How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK? Real Prices for Local Businesses (2026)

Say you ask three people to quote for “a website”. One comes back at £900, another at £6,000, and meanwhile a builder advert says you can do it yourself for £9 a month. They can’t all be describing the same thing, but nothing in the quotes tells you what’s missing from the cheap one or what’s padding out the expensive one.

UK web design price guides, including those published by Whito and Media Village, typically put a simple small-business site from a freelancer at roughly £1,000 to £3,000, and the same kind of site from a regional agency at roughly £3,000 to £8,000. Building it yourself on a website builder costs very little up front and, on today’s official prices, a few hundred pounds a year to run. Those ranges come from firms that sell websites, not from an independent survey, so treat them as a guide to what quotes usually look like rather than an average.

The bigger difference between quotes is what’s included, and what you’ll pay every year after launch. This guide adds both up, using prices we checked on the providers’ own pages on 27 September 2026, and ends with the ownership checks and questions that stop you paying for the same website twice.

Website costs at a glance

Route	Typical build cost	Typical yearly running cost	Best suited to
Build it yourself (website builder)	£0, plus your time	About £257–£275 before VAT for a builder plan and one business email account, more for online shops and paid add-ons	Simple sites, owners with time to set up and update them
Freelancer	Roughly £1,000–£3,000 for a site of about five pages	Hosting, domain and any support you agree; Media Village estimates roughly £200–£1,000 a year to keep a simple site online if you manage most updates yourself	A straightforward site where you can supply the words and photos
Regional agency	Roughly £3,000–£8,000; London agencies usually quote more	From a few hundred to several thousand pounds a year, depending on what the care plan covers	Businesses that want copy, strategy, SEO set-up and ongoing support handled by a team

Build ranges come from UK web design price guides published by agencies, hosts and comparison sites (named in the sections below). None discloses a sample size, and each has something to sell. Running-cost ranges for freelancer and agency sites come from the same guides; the DIY figure is our own sum from official prices, worked through further down. Prices change often, so check them again before you commit.

Why website quotes vary so much

“A website” can mean a single page on a template or a 30-page bespoke build with online booking, professionally written copy and photography. Quotes differ mainly because they bundle different things, and they rarely spell out what they leave out. The usual variables are:

• Pages. A five-page brochure site (home, about, services, reviews, contact) is a different job from a site with a separate page for every service and town you cover.
• Who writes the words. If the quote assumes you supply the text, you’re doing a large share of the work yourself.
• Photos. Stock images, your own phone photos or a paid photographer.
• Template or bespoke design. Adapting a ready-made theme takes far less time than designing from scratch.
• Features. Online booking, payments, a shop, quote forms or integrations with your other systems all add cost.
• SEO set-up. Some quotes include page titles, local business details and a Google Business Profile link-up. Others include nothing.
• Hosting, maintenance and support. Sometimes bundled into a monthly fee, sometimes quoted separately, sometimes not mentioned at all.

That’s also why the price guides you’ll find online disagree so sharply. The GoDaddy UK guide that ranked first on Google UK when we checked on 27 September 2026 puts the cost “from around £100 per year for a simple website… up to £10,000 and beyond”. A budget web design firm suggests spending at least £300–£400 on a single-page site, while estimating that a larger agency might charge £15,000–£30,000 for a simple custom site. That top figure is an outlier: the other guides we checked mostly put a regional agency’s small-business site at £3,000–£8,000. Neither figure is necessarily wrong. They describe very different packages.

One agency, Authentic Style, publishes its own figure: across the quotes it put together between January and September 2026, the average bespoke website came to £5,250. That’s one agency’s quotes with no sample size given, so it’s a useful reference point, not a market average.

So line up what’s in each quote, item by item, before you look at the total.

Route 1: build it yourself

A website builder such as Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or GoDaddy’s builder gives you templates and hosting in one monthly subscription. You drag in your text and photos and publish.

