What a website costs in the UK
Five different price ranges sit on page one for this question. The only band all five cover is £2,000 to £3,000. What moves you above or below it is not the design, it is whether your content already exists and whether you own the result.
Quoted on page one · UK · July 2026
Five answers to one question.
The band every one of them covers
£2,000–£3,000
Five prices, all called a website
The five ranges above all sit on page one of the same search.Every one of them is true.None helps on its own, because they are pricing five different things and calling all five a website.
So here is the same question answered by what you get, rather than by a range wide enough to be safe.
What you get at each price
| Band | Typical UK price | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | £108 to £300 | A template and your own weekends. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. |
| Built it yourself with AI | £180 to £1,080 | Code you own, written with Claude Code or similar. The subscription is the cheap part. Your time is not. |
| Budget agency | £299 to £499 | The same template, configured for you. Usually with a monthly tie-in. |
| Small agency build | £1,200 to £4,000 | A layout designed around how you sell, your copy, one clear path to enquiry. |
| Studio build | £8,000 and up | Bespoke design and code, built to be owned, extended and handed over. |
Where Wix and Squarespace land
A builder runs £9 to £25 a month on standard pricing, which is the top row of that table. Watch the headline price: Wix was advertising half that when we checked, and Squarespace shows the annual rate by default while monthly billing costs more.You are also renting the site, not buying it. The pages and the platform stay with the builder, so leaving means rebuilding rather than moving.
Building it yourself with AI
This is the option missing from every other answer to this question, and in 2026 it is a real one. Claude Code, Cursor and the rest will write the code. You still have to know what you are asking for, and you carry every decision nobody is there to talk you out of.The subscription is £15 to £90 a month before you write a line.
Run that out and the sums stop flattering it. A year on the entry plan is £180. A year on the top published plan is £1,080, which lands inside the small agency band in the table above.You are not saving money so much as spending it on yourself instead of a studio.
That can be exactly the right trade. If you want to own the thing outright, understand every part of it, and keep changing it without booking anyone, this is the cheapest route to that and nothing else comes close.It is the wrong trade if what you actually wanted was for it to be finished while you ran your business.The cost that does not appear on the invoice is your attention.
Template or built for you
The jump from band two to band three is the one that catches people.A £499 site and a £3,000 site can look the same in a screenshot.The difference shows up the first time you need to change something.
One brief, two finished sites
Design one
Design two
Two finished sites, same brief, same studio.Neither screenshot tells you what it cost.
You need a page the layout never planned for
You want to move it somewhere else
The monthly payment stops
Website cost calculator · UK · 2026
To build
£1,200 to £4,000
Over three years
£1,431 to £4,722
Plus hosting and a domain at £77 to £241 a year, which is £231 to £722 over 3 years. Keeping the platform patched is on top and has no list price.
Where this band comes from: Both endpoints are anchors from quoted ranges on page one, July 2026.
What moves the number
- Whether the content exists. Copy and photography you already have is the largest cost you can remove. Content that has to be written is usually the biggest single line on the quote, and the one most people forget to budget for.
- How much template you accept. A configured template is quick and cheap because the decisions were made before you arrived. A layout built around how your business sells is neither, and that is the whole reason the bands separate.
- Who owns the result. A site you own outright costs more on day one and less by year three. A site you rent never stops costing, and you cannot take it with you.
What moves the quote
Your content
Copy and photography already exist
Every word has to be written first
The layout
A template, configured for you
Built around how you actually sell
Ownership
You rent it, monthly
You own it outright
This one reverses. Renting is cheaper on day one and dearer by year three.
Who builds it, and what that changes
The same brief costs different money depending on who takes it on. UK rate guides published this year put freelance day rates at £200 to £550, most often £300 to £400, and freelance project prices from £500 upwards.That overlaps the small agency band in the table above almost exactly.Price is not what separates them.
- A freelancer is one person. Cheaper by the day, and everything stops when they are ill, busy, or gone. That is a fair trade for a defined piece of work and a bad one for something you need changed in eighteen months.
- An agency is a process. You are paying for the coordination as well as the work, which is worth the money when the site has to outlive whoever built it, and is dead weight when it does not.
- In-house is neither. The cheapest option if you already employ someone who can do it, and the most expensive way to discover you do not.
What it costs to run, and what nobody quotes
Hosting a small business site runs £6 to £19 a month with a UK host. A .co.uk domain is £8 to £13 a year, at renewal rather than the £1 you pay in year one.That is £77 to £241 a year before anyone looks at the site.
Then someone has to keep the platform patched, and that someone is either you or a person you pay. That is the line nobody puts on the quote, and it is why sites get hacked eighteen months after launch.
The monthly tie-in is where the cheap quote earns its money back.Run it out over the life of the site and the gap closes.
Total cost over three years
£499 build, then £59 a month for 36 months
£3,000 build, nothing after it
Stop paying the monthly fee and the rented site stops being yours. That is the whole difference between the two bars.
Common questions
How much should a decent website cost?
For a small business in the UK in 2026, £1,200 to £4,000 buys a site built around how you sell rather than a template with your logo dropped into it. That is the band where someone has to understand your business before they open a design tool, and it is the first point on the scale where the site is a sales channel rather than a business card. Below it, £299 to £499 gets you a configured template, which is a fair price for what it is and genuinely enough if the site only has to prove you exist. The word doing the work in this question is "decent", and it depends entirely on what the site has to do. A page that gives people a phone number does not need to cost £3,000. A page that has to win you work does.
How much does a five-page website cost in the UK?
Between £1,200 and £4,000 from a small agency in 2026, assuming your copy and photography already exist. If they do not, expect a separate line for content, and expect it to be a large one, because writing five pages properly takes longer than building them. Ask for that number in writing rather than accepting a build price that quietly assumes you will supply the words. A configured template comes in lower, around £299 to £499, and that is a fair price for what it is. The trade is flexibility: template pricing works because the layout decisions are already made, so the first time you want something the template does not do, you are either paying to fight it or starting again.
Why do quotes vary so much for the same brief?
Because the brief is rarely the same, even when the words are. One quote is for your logo dropped into a layout that already exists. Another is for a layout designed around how you actually win work, which means someone has to understand your business before they open a design tool. Both are called a website. They differ by roughly ten times in price and about the same in the time they take. When you get quotes that far apart, the useful question is not who is cheapest, it is what each one is quoting for. Ask what happens when you need a new page in six months, and the answers separate quickly.
What does a website cost to run per year?
Between £77 and £241 a year for the parts that have a published price. Shared hosting from a UK host runs £5.75 a month at Fasthosts and £7 at Krystal for their entry plans, rising to about £19 a month for the tier a busy small business site would sit on. A .co.uk domain renews at £7.99 to £12.83. An SSL certificate is free now and both of those hosts include one, so treat anyone charging for it as a warning sign. What is not in that total is somebody keeping the platform patched, which has no list price because it is time rather than a product. Skipping it is why sites get hacked eighteen months after launch. Managed monthly plans roll the whole lot into one number, and the two on page one of UK search right now are £59 and £79 a month. That is fair value if you want one bill and someone to call. Read what it includes before you sign. Hosting and support are normal in those plans. Ownership of the site itself often is not.
Is it worth paying more than £1,000 for a website?
It depends entirely on what the site has to do. If it is a business card that proves you exist and gives people a phone number, a £500 template does that job and spending more is waste. If the site is how you get enquiries, then it is a sales channel, and the difference between one that converts and one that does not is worth far more than the build cost either way. The honest test is to work out what one new customer is worth to you. If a website that brings two more a month pays for itself in a quarter, the build price stops being the interesting number.