Web Design & Development
Most small business websites are built to look finished. Being found is a different job, and the gap between the two is why so many businesses pay for a website twice. We design the site properly and structure it to rank from day one, because otherwise we are the people fixing it six months later.
Quoted per project after a call about what the site has to do, and the number does not move once agreed. Five to eight pages sits at £1,000 to £2,500; a service site built to rank at £2,500 to £5,000. You get a launch date with the quote.
What a website actually costsWhat a build includes
Your website is the only marketing asset you own outright. Everything else (your Google ranking, your ad account, your social following) is rented from someone who can change the terms whenever they like. That is the case for building the one thing you own properly.
Built to rank, not retrofitted
Page structure, titles, internal linking, schema and speed are design decisions. Adding them afterwards costs more, works less well, and usually means paying for the site again.
You own it, in writing, from day one
Domain, hosting account and files in your name. If you leave, you leave with the website. Most monthly website plans cannot say that.
The problem with most small business websites
They are finished and invisible. The design is fine, the photos are fine, and six months after launch the business finds that nobody arrives except people who already knew the company name.
That is almost never a design failure. It is a structural one. A five-page site with pages called Home, About, Services, Gallery and Contact is competing for nothing, because none of those titles names a thing anybody searches for. One Services page covering six offerings across four towns is a page about nothing in particular. Search engines rank pages, not businesses, and a page can be about one thing convincingly or six things vaguely.
Fixing that afterwards means restructuring the site: a page per service, a page per place, titles rewritten, internal linking rebuilt. It costs more than doing it at the start, and it is the single most common reason a small business pays for the same website twice.
What "built to rank" actually means
It is not a package or an upsell. It is a set of decisions made during the build that cost nothing extra at the time and a lot to bolt on later.
- 01
One page per thing you sell, and per place you sell it
Decided at the sitemap stage, before a single screen is designed. This is the biggest single factor in whether the site will ever rank.
- 02
Page titles written for search, not for you
"Emergency Plumber in Sheffield | 24hr Callout | Business Name", not "Services". The first one gets found. The second one does not.
- 03
Structured data from the start
LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList markup, so machines are handed the facts instead of guessing them. It is also what decides whether an AI assistant can recommend you.
- 04
Speed as a design constraint
Images sized and served in a modern format, no page builder loading forty stylesheets, and dimensions reserved so the layout does not jump. More than half of local searches happen on a phone, often on a poor connection, and a slow page loses the visitor before they have read a word.
- 05
Internal linking that goes somewhere
The previous version of this website had 288 service pages and almost no links between them, so every page was a dead end. That is a large part of why none of them ranked.
- 06
A redirect map before the build, not after
If we are replacing an existing site, every URL a search engine already knows about is mapped to its destination before a template is written, so the rankings you already have come with you.
What a website costs, and what drives it
We quote a fixed price per project after a call about what the site has to do: no day rates, and the number does not move once agreed. These are the bands we quote within:
- 01
Small brochure site, £1,000–£2,500
Five to eight pages. Trades, consultants, small practices. Three to four weeks from sign-off.
- 02
Service site built to rank, £2,500–£5,000
A page per service and per town, with the search work designed in. Four to six weeks. This is the first band where you are not paying twice.
- 03
Booking or member site, £4,000–£8,000
Clinics, gyms, salons, anything with a calendar or a login. The integration is what you are paying for, not the design.
- 04
E-commerce, from £5,000
Product data migration is routinely underquoted. Ask exactly who is entering the products, because if the answer is you, the launch date is yours too.
The two things that move the price most
Who writes the words. This is the biggest hidden variable and the first thing cut to hit a number. A five-page site needs roughly 3,000 words specific to your business, and writing them properly costs £75–£250 a page. If a quote does not say who is writing, you are. Most people find that out in week three, and the project then stalls for a month.
Anything with a login, a calendar or a basket. Booking systems, member areas and shops are where fixed-price quoting breaks down. Ask which specific system is being used and whether the licence is included, because a £40-a-month plugin subscription attached to your site is a bill you now own.
The full version, including what six other UK agencies publish and the running costs most quotes leave out, is here: what a website actually costs in the UK.
WordPress, Wix, or something else
We build on all three and we have no stake in the answer. Honestly, the platform is maybe fifteen per cent of whether a small business site works. The rest is structure, content and time.
WordPress when you need more than about fifteen pages, publish regularly, or need a shop or booking system. It is yours outright and you can move it. It also needs maintaining, which is a cost to budget for.
Wix when you are a one-person business with five to eight pages, you will genuinely edit the site yourself, and you would rather not think about updates. It is better than its reputation and often the right call. The catch: there is no meaningful export, so leaving Wix means rebuilding.
Static when the site is mostly content and needs to be fast. No database, no plugin updates, no maintenance window, and page loads WordPress cannot match without real effort. This website is built that way.
The full comparison, including the five-year cost of each, is in Wix vs WordPress for a UK small business.