DIY suits you if your site is genuinely simple (who you are, what you do, where you work, how to get in touch), you’re comfortable with the software, and you’ll keep it up to date. It suits you less if your time is worth more spent on paying work, or if the site needs to win enquiries in a competitive local market, because a builder gives you the tools but not the words, photos or search set-up.

What the builders charge

Entry-level plans, from each provider’s UK pricing page, checked 27 September 2026:

Builder	From (per month, billed annually)	Paying monthly instead	VAT on the listed price
GoDaddy Website Builder	£7.49 (Starter)	£14.99	Not confirmed on the page we checked
Wix	£9 (Light); Core £16	Not checked	“Prices do not include applicable taxes”
Squarespace	£12 (Basic); Core £17	£16	Excludes VAT
Shopify (online shops)	£19 (Basic)	£25	Not confirmed on the page we checked

A few details matter more than the headline price:

• Annual prices are paid up front. Wix, for example, says its displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase. Paying monthly usually costs more, as the Squarespace, Shopify and GoDaddy figures show.
• First-year offers. GoDaddy advertises an extra discount on your first year of an annual plan, and Shopify’s trial is three days free then £1 a month for three months. Ask what you’ll pay in year two.
• Free domains are for year one. Wix’s free domain voucher only covers a new domain bought from Wix and “cannot be used to renew or extend a domain you already own”. GoDaddy also offers a free domain with its paid builder plans. Either way, the renewal is yours to pay.
• Selling online adds fees. Squarespace’s Basic plan takes a 2% transaction fee on online store sales. Shopify Basic charges card rates from 2% + 25p, and 2% on top if you use a third-party payment provider.

We’re not naming a cheapest or best builder here. The plans include different things, and the right one depends on what your site needs to do.

What DIY really costs a year

Here’s an illustrative sum using official prices, with a mid-range plan and one business email address:

Item	Low example	High example
Builder plan, billed annually	Wix Core: £16 × 12 = £192	Squarespace Core: £17 × 12 = £204
Business email, one user	Microsoft 365 Business Basic: £5.40 × 12 = £64.80	Google Workspace Business Starter: £5.90 × 12 = £70.80
Domain, year one	Free with Wix’s annual plan (new domain only)	Assumed free; check your plan includes one
Total before VAT	£256.80	£274.80
With 20% VAT, where charged	About £308	About £330

Microsoft 365 lists Business Basic, which includes a custom email address, at £5.40 per user a month paid yearly, excluding VAT. Google Workspace lists Business Starter from £5.90 per user a month; its page was also showing a short-term promotional price, and the billing basis wasn’t clear, so treat that figure as approximate. A Shopify Basic shop costs more (£228 a year for the plan alone), before transaction fees.

So a plain DIY site with one email address runs to roughly £257–£275 a year before VAT, as long as the first-year domain is free and you add nothing else. That fits the £240–£360 a year one business-services firm quotes for DIY, including domain and email.

What the sum leaves out:

• Your time: setting up, writing, choosing photos and keeping it current.
• Domain renewal. The domain is free in year one. Renewal prices weren’t shown alongside the plan prices we checked, so ask before you buy.
• Extra email users, one per member of staff who needs an address.
• Paid apps and add-ons, such as booking tools or premium templates.
• Transaction fees, if you sell online.

DIY stops being cheap when the site needs to bring in work and doesn’t. A £300-a-year site that nobody finds isn’t a saving. That doesn’t make DIY the wrong choice; it means the subscription is only part of the cost.

Route 2: hire a freelancer

A freelance web designer builds the site for you, usually on WordPress or a builder platform, and hands it over or looks after it for a monthly fee.

The UK price guides we checked cluster at roughly £1,000 to £3,000 for a freelancer-built small-business site. Whito’s 2026 UK pricing research, which it says is aggregated from publicly listed rates, real quotes and published pricing, puts a five-page freelancer brochure site at £1,500–£3,000, excluding VAT. For a larger site of five to ten pages, ExpertSure’s freelancer cost guide gives the same £1,500–£3,000 band. Cheaper options exist: one budget web design firm suggests spending at least £400–£600 on a four-to-eight-page site. At that end of the market, check carefully whether the price covers design from scratch, any writing, and any support after launch.

