Web designers are strangely cagey about money. You ask what a website costs and get "it depends on your requirements" — which is true, and completely useless when you are trying to work out whether you can afford one at all.
The honest range
For a small business in the UK, a properly built website usually lands somewhere between £300 and £3,000. At the lower end you are getting a single, well-built page. Higher up you are paying for either an agency's overheads or genuine complexity — booking systems, customer accounts, online ordering.
My own pricing sits inside that range and is published on the site, because I would rather you knew before you rang me.
What actually moves the price
The number of pages — a bit
This matters less than people expect. The second and third page cost far less than the first, because the design work is already done. Going from four pages to eight rarely doubles anything.
Whether it has to do something — a lot
A site that shows information is one job. A site that takes bookings, handles payments, logs people in or manages stock is a different job entirely, and that is where the price genuinely climbs. Be clear about which you actually need, because it is easy to buy the second when the first would have done.
Who is writing it — more than you would think
Copy and photographs are the single biggest cause of delay and extra cost on small projects. If you can send text and decent pictures, the job is quicker and cheaper. If you need someone to write it and organise a photographer, that is real work and it gets billed.
The costs nobody mentions
The build is the one-off. These are the ongoing ones, and they are small, but you should know about them before you sign anything:
- A domain name — roughly £10 to £15 a year for a .co.uk
- Hosting — often free or a few pounds a month for a small site
- A care plan, if you want one — updates, backups and changes, typically monthly
- Any paid tools the site depends on, such as a booking system
Ask about all four before you commit. A cheap build with an expensive, compulsory monthly plan attached is not a cheap build.
The question worth asking instead
Not "what does a website cost?" but "what is not having one costing me?"
Run the sum for your own trade. If your average job is worth a few hundred pounds and the site brings in one extra enquiry a year that turns into work, it has usually paid for itself inside the first twelve months and then keeps going. For most trades and service businesses it is not close. That does not mean spend more than you can afford — it means judge the cost against what it brings in, not against nothing.
Tell me what you do and roughly what you need, and I'll give you a fixed price in writing. No obligation, and no hourly rates.