How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK? (2026 Guide)

“How much will a website cost?” is usually the first question I’m asked as a freelance web developer, and the honest answer is anything from a few pounds a month to well over £20,000. That isn’t a dodge. A sole trader who needs a credible page to back up their Google listing and a manufacturer whose site takes trade orders and talks to their stock system are buying very different things, even though both are called “a website”.

In this guide I’ll break down typical UK prices in 2026 by type of website, explain what actually drives the cost, cover the running costs that often get forgotten, and give you the questions I’d ask any developer before hiring them, including me. The figures are indicative ranges based on current UK pricing, not quotes, and most freelancer and agency prices are quoted before VAT.

• DIY website builder: from a few pounds to around £40 a month, plus your own time.
• Simple brochure website (five to ten pages): typically £1,000–£4,000.
• Custom-designed business website: typically £2,500–£10,000, with agencies usually towards the higher end for similar work because they carry more overheads.
• Ecommerce website: typically £5,000–£15,000, and more for large catalogues or complex integrations.
• Bespoke web application or customer portal: usually £10,000 and up, often well into five figures.
• Running costs: commonly £500–£2,500 a year for a small business site once hosting, domain, maintenance and licences are included.

The rest of this article explains where your project is likely to sit within those ranges, and why.

Builders such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify’s own site tools let you launch quickly for a monthly fee. They work well if your website isn’t a major source of new business and you have the time and eye to put it together yourself. I’d genuinely recommend one to some very small businesses.

The trade-offs are your time, a design that tends to look like many other sites on the same template, and costs that creep up as you add paid apps or higher plans. You’re also renting the platform: you can usually export your content, but you can’t take the site itself elsewhere.

For roughly £1,000–£4,000, you can expect a five-to-ten page site on a platform such as WordPress, often built from a quality theme adapted to your brand. That should include contact forms, a mobile-friendly layout, basic on-page SEO set-up and training on how to edit your own pages.

This is good value when your needs are clear and you can supply your own text and photography.

In the £2,500–£10,000 range you’re paying for more thinking, not just more pages. That typically means time spent understanding your customers, a custom design rather than an adapted theme, help with copy and page structure, SEO planning before launch, analytics and conversion tracking, and proper testing across devices.

For service businesses that rely on their website to generate enquiries, this is usually where the return justifies the spend. You can see how I approach this kind of project on my web design and development page.

An online shop has far more moving parts: product data, variants, stock, delivery rules, payment providers, VAT, order emails and customer accounts. A standard Shopify or WooCommerce build commonly lands between £5,000 and £15,000. Large catalogues, trade pricing, multiple currencies or links to stock and accounting systems push the cost higher, and that’s often where Magento enters the conversation. I’ve compared the three in Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Magento if you’re weighing them up.

Booking systems, quoting tools, customer or supplier portals and internal dashboards are software projects rather than websites. I usually build these on Laravel, and they’re priced by the scope of the features, typically starting around £10,000 and rising with complexity. The pay-off is a system shaped around how your business actually works, rather than bending your processes to fit an off-the-shelf tool.

Often, yes. An agency’s price has to cover account managers, office space and a larger team, so the same scope of work usually costs more. That can be worth it for very large projects that need several specialists working at once.

With a freelancer, you deal directly with the person designing and building your site. There are no hand-offs between departments, decisions get made quickly, and you’re not paying for layers of management. For most small and medium-sized businesses, that’s the better fit.

Being a freelancer myself, I’d still encourage you to ask any freelancer a few sensible questions:

• Capacity: when can they start, and how many projects are they juggling?
• Continuity: what happens if they’re ill or on holiday while your site has a problem?
• Independence: will you have full admin access, your own hosting and domain logins, and enough documentation that another developer could pick the site up if they ever needed to?

A good freelancer will be happy to answer all three. Your website shouldn’t depend on one person’s laptop.