VAT. The standard rate is 20%. A business only has to register for VAT once its taxable turnover over the last 12 months goes over £90,000, so a sole-trader freelancer below that threshold may not charge VAT at all. An agency quote of £3,000 + VAT is £3,600, so compare like with like.

The risks are about dependence. One person holds the knowledge of how your site works. If they get busy, move on or stop answering, you need the logins and the domain in your own name to carry on without them. That’s covered in the ownership section below.

Route 3: use an agency

An agency brings a team: design, development, copywriting, SEO and ongoing support, with someone else to pick up the work if one person is away.

Media Village’s UK pricing guide says most professional websites for small and medium-sized businesses cost between £3,000 and £8,000, and that’s broadly where other agency guides land for a regional agency. Whito puts a five-page agency brochure site at £3,000–£5,000. Some agencies start from about £2,000–£2,500. London agencies are more expensive: ExpertSure puts London agency pricing from about £8,000.

The extra money buys work the cheaper routes leave to you: planning which pages you need, writing copy that sells your service, setting the site up for local search and looking after it afterwards. That’s worth paying for when your website is where most new enquiries start, or when you’re competing with firms that already invest in theirs. It’s harder to justify for a business that gets its work by word of mouth and needs a site mainly so people can check it exists.

If you’re weighing up an agency build, our web design page explains how we approach it.

The running costs nobody lists

Whichever route you take, these costs come round every year. Some are small; the trick is spotting which ones jump after the first year.

Domain name. You register your domain (yourbusiness.co.uk) for a year or more at a time through a registrar, the company that manages it for you. Behind every registrar sits Nominet, which runs the .uk registry. Nominet charges registrars £3.90 a year, excluding VAT, to register or renew a .uk domain, so anything above that is the registrar’s margin and service. Watch the introductory offers: IONOS, for example, lists a .co.uk at £1 for the first year, shown against a usual price of £10. If it then renews at £10, three years cost you £21 before VAT, not the £3 the offer might suggest.

Hosting. Hosting is the server space where your site lives. Builders include it; a freelancer or agency site usually needs it paying for separately. Introductory prices are common here too. IONOS’s Plus hosting plan is £1 a month for 12 months, then £9 a month, excluding VAT. That’s £12 in year one and £108 in year two. The low price is real; it just doesn’t last. Ask for the renewal price in writing.

SSL certificate. This is what puts the padlock and “https” in the browser bar. It can be free: Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit, provides free certificates, and builders such as Shopify and GoDaddy include one. If a quote charges a yearly fee for a basic certificate, ask why.

Business email. From £5.40 per user a month on Microsoft 365 or about £5.90 on Google Workspace, as above. It’s a per-person cost, so it grows with your team.

Maintenance and updates. Websites, especially WordPress sites with plugins, need regular software updates to stay secure. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre advises organisations to update by default, and someone has to do it. Maintenance quotes vary more than anything else in this guide, from about £30 a month to over £500 a month in the guides we checked, because “maintenance” can mean anything from updates and backups to monthly content changes and development time. Ask for a list of what’s covered.

Content changes. New services, prices, photos and staff. Either you do them, or you pay someone per change or as part of a care plan.

SEO. A new site doesn’t bring visitors on its own. Getting found in local search is a separate job, usually with a separate budget; our guide to how much SEO costs in the UK covers typical prices, and our local SEO page explains what the work involves.

Cookie consent. If your site uses cookies or tracking tags, UK rules apply. The ICO’s guidance, last updated in April 2026, sets out exceptions that can cover some analytics and some cookies that control how your site looks. Even then, you must give visitors clear information and an easy way to object. Advertising and remarketing tags still need consent. If your site runs ad tracking, such as Google or Meta advertising tags, budget for a consent tool, which may be a paid add-on or something your developer sets up. This is a cost to budget for, not legal advice; check the ICO guidance or take advice if you’re unsure.

