How much does a website cost in the UK? Here is our price list.

Search for what a website costs in the UK and you will get a dozen agency pages, all of which answer the question the same way: somewhere between £2,000 and £8,000, it depends. Then a contact form.

That is not an answer. It is a way of not giving one until you are on a call, where the number can be adjusted to fit what you look like you can pay. So here is our actual price list, the same one on our services page, and then the honest part: what makes a real quote move away from it.

What we charge

Those are starting prices and we mean it literally: they are what the smallest honest version of each job costs. Nobody has ever paid less. Plenty have paid more, and the rest of this piece is about why.

The five things that actually move the number

1. How many pages have real thinking in them

A ten-page site is not ten times a one-page site, because eight of those pages are usually variations on a layout that already exists. What costs money is a page that behaves differently from the others: a booking flow, a fee calculator, a product configurator. One of those is worth more than six text pages.

A useful test when you are reading a quote: ask which pages are new designs and which are new content in an existing design. The second kind should be close to free.

2. Whether money changes hands on the site

This is the biggest single step, and it is why our shop price is two and a half times our site price. A brochure site that is wrong is embarrassing. A shop that is wrong takes someone's money and does not deliver. Taking payments means tax rules, refunds, failed cards, stock that can go negative, order confirmations that must arrive, and a checkout that has to survive a bad phone on a train.

3. Who writes the words and takes the photographs

Most quotes quietly assume you will supply both. Most clients assume the agency will. That gap is where projects stall for six weeks, and it is worth settling before anybody signs anything.

If you have neither, budget for a copywriter and a photographer, or accept that the site will launch with placeholder text you promise to replace and never do. We have watched that happen more than once.

4. What it has to talk to

A site that stands alone is one job. A site that has to push enquiries into your CRM, pull stock from your till system, sync bookings with a calendar, or hand orders to a courier is several jobs, and each of those systems has its own opinions. Integrations are the most common reason a £999 project becomes a £2,500 project, and the most common thing left off an initial brief.

5. Who is actually doing the work

A £6,000 quote from a larger agency is not usually a rip-off. It reflects an account manager, a project manager, a designer, a developer and an office. If your project genuinely needs five people, that is what five people cost. Ours are lower because that overhead does not exist here — which is an honest trade, not a magic trick, and we will come back to it.

What is not in the price

These are the costs that turn up after launch and rarely appear in a quote:

• The domain — roughly £10 to £15 a year. Register it yourself, in your own name. This is the single most important thing in this article.
• Hosting — anywhere from nothing to £30 a month. A hand-built static site can genuinely be hosted for free; a WordPress site with a shop cannot.
• Email — around £5 per person per month for a proper mailbox on your own domain.
• Payment fees — about 1.5% plus 20p per transaction in the UK, taken by the payment provider, not by us.
• Changes later — either an hourly rate or a care plan. Ask which, and ask what a typical month looks like.

Care plans, and what they are worth

Most UK agencies offer something between £30 and £300 a month to look after a site. The cheap end is usually plugin updates and a backup. The expensive end is content changes and someone answering the phone.

Both can be worth it. What is not worth it is a care plan on a site that has nothing to maintain. A static site with no database and no plugins does not need monthly patching, because there is nothing in it that can be exploited or fall out of date. If you are quoted a care plan, ask what specifically it is protecting against, and whether that thing exists on your site.

When you should not hire us, or anybody

We would rather write this than take a job that was never going to work.

Use a site builder if your budget is under £500, you need it this week, and the site's job is to exist so that people who already know your name can find your address and opening hours. Squarespace or Wix will do that well for about £15 a month. Paying an agency £999 for the same outcome is a waste of your money.

Fix your existing site instead if the problem is that nobody visits it. A new design does not create demand. If your current site converts the visitors it gets and simply gets very few, the money belongs in search and marketing, not in a rebuild. We have talked people out of rebuilds for exactly this reason.

Wait if you cannot yet say in one sentence what you want a visitor to do. That sentence is the brief. Without it, you will pay for a site and then pay again to change it.

How to compare two quotes properly

Quotes are hard to compare because they are written to be hard to compare. Four questions flatten most of that:

1. Who owns it when it is finished? The code, the domain, the hosting account, the content. Get it in writing.
2. What happens if I leave? Can the site be moved to another host and another developer, or is it locked to a proprietary platform only they can edit?
3. What is included after launch, and for how long? "Support" means anything from a year of changes to two weeks of bug fixes.
4. Can I see three sites you built that are live now? Not screenshots. Live URLs that open.

That last one is the one that separates most quotes, and it is the reason our portfolio is a list of things that open rather than a wall of images.

The honest summary

For a small UK business in 2026, a professional website is realistically £1,000 to £3,000, a shop is £2,500 to £8,000, and anyone quoting under £500 for either is either using a template you could have used yourself or is about to disappear halfway through.

Our number is £999 because the work is done by the person who answers your email, and there is no office to pay for. That is the whole explanation. If a larger agency quotes you £6,000 and you need the five people they are quoting for, take it — you will be better served.

If you want the smaller version, tell us what the site has to do and you will get a fixed price back, in writing, before anybody starts.