The honest answer is a range, not a number. Most small business websites in the UK cost between £500 and £2,000 to build, and the ones I build usually land between £500 and £1,000. What moves you along that range is the number of pages, whether you need anything beyond a simple brochure site, and how much of the writing and photography you can supply yourself.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this explains where the money goes, so you can tell a fair quote from a padded one.
Where the money actually goes
A website quote is mostly time. For a straightforward five-page site for a local business, the work breaks down like this:
- Design. Deciding how the site looks and how someone moves through it. A day or two.
- Build. Turning that into pages that load fast, work properly on a phone, and can be used by everyone. Two or three days.
- Setup. Your own hosting, your domain pointed at it, the contact form tested, search engines told the site exists. Half a day.
Add it up and a small brochure site is a handful of days of work. At a sole trader's day rate, that is where the £500 to £1,000 comes from. If a quote is well above that for the same scope, it is fair to ask what the extra days are for.
A rough guide by type of site
- One-page site. A single scrolling page: who you are, what you do, how to get in touch. £300 to £600. Enough for a sole trader who mainly needs to look real and be reachable.
- Five-page brochure site. Home, services, about, a gallery or case studies, contact. £500 to £1,200 for most trades and local services. This is what the majority of small businesses actually need.
- Larger or custom site. More pages, separate pages for several towns you cover, a blog, layouts that are not off a single template. £1,200 to £2,500.
- Online shop. Starts around £1,500 and depends entirely on how many products you sell and how complex the postage and payment rules are.
These are build costs, paid once. The ongoing cost after that should be small: a domain is roughly £10 to £15 a year, and hosting for a site like this is a few pounds a month, sometimes free.
What pushes the price up
Four things, roughly in the order they come up:
- More pages, or one-off layouts. A fifteen-page site with three custom section designs is more design and more build than a five-page site working from one layout you both agreed.
- Features. A booking system, a filterable gallery, a map with several locations, a link to software you already use. Each one is scoped and priced on its own.
- Selling online. A shop is a different job from a brochure site: products, payments, delivery rules, tax. Expect it to roughly double the starting figure and rise from there.
- Content help. Supplying your own words and photos keeps the price down. Help with writing the pages or sorting photography is real work, and it gets added to the quote.
None of these are upsells. They are just more work, and a good quote tells you which of them it includes.
What you should not be paying for
- Monthly rent for your own website. Some builders charge £50 to £150 a month and call it a package. Take out genuine hosting, which is a few pounds a month, and any support you have actually agreed, and the rest is rent on something that should belong to you. Over three years that is £1,800 to £5,400 for a site a fair one-off quote would have built once.
- A page-builder licence dressed up as value. If the site stops working the day you stop paying the platform, you are renting again, just less obviously.
- An SEO retainer bolted on before launch. For a local business, most of your search visibility comes from a well-built site, a complete Google Business Profile, and consistent contact details across the web. Get those in place, see where you stand, and then decide about a monthly SEO contract.
Questions to ask before you pay
- Do I own everything at the end: the domain, the hosting account, the files?
- If I want to leave, can I take the site to another host or another developer?
- Is this a template, and if so, which one? A template is not automatically a problem. Not being told is.
- What is not included in this price?
- After launch, what can I change myself, what has to come back to you, and at what cost?
A quote that answers those plainly is usually a fair one, whatever the number on it. The number matters less than knowing what is behind it.
Common questions
How much does a 5 page website cost in the UK?
For most local businesses, a five-page brochure site costs between £500 and £1,200 to build once. The spread comes from how custom the layouts are and how much of the content you supply yourself.
Is a cheap website bad for SEO?
Not because it was cheap. It is bad for search when it loads slowly, is hard to use on a phone, or is built on a platform that buries your content in heavy templates. A modest budget spent on a fast, well-structured site beats a large one spent on a slow one.
Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper than a custom website?
Cheaper to start, often not cheaper over three years once the monthly fees add up, and you are renting the platform rather than owning the site. They are a reasonable choice if you will maintain it yourself and do not need anything unusual. There is more detail in Squarespace or a custom-built site.
Do web designers charge for changes after launch?
It varies, so ask before you sign. Get it in writing: what you can edit yourself, what has to come back to the designer, and the rate for that work.