Accessibility. GOV.UK’s guidance says all UK service providers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010, and the EHRC’s draft code of practice for services says that obligation also applies to services provided on a website. The detailed WCAG 2.2 AA standard is a legal requirement for public-sector websites; for a private business it’s the recognised benchmark to build to. Ask any designer how they check accessibility. Again, this isn’t legal advice.

VAT. Many providers list prices before VAT. Wix, Squarespace, Microsoft 365, IONOS and Nominet all say so on the pages we checked. Where VAT applies, add 20% to anything marked “ex VAT” before you compare totals.

Make sure you own it: domain and lock-in checks

The most expensive website is the one you pay for twice because you can’t take the first one with you. Most of these checks take a few minutes.

1. Find out who manages your domain. Look your domain up on Nominet’s domain lookup, which shows information about existing .uk domains, including which registrar manages it. It may not show the owner’s name, because that depends on consent settings.
2. Make sure your business is the registrant. The registrant is the legal owner. When a domain isn’t renewed, Nominet says it emails the legal owner at the contact address it holds. If your web designer registered the domain in their own name or with their own email, the renewal warning could go to them rather than to you.
3. Set up a Nominet Online Services account. Nominet recommends doing this as soon as you’ve registered a domain. It lets you update your contact details, move to a different registrar or transfer the domain to another registrant. You’ll need access to the email address used to register the domain.
4. Know your way out. If your registrar can’t move your domain, you can switch registrar through Online Services for a one-off fee of £10 plus VAT.
5. Hold your own logins. Get admin access to the website, the hosting account, the domain account and your email, in your name, from day one.
6. Get your content and files. Confirm in writing that you own the text, photos and design you’ve paid for, and that you can have a copy if you leave.
7. Read the notice period. Find out how much notice any monthly plan needs and what you get back when it ends.

Questions to ask before you sign

Put these to every supplier, in writing, so you’re comparing like with like:

• What exactly is included: how many pages, who writes the copy, who supplies the photos?
• Is the price with or without VAT?
• Whose name will the domain be registered in, and which email address?
• Will I have admin access to the site, the hosting and the domain?
• What does hosting cost after the first year? What does the domain renew at?
• What does maintenance cover, and what’s charged extra?
• What happens if I want to leave? Can I take the site, the content and the domain with me?
• What’s set up for search: page titles, business details, Google Business Profile, Search Console?
• How do you check accessibility and cookie consent?

If you’re also hiring someone for SEO, many of the same questions apply; our guide to choosing an SEO agency has the full list for that side.

Red flags

• The domain is registered in the supplier’s name, or they won’t say whose name it’s in.
• No admin access for you, or logins “held for safekeeping”.
• A “free website” tied to a long contract, where leaving means losing the site.
• You can’t take the site with you, or the price for handing it over isn’t stated.
• Very cheap hosting or domains with no renewal price. The £1 first year is fine; not knowing year two isn’t.
• No mention of VAT or running costs anywhere in the quote.
• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google’s results, so a promise of page one is a sales line, not a plan.

Do you need a new website at all?

Sometimes the answer is no. A site that’s slow, hard to use on a phone or missing from Google may need fixing rather than replacing, and fixing it often costs less than a rebuild. Before you ask for quotes, run our free website health check: ten checks you can do yourself with free tools, which should help you tell whether you’re looking at a few fixes or a rebuild.

Getting a quote you can trust

Get Found is a web design, local SEO and AI SEO agency based on Foregate Street in Worcester, with a second office in Stockport, working with businesses across the UK. We’ve been doing this for 22 years, and we don’t tie clients into long contracts.

We don’t publish a price list for websites, because a quote depends on everything covered above. Instead, every web design project is quoted after a free visibility audit, which shows how your business currently appears on Google, in Maps and in AI search. That way the quote starts from where your business stands now. If you’d rather talk it through first, get in touch.