What a small-business website should actually cost in the UK

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace and similar) are the cheapest on paper — often free to start, £10–£25 a month once you need a proper domain and no adverts. You're doing the design and the writing yourself, on a template, with whatever time you can find around running the business. Fine for a very simple presence; frustrating the moment you want something the template doesn't do.

Freelancers typically sit somewhere between £500 and £3,000 for a small-business build, depending on experience and scope. You get a real person and often a better result than DIY, but ongoing care is inconsistent — some are excellent at it, some disappear after the invoice clears, and there's rarely a fallback if they do.

Agencies range enormously — from a few hundred pounds for a template-based build with light customisation, up to five figures for something bespoke with genuine strategy work behind it. What you're usually paying for beyond the freelancer tier is process: a team rather than one person, and — if it's a good agency — a plan for what happens after launch, not just at launch.

Custom design versus template is the biggest single factor. A template is cheaper because the design work has already been done, once, for thousands of other businesses. Custom means someone is designing specifically for your business, which costs more because it takes longer — but it's also the difference between a site that looks like yours and one that looks like everyone else's on the same theme.

Page count matters less than people assume. Five well-built pages that say the right thing will outperform twenty pages of padding. Be wary of anyone pricing purely by page count — it incentivises bulk, not usefulness.

The quiet one nobody prices upfront is maintenance. A website is not a one-off purchase, whatever the invoice implies — it needs security updates, backups, and the odd content change, indefinitely. Some of that cost is paid later, in a slow site, a hack, or a frantic call when the domain lapses. It's real either way; the only question is whether it's priced honestly now or paid for badly later.

If your budget is genuinely near zero and the site can be simple, a DIY builder is a reasonable choice — don't let anyone talk you out of it if it fits. If you want something that looks and reads like your business, was built by someone who'll still answer the phone in a year, and has a clear, single monthly cost instead of a surprise renewal — that's the gap agencies with a proper care model exist to fill, and it's roughly what we do here.