Six UK agencies publish six different answers, from £360 to £15,000. None of them is lying. They are pricing different things and calling all of them a website. This is the version with the numbers left in, so you walk into a quote knowing what a fair one looks like.
In 2026 a professional small business website in the UK costs £1,000 to £5,000. Most Yorkshire quotes for a five-to-eight page site come in between£1,000 and £2,500. A one-page site starts around £400. E-commerce starts around £5,000 and has no real ceiling.
Those are build costs only. Add roughly £100–£500 a year for domain and hosting, and budget separately for the writing, the item most often missing from a cheap quote. If the site also needs to be found, that isa separate monthly cost, and ours is published in full.
All six were published or updated in 2026 by working UK agencies or business services. They do not agree, and the gap is not small: the widest figure is forty times the narrowest. Read the third column before you trust either of the first two.
| Source | Stated range | What they are pricing |
|---|---|---|
| getyouonline.co.uk | £1,000 – £3,000 | Small business site |
| brightpath-digital.co.uk | £500 – £3,000 | Brochure site; £1,500–£10,000+ once features are added |
| brambla.co.uk | £1,200 – £8,000+ | Range widens with page count |
| redeagle.tech | £2,000 – £6,000 | From a regional agency |
| havis.dev | £3,500 – £7,000 | Stated as typical |
| duport.co.uk | £360 – £2,000 | Freelance and done-for-you builders |
They disagree because “website” covers a one-page template a freelancer finishes in an afternoon and a bespoke booking platform that takes three months. Pin the scope down first. Until you do, every number in the table is correct and none of them helps you.
These bands sit in the honest middle of the six guides, narrowed by what we see quoted around Yorkshire. Find the row that matches what you need and ignore the others, so you stop comparing your quote against a different product.
Two of these account for most of the gap between quotes, and they are the two nobody thinks to ask about. Ask, and the cheap quote usually gets dearer or shorter.
The biggest hidden variable, and the first thing cut to hit a price. A five-page site needs around 3,000 words specific to your business, and writing them properly costs £75–£250 a page. If the quote does not say who is writing, you are. Most people find that out in week three, and the project stalls for a month while they stare at a blank page.
A bought theme set up well is a legitimate way to build a small business site, and it can save you £1,500. A bought theme set up badly is why so many trade sites look like each other. Ask to see the theme before it is bought, so the saving does not cost you the enquiries.
The pricing unit nearly everyone uses. Between five and twelve pages, expect £150–£400 for each extra one. Past fifteen pages, ask whether they are templated. Location and service pages usually should be, and you should not be paying bespoke rates for them.
Booking systems, member areas and shops are where fixed-price quotes fall apart. The design is not the cost; the integration is. Ask which booking or payment system is being used and whether the licence is included, because a £40-a-month plugin bolted to your site is a bill you now own.
A site can be finished and invisible. Page titles, heading structure, internal links, structured data, image weight and Core Web Vitals are either designed in at build or bolted on later at a higher price. Bolting on is the most common reason a business pays for the same website twice. See why SEO matters, and when it does not.
Optional, in that stock photos are free. Not optional, in that visitors can tell. On a trades or clinic site, real photos of your team against a stock image of somebody else's team is a difference you can count in enquiries.
London agencies charge 30–60% more for the same work, and most of that is the building it happens in. A regional agency is not cheaper because it is worse. Offshore is cheaper still and riskier still, and the failure is rarely bad code. It is nobody picking up when something breaks.
A website quote is a build cost. These arrive afterwards, and they are why people feel misled when nobody actually misled them. Know them now and the year-two invoice is no surprise.
| Cost | Typical | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10 – £20 a year | Register it in your name, not the agency’s, or leaving gets expensive. |
| Hosting | £60 – £360 a year | A small business site does not need a £100-a-month plan, whatever the quote says. |
| SSL certificate | £0 | Free via Let’s Encrypt. If it shows up as a line item, ask what you are paying for. |
| Maintenance and updates | £30 – £150 a month | WordPress needs it. A static site largely does not, which is a saving every month. |
| Copywriting | £75 – £250 a page | The thing most often missing from a website quote, and the reason cheap ones grow. |
| Photography | £300 – £900 a day | Optional, but visitors can spot stock photography, and it costs you trust before they read a word. |
| SEO | From £497 a month | A site nobody finds is a brochure nobody opened, however good it looks. |
Total running cost for a small business site on sensible hosting: £100–£500 a year, plus maintenance if it runs on WordPress. Anything much above that should be itemised before you agree to it, so you know what the extra is buying.
