01
Hours, times a rate
A quote is hours times a rate plus a risk margin. My hourly is £65, so my five-page fee is thirty hours and my bespoke fee sixty. Suspiciously tidy, and still a fair way to read anybody’s number.
How much does a website cost in the UK?
Somewhere between a monthly subscription and thirty thousand pounds, which is useless on its own. So this page names six market bands, says what each one buys and who it suits, and explains why the spread is that wide. My own figures go in as a seventh row, labelled as mine.
- Mine: £1,950 for 5 pages, 2–3 weeks
- Market spread: £300 to £30,000 plus
- Bands I see quoted, not survey data
- Not VAT registered, so no 20% on top
The short answer
A website builder on a paid plan costs a monthly fee and a fortnight of your evenings. A bought theme configured for you is a few hundred. A bespoke site for a small business, built by one competent person, is usually one to seven thousand. A small agency starts around eight. Past thirty thousand you are buying a team for months.
Two corrections first. I am not VAT registered at present, so my figure is the figure you pay, while an agency over the threshold adds twenty per cent. Compare the two unadjusted and you are a fifth out. And a build price is not a total: hosting, licences and somebody to change things run as long as the site does. Every figure I charge is on the pricing page.
What the UK market charges
Bands I see quoted, not survey data. No dataset sits behind them and I will not pretend otherwise. The last row is the only certain number in the table.
- A subscription and your own evenings
- Squarespace, Wix or similar: a monthly plan in the low tens of pounds, a template, and your own time. Right answer for a one-page presence with a phone number.
- £300 to £900
- One person configuring a bought theme, quickly. A legitimate product. Not a design made for your business, and support usually stops the day the site goes live.
- £1,000 to £2,500
- A freelancer doing real design work on five or six pages, two or three weeks. Below about £1,500 something gives: the design, the copy, or year two.
- £2,500 to £7,000
- Where most of the small and medium business quotes I see land. Ten to fifteen pages, a design drawn for you, structured content, and somebody who answers an email eighteen months on.
- £8,000 to £25,000
- A small agency: designer, developer, someone managing it, often copy and photography in scope. If you need brand work as well, that is a fair price for both.
- £30,000 and upwards
- Several people for several months. Multiple languages, a design system, integration with existing software, procurement sign-off. I have not worked at that level and would refer it.
- Where I sit, for comparison
- £1,950 for up to five pages in two to three weeks, £3,900 for ten to fifteen, £4,900 beyond fifteen. Fixed before anything starts.
Why the same site can be £900 or £9,000
Not mystery, and mostly not greed. Six decisions, and the quote in your hand will not tell you where it stands on any of them.
02
Whose hours they are
One person doing design, build, structure and testing spends fewer hours than four people doing it with handovers between them. The agency is not padding. Coordination is real work.
03
Bespoke design, or a theme with your logo on it
The biggest fork in the road, and most of the gap between the £600 site and the £3,900 one. A recoloured theme is a few hours. A design drawn for one business is days before any code exists.
04
Who writes the words
The commonest unpriced item in the quotes I read. Most of them assume you supply finished copy, and most clients arrive having written none. I charge £400 to structure and edit yours, and I do not write from nothing.
05
Who supplies the photographs
Stock images cost nothing and look like stock images. A day with a photographer can cost as much as a small website, and often does more for it.
06
Whether anybody is accountable in year two
The line item nobody prints. Cheap is often cheap because the relationship ends at launch and the cost returns later as a rebuild. People advertise sites under £400 near me. Take it if that is the budget, and expect no answer in year two.
Why I take cost guides seriously
Because I built one. Costwise is an independent UK cost-guide site with a calculator, covering loft conversions, driveways, extensions, boilers and solar. It is mine start to finish and it sits with the rest of my own work. Building it meant reading a great many trade cost guides, and the pattern rarely varied: ranges, a note that every job differs, and a form.
Which is why the table above ends in my own figures rather than a call to action. A cost guide that will not commit to a number is a lead form in a reference book’s jacket. Publishing costs something: a competitor reads my floor and undercuts it, and I can never price a job by how wealthy a client looks. Both seem fair.
What pushes a quote up
A login, of any kind
The moment a visitor has an account it stops being a website and becomes software: sessions, permissions, password resets, and data you are responsible for. A different quote, not a line on this one.
Anything it has to talk to
A CRM, an accounts package, a booking system, a stock file. Naming the software moves a price further than any design decision. A quote that says integration without naming it has priced a guess.
Content that has to come across
A migration is not a copy and paste. Old addresses need redirecting or you lose the rankings you had, and page-builder content rarely comes out clean. I price it at £350.
A page for every town you cover
Worth having when each page says something true about that place, harmful when they repeat each other. A proper set is £450 here, and I wrote a plugin that refuses to publish the thin ones.
The login is the one that changes the category rather than the number. Anything with accounts, permissions or a data model behind it is a web app, from £7,500 after £950 of paid discovery.
Six things to ask whoever is quoting
01
Is VAT in that number?
A fifth of the price, and the commonest reason two quotes are not comparable. I am not registered at present, so mine is what you pay. Ask everybody else.
02
How many hours, and who is doing them?
Not everyone will answer. Thirty hours from one experienced developer and thirty split across three people learning the job are not the same purchase.
03
Who owns the design and the code?
You should, from the day you pay the balance. If a theme licence or a page-builder subscription sits between you and your own site, find out whose name it is in.
04
Whose name is the hosting and the domain in?