Two quotes for “a ten-page website” can differ by thousands because the work behind them is different. When I’m pricing a project, these are the factors that move the number most:

• Number of unique page layouts, not pages. Ten service pages built from one template cost far less than ten pages that each need a different design.
• Custom design versus an adapted theme. Designing from scratch takes longer but produces something that fits your brand and your customers.
• Content. Writing, editing and sourcing photography is often the most underestimated part of a project. If your developer or a copywriter is writing the words, budget for it.
• Functionality and integrations. Booking, quote forms with logic, CRM or email marketing connections, stock feeds and payment gateways each add development and testing time.
• Replacing an existing site. Moving content across and setting up redirects from old URLs to new ones is essential if you want to keep the search traffic you already have.
• Branding. If you need a logo, colour palette or wider brand identity, that’s usually priced separately and should come before the website.
• Performance and accessibility. Building to good accessibility practice and fast load times takes care, and is worth asking about explicitly.
• Revisions. Clear sign-off stages keep costs predictable; open-ended changes don’t.

A website isn’t a one-off purchase. These are the ongoing costs a small business should expect:

• Domain name: a .co.uk or .com typically costs around £10–£20 a year.
• Hosting: basic shared hosting is often £7–£12 a month at renewal prices, with managed or higher-performance hosting costing more. Hosted platforms such as Shopify include hosting in the monthly plan.
• SSL certificate: a standard certificate should be free in 2026. Most hosts provide one automatically.
• Maintenance and security updates: WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento all need regular core, theme and plugin updates. Most developers offer a monthly care plan for this.
• Licences and apps: premium plugins, Shopify apps and themes often carry annual or monthly fees.
• Business email: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is usually billed separately per user.
• Marketing: SEO, content and advertising are what bring people to the site, and are separate from the build. If you serve a local area, my guide to local SEO for small businesses covers the free steps worth taking first.

The question I’d ask any developer is not “how much is the build?” but “what will this cost me over the next three years, including everything?”

There’s nothing wrong with a modest first website if your needs are genuinely simple. Problems start when a site is bought cheaply to do a much bigger job. These are the situations I’m most often asked to sort out:

• Starting again within two years because the site can’t grow with the business.
• Lost search rankings because a replacement site launched without redirects from the old pages.
• Ownership problems, such as a domain registered in a former supplier’s name or no admin access to your own website.
• Security issues on unmaintained sites, which cost far more to clean up than to prevent.
• A site that gets visits but no enquiries, because nobody planned what visitors should do next.

In the UK market, a quote of a few hundred pounds for a complete, custom business website is usually a sign that something important is missing.

Quotes are hard to compare because developers include different things. Ask each one the same questions, and expect the same from me:

1. Who will own the domain, the hosting account, the design and the content once the site is live?
2. What exactly is included: copywriting, images, SEO set-up, redirects from the old site, analytics and training?
3. Which platform will you build on, and why is it right for my business?
4. How many rounds of design revisions are included?
5. What happens after launch: who handles updates and security, and what does that cost each month?
6. Are the prices shown with or without VAT?
7. Can I see live examples of similar sites you’ve built?
8. What will I need to provide, and by when?

A developer who answers these clearly is usually one who will run the project clearly too.

I always suggest working back from what the website is worth to you rather than starting from a number. Think about what a new customer is worth, and how many extra enquiries the site would need to bring in to pay for itself.

As an illustration: if an average new job brings you £800 of profit and a better website wins two extra jobs a month, that’s £1,600 a month. A £4,000 website would pay for itself in about two and a half months. Your own numbers will differ, but the exercise quickly shows whether a cheaper or more ambitious option makes sense.

For most UK small businesses that rely on their website for enquiries, a well-planned professional site sits somewhere in the low-to-mid thousands. Online shops and bespoke systems sit higher because they do more of the work of running the business.

• Startups.co.uk: How much does a website cost for a small business?
• Shopify UK pricing