quote more than everything else put together:

• How many pages. One page is one set of decisions. Eight is eight, plus a menu that has to make sense to somebody who’s never heard of you.
• Whether the words already exist. Writing your services page from scratch takes hours that pasting yours in does not.
• Whether the photos exist. Real pictures of your work, your van, your shop beat stock every time, and with none the site either waits or settles.
• Whether it takes bookings or payments. A contact form sends an email. A booking system holds slots, sends confirmations, and has to not double-book you on a Saturday.
• What it has to talk to. Accounting software, a CRM, an EPOS till, a supplier feed. Each connection can break, so each one has to be built carefully and tested.

That’s the whole mystery. A five-page site for a joiner who has photos and knows what he wants to say is a different animal from a five-page site where I’m writing every word off a single phone call. Same page count. Nothing like the same job.

What should be in the price whoever builds it

A website isn’t cheap if half of it is missing. I include all of these as standard, and I’d want them on anybody else’s paperwork before comparing two numbers:

• SSL, so browsers don’t put a warning in front of your business before anyone reads a word.
• A site that works properly on a phone. Pull your own up on 4G, not office wifi, and count how long you’d wait.
• A contact form that genuinely delivers, to an inbox somebody checks.
• The site submitted to Google Search Console. A site nobody has told Google about can sit there for weeks doing nothing.
• Analytics, so “is it working” has an answer instead of a feeling.
• Weekly backups, so a bad plugin update on a Tuesday isn’t the end of your business online.

Miss four of those and the cheap quote quietly becomes the expensive one. You’ll pay somebody to bolt each of them on later, and retro-fitting is always dearer. Nobody rewires a house through the plaster.

What legitimately costs more

Some things push a price up for honest reasons. Anything that takes money is one, because a checkout has to handle refunds, failed cards and stock levels, and keep doing it at midnight on a bank holiday. Bookings are another, especially with staff, rooms or vehicles that can only be in one place at once. Content is the quiet one: write your own pages and send photos off your phone and you’ve cut real hours out of the build.

One thing worth saying, since it saves people money. You probably need fewer pages than you think. A home page, the services people actually buy, some proof you exist and do good work, and a way to get hold of you covers most small businesses. Everything past that should earn its place on the invoice.

Where a cheap website turns out to be the dear one

The monthly builder deal is the big one. A fixed fee every month with the website “included” sounds painless, and for a while it is. What you’re doing is renting. Stop paying and the site goes dark, because the files were never yours, and after a few years you’ve handed over more than a build would have cost with nothing left behind.

Then there’s the quote that leaves hosting out. On paper it’s the cheaper of the two, right up until the first renewal lands and you find out it was never in there in the first place. Ask straight: is hosting in the price, and for how long?

The “free website” that registers your domain in somebody else’s name causes the most grief of the lot. Your domain is your address. Don’t hold it and you can’t move, you can’t take your email, and leaving becomes a negotiation. None of this is illegal and plenty of the firms doing it are decent. It’s just a different deal from the one people think they’re signing, and asking in writing costs nothing.

How to compare two prices properly

Give both people the same brief. Write down your page list, say whether you’re supplying words and photos, say whether you need bookings or a shop, then send that identical thing to both. Half the wild differences in quotes are two people pricing two different websites.

Then ask the questions that cost nothing. Who owns the site and the domain at the end? Is hosting in the price? What’s included from the list above? Who do I actually speak to in six months when a page needs changing? The answers explain the gap faster than the quotes do. I’ve written a longer piece on choosing who to hire that covers the parts that aren’t about money.

What it costs once the site is live

You get two weeks of free support after the site’s finished, which is when the small stuff surfaces. After that there are care packages if you’d like someone keeping an eye on it. No obligation if you’d rather not. Hosting and your domain renew on their own schedule whoever built the thing, so budget for those either way.

During the build I usually give three rounds of revisions, and that’s plenty if you gather feedback into one message instead of nine emails over a fortnight. How the rest of the process runs is on my FAQ page.

FAQs

Is a cheap website worth it?

Often, yes. A £599 one-pager that loads fast, works on a phone and has your number at the top of it will out-earn a four-grand site nobody can find. Cheap is only a problem when it’s cheap because things are missing rather than because the job is small. Check it against the list above.

Do I pay it all up front or in stages?

Stages. Get the split written into the quote before anything starts, because nobody should be asking for the full amount before you’ve seen a thing, and you shouldn’t be holding all of it back until launch day either. I agree it on the call and put it in writing.

What does it cost to run after launch?

Two weeks of free support from me, then care packages if you want ongoing cover. Hosting and your domain renew each year regardless of who built the site. If a quote doesn’t mention hosting anywhere, ask. It’s the most common thing left off.

Why is one quote double the other for the same website?

Nine times out of ten it’s scope. One person quoted for the site you described and the other quoted for what you’ll need once you’ve thought it through, bookings and copy included. Ownership is the other big one. A rented site and a site you own aren’t the same product, even when they look identical in a browser.

Does a more expensive website rank better on Google?

No. Price and rankings aren’t connected. Google tends to reward a site that loads quickly, works on a phone, says plainly what you do and where you do it, and gets mentioned elsewhere. A bigger budget buys more care over the first few of those. It doesn’t buy position one. If local search is the real goal, your Google Business Profile does more of the early heavy lifting than the website does.

You can take all of that and go and test a quote yourself, and if there’s one sat in your inbox now you’ve got the questions to do it with. If you’d rather send it over and have somebody tell you plainly whether it’s fair and what’s missing from it, that’s the sort of thing I do for businesses round here. No jargon, no hard sell. Drop me a line and I’ll take a look.