How much should a small business website cost in the UK?

Most articles on this question are written to make their author's price look reasonable. This one will give you ranges that include options cheaper than ours, because the useful version of this answer has to.

The honest ranges

Do it yourself, on a builder. Roughly ten to thirty pounds a month. Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and the rest. Genuinely fine for a lot of businesses. You pay in time, and in the risk that something is broken in a way you cannot see.

Do it yourself, with AI help. Similar hosting cost, less of your time than it used to take. The tools are good now. The gap is judgement rather than production, which is the argument in agency or AI.

A managed small business site. Low three figures to set up, then a small monthly fee. This is where a local business with a handful of pages, hosting, a domain in its own name, and someone to ring about changes should land in 2026. Our own numbers sit in this band and are published on the specification.

A one-off freelance build. Roughly five hundred to two thousand pounds. Usually good value and usually complete at handover: the risk is what happens in year two, and whether the person is still contactable.

A full agency project. Two thousand up to five figures. Sometimes entirely justified: bespoke design, e-commerce, integrations, real research, multiple stakeholders. Frequently it is a brochure site carrying a 2018 price tag, for the reasons set out here.

Ecommerce, booking systems, anything with logins. Genuinely more, because there is genuinely more. Payments, stock, accounts and the security work around them are real engineering.

What should be included at any price

Regardless of what you pay, these are not extras:

• The domain registered in your name, not the agency's. This is the single most common trap.
• Hosting that does not silently expire, with certificates renewed automatically.
• Working forms, tested by somebody submitting one and confirming it arrived.
• A Google Business Profile that is claimed and consistent with the site, which matters more for a local business than the site itself.
• Something readable without JavaScript. A page that only renders when a browser runs code is a page some crawlers and assistants see as blank.
• Somewhere to go when it breaks.

If a quote does not mention the domain or what happens after launch, that is the first question to ask.

Three structures to be careful of

A large upfront payment with no ongoing obligation. The problem is not the money. It is that once the invoice is paid, nobody has any reason to answer the phone. Year two is when websites need attention.

A monthly fee that buys nothing. Some arrangements charge a rental for a site you cannot take with you. Ask directly: if I stop paying, what do I keep? "The domain and the content" is a fair answer. "Nothing" tells you what you needed to know.

Per-change pricing with no ceiling. Fine in principle, unpredictable in practice. Small businesses change prices, hours and staff constantly. If every edit is chargeable, the site slowly goes out of date because nobody wants to raise an invoice over a phone number.

What actually drives whether it works

The uncomfortable truth in a pricing article is that for most local businesses, the website is not the main variable.

The Google Business Profile is. Review volume and recency are. Whether your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere is. A tidy site with a strong profile and ninety recent reviews beats a beautiful site attached to an unclaimed listing and eleven reviews from 2022, every time.

That is why we sell an audit before we sell anything else, and why it is priced separately: for a meaningful share of businesses, the answer is that the website is fine and the money should go somewhere else entirely. Finding that out is worth more than a redesign.

The question to ask any quote

Not "why so much", which invites a defensive answer. Instead:

What does this buy me that a competent person with modern tools could not do in a day?

Good answers exist. Research you cannot do yourself. Evidence that it works. Someone accountable in two years. If the answer is a longer description of the pages, the price is inherited rather than calculated, and you can say so.