Design that does a job
Good design on a small business site is not decoration and it is not a portfolio piece. It is the difference between a visitor understanding what you do in four seconds and leaving.
In practice that means one clear action on every page, contact details never more than a tap away, real photographs of your team and your work rather than stock images of someone else’s, and type that is legible on a phone in daylight. On a trades or clinic site, the difference between real photos and stock shows up in the enquiry count.
It also means accessibility, which is a legal consideration and a plain commercial one: contrast that works for people with low vision, text that scales, forms that work with a keyboard, and images with alt text. None of it costs much at build time. All of it costs a lot to retrofit.
What you own, and why we keep saying it
Your domain, your hosting account and your website files, registered in your name from day one, in writing. If you leave us, you leave with the website.
We keep saying it because monthly website plans are common and many of them are leases: stop paying and the site goes dark, because the agency owns the domain, the hosting and the files. Ask any agency you are considering one question, what do I keep if I leave? The answer tells you which kind of deal you are being offered.
Design, search and paid as one thing
We are a marketing agency that builds websites, not a web shop that resells SEO, and the difference shows up in the brief. A site we build is structured for the campaign it will carry, and the campaign is planned around the site we actually built, so neither has to be redone to fit the other.
That means local SEO designed in rather than added, technical foundations that do not need rescuing in month six, landing pages for paid search that match the ads pointing at them, and structured data for AI search as standard.
If you want the website and the campaign together, SEO starts at £497 a month plus VAT and the build is quoted separately at a fixed price. Ask for a quote and you get a number and a launch date, not a discovery process.
Structure first, design second
The order matters. Deciding the sitemap before anyone opens a design tool is what stops you paying for the same website twice.
- Step 1Sitemap and redirect map
A page per thing you sell and per place you sell it, decided before a screen is designed. If we are replacing a site, every URL Google already knows is mapped to its destination first.
- Step 2Design and content
Layouts you approve, then the words. We tell you up front who is writing them, because content is the thing that stalls projects and it is the thing most quotes leave out.
- Step 3Build
Titles, schema, internal linking and speed treated as build decisions rather than an afterthought. They cost nothing now and a great deal to retrofit.
- Step 4Launch and handover
Domain, hosting and files in your name, in writing. Redirects checked live. If you leave us later, you leave with the website.
£400 – £15,000+
Fixed price per project with a launch date, agreed after a call about what the site has to do.
Five to eight pages sits at £1,000 to £2,500. A service site built to rank is £2,500 to £5,000, and that is the first band where you are not paying twice. Booking and member sites £4,000 to £8,000; e-commerce from £5,000.
Straight answers to the usual questions
How much does a website cost?
A small brochure site of five to eight pages typically costs £1,000 to £2,500, and a service site properly built to rank costs £2,500 to £5,000. E-commerce starts around £5,000 and has no real ceiling. We quote a fixed price per project rather than a day rate, and the figure does not move once agreed. What actually changes it is who writes the content and whether the site needs a booking system or a basket.
How long does it take to build a website?
Most small business websites take three to six weeks from sign-off to launch. The main variable is how quickly you can supply content, photographs and approvals, not the build itself. Projects stall on content far more often than on development, so we give you a fixed launch date when we quote and tell you which parts of it depend on you.
Will my new website rank on Google?
It will be built so that it can, which is not the same as guaranteeing a position. That means a page per service and per location, titles written for search, structured data, and a site fast enough to survive a mobile connection. Ranking then depends on your market and on sustained work afterwards. A new site is the foundation, and anyone promising rankings as part of a build is selling something they cannot control.
Do I own my website?
Yes: the domain, the hosting account and the files are registered in your name from day one, in writing. It matters more than it sounds. Many monthly website plans are leases in all but name, where stopping payment takes the site offline because the agency holds the domain and hosting. Ask any agency what you keep if you leave, and get the answer before you sign.
Can you redesign my existing website?
Yes, and redesigns are a good share of what we do. The part that matters most is the redirect map: every URL search engines already know has to resolve to its new equivalent, decided before the build starts rather than compiled afterwards. Badly handled replatforms lose more rankings than penalties do, and recovery takes months you will not get back.
Do you write the content?
We can, and we say up front whether it is in your quote, because content is the single most common thing quietly left out of a cheap website price. Expect roughly £75 to £250 a page for writing specific to your business. If you would rather write it yourself, that is fine. We give you a brief per page and a deadline, because the deadline is the part that keeps the project moving.
The other services we run
- Technical SEOFull technical audits · Crawling and indexing fixes · Core Web Vitals
- SEO ConsultantIndependent SEO audits · Strategy and roadmaps · Second opinions on your current agency
- Local SEO ServicesGoogle Business Profile, completed properly · Map pack rankings · Citation building and clean-up
- National SEOBusinesses selling UK-wide · B2B and professional services · Manufacturers and wholesalers
- Link Audits & Link BuildingBacklink audits and risk reviews · Disavow files, done carefully · Recovering from bought links
- Digital PRData and survey campaigns · Expert comment and reactive PR · Founder and spokesperson profiles
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.