A real website. One page, a bought template, your logo, your phone number, three paragraphs you wrote yourself and a contact form. It will look fine on a phone and it will work.
What it will not do is rank. Not because £500 is cursed, but because the things that get a site found (a page per service, a page per place you work, titles written for search rather than for you, structured data, and a site fast enough to survive a mobile signal) all take time, and time is the whole cost.
If you are a new sole trader who needs to exist online before you need to be found, buy it. It is the right call and anyone saying otherwise is selling. Just plan to replace it in eighteen months instead of being surprised when you have to.
Send these to every agency on your shortlist, in writing. How fast and how specifically they answer tells you more than any portfolio, and it costs you one email.
Websites we quote fixed, per project, after a call about what the site needs to do. No day rates, and the figure does not move once agreed, so the number you sign is the number you pay. The bands on this page are the ones we quote inside.
SEO we publish outright, which almost nobody in this market does.Campaigns start at £497 a month: a £1,000 deposit then eleven monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. Up to five target keywords, a named consultant with a direct line, and a monthly roadmap written in plain English.
You own the domain, the hosting account and the files from day one, in writing. If you leave, the website leaves with you.
A professional small business website in the UK typically costs between £1,000 and £5,000, with most Yorkshire quotes for a five-to-eight page site landing between £1,000 and £2,500. Published UK agency guides put the full range at roughly £360 to £15,000, which is too wide to be useful because it lumps one-page freelance builds in with full e-commerce projects. The number that matters is the one for your page count and your features, which is why we quote a fixed price rather than a day rate. You know the total before you commit.
Because “a website” is not one product. Two quotes for a five-page site can differ by a factor of five depending on whether the content is written for you, whether the design is bespoke or a bought template, and whether anyone is doing the search work that makes the site findable. Cheap quotes are usually cheap because something has been left out, and the thing most often left out is the writing, which you then pay for separately or do yourself.
Most small business websites take between three and six weeks from sign-off to launch. The main variable is how quickly you can supply content, photos and approvals, not the build itself. We give you a fixed launch date when we quote, and we tell you which parts of it depend on you, so nobody is surprised in week five.
Sometimes, for about eighteen months. If you are a brand new sole trader who needs an address on the internet before you need enquiries from it, a one-page site is a sensible first step. It stops being sensible the moment you need to compete on search, because the things that make a site rank (structure, speed, page-level targeting, structured data) are exactly what gets cut to hit that price. You end up buying the site twice.
Budget £100 to £500 a year for domain and hosting on a small business site, plus maintenance if it runs on WordPress. Beyond that, the real ongoing cost is content and SEO. A website nobody finds costs the same to run as one that brings in enquiries; it just never pays you back. Our SEO campaigns start at £497 a month and the full price list is published rather than quoted on request.
Yes, typically 30 to 60 per cent more for comparable work, and most of the difference is the office it was built in. The work itself is no different. What you should not do is chase that saving offshore. The saving is real, the cost of rebuilding it in two years is also real, and you cannot ring a £300 website when something breaks.
Only if you have read what happens when you stop paying. Monthly website plans are common and some are fair, but many are leases: stop paying and the site goes dark, because the agency owns the domain, the hosting and the files. Ask one question before you sign, "who owns it if I leave?", and the answer tells you which kind you are being offered and what it costs to walk away.
Yes, in almost every case. A website is only visible if search engines can find, understand and rank it, and most small business sites are built without that in mind. SEO is the work that gets an existing site in front of the people already searching for what you sell, and it is usually far cheaper than rebuilding from scratch.
The pages people open once they have a number in mind.
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.