Yours, with the login in your hands. A site you cannot move is a site you rent, and the rent rises the moment you try to leave.
05
What does a small change cost in month seven?
Ask for the number, not the sentiment. Mine is £65 an hour with no minimum, or a care plan from £65 a month. Silence here is the expensive answer.
06
What is not included?
Copy, photography, hosting, training, the fixes in the fortnight after launch. Compare the written exclusions rather than the totals. The difference lives there.
When a cheap quote turns out to be expensive
Cheap is not the same as bad. A well-configured theme for a few hundred pounds is a real product, as I have said twice already. These are the three signs that the low number gets collected from you later.
The price arrived before the questions
A figure quoted before anyone asked how many pages, who writes the copy or what it connects to is an opening position, not a price. It rises once the work is understood.
The accounts are in their name
Hosting, domain and licences held by the developer and billed on to you. Everything works until you want to leave, at which point the site will not move and the rebuild is your problem.
A monthly fee with no end and nothing owned
The advert usually reads: website included, ninety-nine pounds a month, no build fee. Sometimes reasonable, often not. Total it across three years, then ask what you own if you stop paying.
It does not stop at launch
A .co.uk domain is usually £8 to £15 a year. Hosting runs from a few pounds a month to £30 or more. A theme or plugin licence renews on a date you will have forgotten. Then somebody has to change things: care plans here are £65 to £295 a month, or £65 an hour with no minimum. The arithmetic is on what a website costs to run.
And the limits. I do not build sites under about £1,500, so if the budget is £500 spend it with somebody who does that work properly. I do not do brand identity, photography, copy written from scratch or paid advertising, and the full list is on the facts page. What the work actually involves is on website design and build.
Questions people actually ask
What is a fair price for a small business website in the UK?
For a genuinely bespoke five-page site, somewhere between £1,500 and £2,500 from one competent freelancer. Between £2,500 and £7,000 once you want ten to fifteen pages and content held as structured types. Below about £1,500 something has to give, and it is usually the design, the copy, or whether anybody answers you in year two. Above £8,000 you are mostly paying for a team rather than a better website, which is sometimes exactly what you need. My own floor is £1,950 and it is published rather than quoted on request.
I have been quoted £900 and £8,000 for the same site. How can both be right?
Because they are not the same site, they only look alike in a brief. A quote is hours multiplied by a rate, and the hours change depending on whether the design is drawn for you or bought, who writes the copy, who supplies the photographs, and how many pages are genuinely different rather than one template repeated. The £8,000 quote probably includes copywriting, photography and somebody managing it. The £900 quote probably assumes you supply all of that and ends at launch. Ask both for their written exclusions and compare those instead of the totals.
Is a cheap website ever the right answer?
Often. If you need one page, a phone number and directions, then a builder subscription or a few hundred pounds spent with somebody who configures templates well is the correct purchase, and I will say so on a call. I do not build sites under about £1,500, so a large part of the market is genuinely better served elsewhere. What cheap does not buy is a design made for your business, or somebody accountable when something breaks eighteen months later. Work out which of those you need before comparing prices.
Does the price include VAT?
Mine does not need to. I am not VAT registered at present, so the figure I publish is the figure you pay. Most agencies are registered and add twenty per cent, which makes a £4,000 agency quote £4,800 leaving your bank. It is the commonest reason two quotes are not comparable and the easiest thing to miss when you line them up in a spreadsheet. Ask every quote whether the number is inclusive, and write the answer down next to it.
Should I pay monthly for a website instead of a one-off fee?
Sometimes, and check two things first. Ask what you own if you stop paying, then total the fee across three years. A bundled deal at £99 a month is £3,564 over three years, which buys a bespoke build outright with money left over for hosting. If the answer to what you own is nothing, it is a rental agreement rather than a purchase and should be compared against renting. Paying a build fee in instalments is a different question and a reasonable one; I do it over three or six months when asked.
What does a website cost to run each year?
Less than most people expect, for a small brochure site. A .co.uk domain is usually £10 to £15 a year, hosting runs from a few pounds a month to about £30 depending on what the site does, and a theme or plugin licence may renew annually. The variable part is who changes things. My care plans are £65 to £295 a month, or £65 an hour with no minimum, and plenty of clients take neither and email me once a year. There is a separate page working the whole thing through.
Does a more expensive website bring in more enquiries?
Not reliably, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Past a certain point you are buying craft, flexibility and somebody accountable rather than enquiries. The things that actually move enquiries for a small business are often cheaper than a redesign: a Google Business Profile filled in properly, reviews, pages that answer the question somebody typed, and a site that loads quickly on a phone. I do not publish conversion uplift figures, because the link is real at scale and not knowable for your specific site in advance.
How much does a redesign cost compared with a new site?
Usually the same, and sometimes more. A redesign carries work a new build does not: existing content to bring across, old addresses to redirect so you keep the rankings you already have, and decisions made years ago that nobody can now explain. I charge £350 as a migration add-on on top of the build fee. The one case where a redesign is cheaper is when the site is structurally sound and only looks dated, which is rarer than people hope. I will tell you which of the two you are in before quoting.
Tell me what the site has to do. I will tell you which band you are in.
Get a quote in four questions
hello@madebykestrel.co.uk · replies inside one working day
This page, measured in your browser
Your deviceLCPMeasuring…
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How long until the main content appears. Google wants under 2.5 seconds.
INPMeasuring…
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How quickly the page answers when you tap. Under 200ms is the target.
CLSMeasuring…
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How much the layout moves while loading. Under 0.1, ideally zero.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.