What a website actually costs in 2026

Ask four people what a website costs and you will get four answers between £300 and £15,000, all of them true. The number depends far less on the pages than on who does the thinking, and on what happens after it goes live.

Here is what each price bracket really buys, so you can work out which one you are in before anybody sends you a quote.

Why the same website costs £300 and £5,000

A website is two jobs wearing one name. There is the building — pages, photos, a form that works on a phone. And there is the deciding — what goes on the front page, what you charge, which jobs you want more of and which you would rather stop doing.

The cheap end sells you the building and leaves the deciding to you. The expensive end does the deciding and charges for the hours it takes. Most small firms need somewhere in between: someone who asks enough questions to get it right, without a team of six people billing for meetings.

What each bracket gets you

Rough figures for a one-person or small firm in the UK, for a site you own outright:

• Doing it yourself on Wix or Squarespace — £15–30 a month, plus a weekend of your time and another weekend every time you want to change something.
• A freelancer, single page — £300–800. Fine if you know exactly what you want and have the photos and words ready.
• A freelancer or small studio, several pages — £800–2,500. A page per service, a gallery, the groundwork so people nearby can find you.
• An agency — £3,000–15,000 and up. Worth it when you have a marketing budget to spend and someone in the office to spend it with.
• Renting monthly — £30–80 a month, usually on a three to five year contract. Looks cheapest on day one. It is worth its own article — see below.

On top of the build you pay for hosting and the domain: somewhere between £50 and £300 a year depending on who does it and how much hand-holding is included.

The bit people forget to price

Nobody quotes for the photographs. If you have not got decent pictures of your own work, either you spend an afternoon taking them or somebody charges you for a photographer, and that is £300–600 gone.

Same with the words. Writing four pages about your own business is far harder than it sounds, and a site that says nothing specific reads like every other site in your trade. Ask whether writing is included or whether you are expected to hand it over.

What actually moves the price

• How many pages — but less than you think. Ten near-identical service pages take less work than three pages that each have to be thought about.
• Whether the words exist. Handing over a folder of text is a different job from starting with a phone call and a blank page.
• Photos. Yours, stock, or a shoot.
• Anything that has to talk to something else — a booking calendar, a stock system, payments. Each one adds real hours.
• How much of the decision-making you want to hand over.

What a one-person firm honestly needs

For most trades: one page, done properly. What you do, where you work, photographs of finished jobs, a phone number that is visible without scrolling, and a form that gets through to you. That is a job in the £600–1,000 bracket and it will out-perform a five-page site that nobody thought about.

Go to several pages when you genuinely want to be found for separate things — a plumber who wants bathroom installations as well as emergency call-outs needs a page for each, because people search for them differently.

What I charge, for comparison

Common questions