What a professional website actually costs, and what changes the price

Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five answers spanning an order of magnitude. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because “a website” describes everything from a one-page template to a multilingual booking platform, and almost nobody says which one they are quoting for.

So here are actual numbers, and more usefully, the specific things that move them.

The rough bands

These are broad market ranges for a business website in 2026, not our prices specifically.

Template platform, self-built: £0 to £500 per year. Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and similar. You do the work. It will look like the template, and you are renting rather than owning, but for a very small business testing an idea this is often the correct answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Freelancer, template-based: £500 to £2,000. Someone else assembles a template for you and puts your content in. Quality varies enormously. The good ones are excellent value.

Small agency or senior freelancer, custom build: £2,000 to £8,000. Designed rather than chosen, built rather than assembled. You should expect a discovery process, custom design, a CMS, technical SEO and a handover. This is where most established small and mid-sized businesses land.

Mid-size agency: £8,000 to £40,000. More people involved, a formal project team, more process. Appropriate for larger organisations, complex requirements, or businesses that need a lot of internal stakeholder management.

Enterprise: £40,000 upwards. Different world, different problems.

Subscription arrangements, where you pay monthly instead of a lump sum, generally run £150 to £400 per month for the small agency tier, usually with a minimum term and often with an option to buy the site outright later.

What actually moves the number

This is the useful part. When a quote comes in higher than you expected, it is almost always one of these.

Page count

The obvious one, though less linear than people assume. Pages one through six carry most of the design work, because that is where the visual system gets invented. Pages seven through twenty are mostly applying decisions already made, so they cost proportionally less.

This is why most published prices cover a fixed number of pages. Ours covers six.

E-commerce, booking, memberships

Any system that takes money, holds a calendar or gates content behind a login is a different category of work. It involves payment integration, state that has to stay correct, security considerations and far more testing.

If someone quotes you the same for a brochure site and a shop, be suspicious.

Whether the content exists

This is the most underestimated cost on any web project, and it is usually the thing that delays launch.

If you arrive with your text written and your photographs taken, the build is straightforward. If the site needs copywriting from scratch, that is a genuine professional service with its own price. Photography likewise.

Most agencies, including us, quote for editing content you supply rather than creating it from nothing. Read that line carefully in any quote you receive.

Design depth

There is a real difference between “make it look clean and professional” and “develop a visual identity that no competitor could reuse”. Both are legitimate. They cost differently.

Migration

Moving 200 existing blog posts, preserving their URLs, and keeping the rankings they have accumulated is careful, unglamorous work. It is also entirely avoidable to price wrongly. If you have a large existing site, say so at the first conversation.

Multiple languages

Not double the cost, but genuinely more: the architecture has to support it, every piece of content exists twice, and the translation itself is a separate cost.

Integrations

Connecting to a CRM, an accounting system, an inventory feed or a booking platform is real engineering. Each integration is its own small project.

The things that should be included, and often are not

When comparing quotes, check explicitly for these. Their absence is how a cheap quote becomes an expensive project.

• A content management system, so you can edit your own text and images without paying anyone
• Mobile layouts designed, not just “responsive” as a technical afterthought
• Technical SEO, meaning titles, descriptions, structured data, sitemaps and clean markup
• Analytics configured around actual conversions rather than pageviews
• Accessibility, which in many jurisdictions is a legal requirement rather than a nicety
• Performance work, since a beautiful site that takes six seconds to load will lose you money
• A real handover: the code, the hosting account, the domain and documentation

That last one deserves emphasis. Ask directly: at the end of this, what do I own, and can I take it to another developer? If the answer is vague, that is the answer.

Ongoing costs, honestly

The build is not the whole picture.

• Domain: £10 to £40 per year, and you should register it yourself, in your own name
• Hosting: anywhere from free to £50 per month depending on the technology. A static site on a modern edge network costs very little to run
• Platform fees: £15 to £300 per month if you are on a commercial platform, and £0 if you are not
• Maintenance: a WordPress site needs regular updating. A static site largely does not
• Content and marketing: entirely up to you, and usually the largest number over time

A useful question when comparing: what does this cost me per year for three years, not just to launch?

Why we publish ours

Most agencies will not put a number on a page. The usual reasoning is that every project is different, and there is truth in that.

We publish anyway, for three reasons.

First, it respects your time. You can tell in thirty seconds whether we are plausible for you, instead of after two calls.

Second, hiding prices mostly protects the agency, not the client. It preserves room to quote based on what a client seems able to pay. We would rather not have that room.

Third, and specific to what we do: concrete figures are exactly the kind of fact search engines and AI assistants can cite. “Contact us for a quote” gives them nothing. Since we sell that discipline, it would be strange not to practise it.

Our own numbers are on the pricing page, along with what is included and, more importantly, what is quoted separately.

How to brief well and get an accurate quote

If you want comparable quotes from several people, give them all the same information:

1. What your business does, and who buys from you
2. Roughly how many pages, and which ones
3. Whether you need e-commerce, booking or logins
4. Whether content and images exist, or need creating
5. Whether there is an existing site to migrate
6. Your deadline, and whether it is real
7. Your budget range

That last one causes discomfort, and it should not. Sharing a range is not an invitation to spend it all. It lets a competent supplier tell you honestly whether the project is feasible at that level, and propose the right version of the work rather than guessing.

The best outcome of any first conversation is a clear yes or a clear no. Both are more useful than a proposal designed to keep you talking.