Ask five UK agencies to quote the same website and you can reasonably get five numbers with a 10x spread between them. All five can be defensible. That is the honest starting point, and most pricing guides skip it because a clean number is easier to publish.
Most UK business websites cost between £3,000 and £20,000. Regional agencies typically quote £3,000 to £8,000 for a small business site, London agencies usually start around £8,000, and experienced freelancers often sit between £1,000 and £4,500. Our own pricing starts at £2,800 for an eight-page brochure site, which puts us near the bottom of that market by design. The number you are quoted depends far more on who you asked than on how many pages you need.
Quick links
- How much does a website cost in the UK?
- Why the same brief gets five different prices
- What we charge, and why we sit low
- How much should a website cost for a small business?
- What you pay after launch
- How to tell whether a quote is fair
How much does a website cost in the UK?
For most UK small and mid-sized businesses, a website costs between £3,000 and £20,000. The width of that bracket is the useful part, not a failure to be precise.
Current market surveys put UK agency pricing at £3,000 to £30,000 or more for a small business website, with regional agencies averaging £3,000 to £8,000 and London agencies typically starting from £8,000. Freelancers occupy a different bracket again: £25 to £120 an hour depending on seniority, which usually lands a bespoke small site somewhere between £1,000 and £4,500.
Here is roughly how it breaks down by what you are actually buying.
| What you are buying | Typical UK range |
|---|---|
| Template site, DIY or near-DIY | £0 to £1,000 |
| Freelancer, bespoke small site | £1,000 to £4,500 |
| Regional agency, small business site | £3,000 to £8,000 |
| London agency, same specification | £8,000 upwards |
| Larger marketing site with integrations | £10,000 to £40,000 |
| Enterprise scope, procurement and security review | £50,000 upwards |
Two notes on the extremes. Below £1,000 you are buying a template with your logo dropped into it, and that is a perfectly sensible purchase if a presence is all you need. Above £50,000 for a straightforward marketing site, someone should be able to explain the number without reaching for the word “bespoke”.
Why the same brief gets five different prices
Before scope, the biggest variable in any website quote is who you asked. Same brief, same page count, genuinely different businesses answering it.
Size and overheads
A freelancer prices their own time. A 40-person agency prices a studio, an account team and a floor in a city centre. Neither is wrong, and the larger number often buys real things: more people on the project, cover when someone is ill, and a process that survives contact with a large organisation’s procurement department.
Experience and speciality
An agency that has built 200 sites in your sector charges for knowing which decisions will go wrong before you make them. Sometimes that premium saves money overall. Sometimes you are paying for a case-study list you will never benefit from. It is worth asking which. Specialists in regulated finance, accessibility to WCAG AA, or high-volume retail price differently to generalists because the work genuinely is different.
Location
Agency hourly rates in the UK run £60 to £120, and where the office sits moves that materially. A London agency and a regional one can quote the same hours and land £4,000 apart.
What “website” means in the quote
Two agencies quoting a “10-page website” can be pricing completely different things. One is filling a template. The other is designing page types, migrating content, setting up a CMS your team can actually use, and making the thing fast. The word “website” is doing a lot of quiet work in both quotes.
We have written separately about what actually drives the cost of a headless build, which goes into page count, integrations, CMS choice and content in more detail than there is room for here.
What we charge, and why we sit low
Our pricing starts at £2,800 for an eight-page brochure site and £5,350 for a 15-page marketing site with a CMS. Those are our numbers, not a market benchmark, and we sit deliberately at the lower end.
| Project | Our price from |
|---|---|
| Brochure site, eight pages | £2,800 |
| Brochure site with CMS | £3,400 |
| Marketing site, 15 pages with CMS | £5,350 |
| Larger marketing site, 25 pages | £7,450 |
| Content site with tools, 30 pages | £11,400 |
| Like-for-like migration, 20 pages | £3,300 |
We are a small agency that uses AI heavily across research, build and content. That takes real hours out of a project, and we pass the difference on rather than keeping it. It is a position, not a benchmark. Plenty of good agencies would price the same brief at three times these numbers and be entirely justified in doing so.
It also means we are not right for everything. If your project needs a large team, a procurement process and six months of stakeholder management, you want a different kind of agency, and we would rather say that here than three meetings in.
For a sense of what the pace looks like in practice: we rebuilt HOC Digital Solutions as a full rebrand, redesign and rebuild, live in four weeks with roughly 80% faster page loads. That is the trade we are making. Fewer people, more automation, shorter timelines.
How much should a website cost for a small business?
If you want a site that generates enquiries rather than simply existing, budget £5,000 to £10,000.
That range buys bespoke design rather than a theme, a CMS your team can update without ringing anyone, content structured for how people actually search now, and a build fast enough that visitors do not leave before it loads. It is the point at which a website starts behaving like a business asset rather than a brochure you paid to digitise.
Below roughly £3,000 you are generally buying a template build with limited structural work. That is a reasonable purchase, and we say so on our own website cost calculator rather than pretending everyone needs a bespoke build. It stops being reasonable the moment the site has a job to do, because the cost then reappears as slow pages, a CMS nobody can use, and a rebuild in 18 months.
One thing worth weighing that did not exist five years ago: buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant before they open Google. Sites built purely for blue links are not structured for that, and the fix is largely structural rather than cosmetic. If you are spending money on a build in 2026, it is worth checking whether what you are buying can be read and cited by answer engines as well as search engines.
What you pay after launch
Budget £15 to £60 a month for a modern static or headless site, and £30 to £150 for WordPress. That covers managed hosting, SSL, backups and the domain.
Industry guides put the full ongoing range at £50 to £300 a month once maintenance, security and content updates are included. WordPress sits higher because it needs a heavier server, plugin licences and someone keeping it patched, which is skippable right up until the morning it is not.
Beyond that, a retainer covering content, changes, performance and search visibility starts around £500 a month. It is genuinely optional. Plenty of sites do without one. Most sites that go stale do so because nobody owned them, not because nobody paid for them.
How to tell whether a quote is fair
Price alone will not tell you. These four questions will.
- What happens after launch? A quote with no answer here is cheaper for a reason. Ask who fixes things, how quickly, and what it costs.
- Who is actually doing the work? Pitched by a director, built by a junior, is a common and expensive pattern. Ask to meet whoever will build it.
- What is not included? Content and copywriting are the usual omissions, because leaving them out makes the headline number look better. On a 30-page site that is easily £2,700 of writing.
- Can I see something they built that is still fast? Run a couple of their recent sites through a speed test. It takes two minutes and tells you more than the deck will.
If the answers are good and the number is high, the number is probably fine. If the answers are vague and the number is low, that is the expensive option.
Price your build in about two minutes
Ranges are useful for planning, but the number you need is the one for your site. Our website cost calculator uses the same figures we quote from: pick your platform, page count and complexity and it returns a budget range and a realistic timeline, with the line items shown. If you would rather see what those numbers bought other people, the case studies have the detail.
- Our real pricing, not a lead-capture form dressed up as a tool
- A timeline alongside the budget, so you can plan around both
- No sign-up, no email wall, and no follow-up unless you ask for one