Hi, I'm Dan · freelance · UK & remote

How much does a website cost in the UK?

An honest breakdown of what you can expect to pay, what moves the number up or down, and the costs that tend not to appear on the quote. Written by someone who builds these for a living, so treat the last section as the sales pitch it is.

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The realistic ranges

> DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy): roughly £12 to £30 a month. Cheap to start and you can have something up the same day. The catch is that the cost never stops, the site is only as good as the hours you put into it, and you cannot take it with you. Over five years, £20 a month is £1,200 and you still own nothing.

> Freelancers: roughly £250 to £1,500 for a small business site. One person, direct contact, far lower overheads than an agency. Quality varies enormously, so the thing to check is not the headline price but what is actually included and whether you end up owning the result.

> Agencies: roughly £2,000 to £10,000 and up. You are paying for a team, project management and process. For a complex site, an e-commerce build or a brand that needs serious design work, that can be money well spent. For a five-page site for a local trade, it is usually more machinery than the job requires.

What actually moves the price

Number of pages

The single biggest factor, and the reason my own pricing is banded by page count. Three pages is a very different job from fifteen.

Who writes the content

If you supply text and photos, the build is quicker and cheaper. If someone has to write copy and source images, that is real work and should appear on the quote.

Custom design vs template

A template adapted to your colours costs less than a design drawn from scratch. Both can look good. Be clear about which one you are being sold.

Functionality

Contact forms are simple. Online payments, bookings, logins, stock or customer accounts are software, and are priced accordingly.

Migrating an existing site

Moving a live site means preserving URLs and redirects so you keep your rankings. Skipping that step is how businesses lose their Google traffic overnight.

Ongoing support

A one-off build and a monthly retainer are different products. Make sure you know which you are buying, and whether the monthly part is optional.

The costs that are easy to miss

> The domain name. Usually £10 to £15 a year. Make sure it is registered in your name, not your developer's. This is the most common way small businesses end up held hostage.

> Hosting. Anywhere from free to £30 a month. A hand-coded static site on Cloudflare generally costs nothing at small business traffic levels. A WordPress site needs real hosting, and usually a backup and security service on top.

> Changes after launch. Ask before you sign: what does a text change cost in six months? Some builders include a window of free tweaks, some charge per change, some only offer a monthly plan.

> Ownership and exit. Ask directly: if I want to leave, do I get the files? With a builder platform the answer is effectively no. That is not a scandal, it is just the deal, but you should know it before committing years of monthly payments.

> The legally required bits. A privacy policy, a cookie policy and a cookie banner are not optional in the UK. If they are not in the quote, find out what adding them costs.

What I charge, for comparison

> Fair warning, this is the part where I pitch. Starter £249 for one to three pages, Growth £499 for four to seven, Business £999 for eight to fifteen. One-off, fixed, agreed before anything begins.

> Hosting setup, domain and DNS help, a mobile-ready build, the legal pages, a cookie banner, sitemap, robots.txt and Google submission are all included rather than bolted on, and the legal pages do not count against your page allowance. You own the code outright and monthly support is optional.

> That is cheaper than an agency because there is no agency: no office, no account manager, no sales team. It is one developer who has built and shipped six products of his own: three public, and three platforms running day to day at a managed service provider.

See what is in each package

Common questions

Honestly, a DIY builder on a monthly plan, if your time is free and you are happy doing the work yourself. The cost shows up later: the monthly fee never stops, the site is usually slower, and you cannot take it with you if you leave. For many sole traders a well-built one-off site works out cheaper within two to three years.

Often for legitimate reasons: a team, a researched design, copywriting, project management and ongoing accountability. For a large or complex site that can be good value. For a five-page site for a local business it is usually more process than the job needs, and you are paying for overheads rather than output.

Sometimes, but read what happens at the end. Many are a build cost spread over a contract, and if you stop paying you lose the site entirely. Over three years, £30 a month is well over £1,000 for something you never own. Ask what you are left with if you cancel.

Price is not the factor. Google cares about speed, mobile usability, sensible structure, and whether the content answers what people searched for. A cheap site built properly can outrank an expensive one built badly. What does cause damage is migrating a site without redirects, or burying your content behind slow, heavy page-builder code.

Ask every quote the same five questions: how many pages, who writes the content, do I own the code at the end, what are the ongoing costs, and what does a change cost after launch. Most of the apparent price gap between quotes disappears once those are answered.

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