How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK?

The Quick Answer

• Doing it yourself on a website builder: roughly £100 to £350 a year all in for the plan, domain and email, plus a fair amount of your own time.
• A freelance web designer: a small brochure site is commonly £500 to £1,500, a fuller small business site £1,500 to £3,000, and an online shop commonly £3,000 to £10,000, though a focused shop built on a fixed package can cost less.
• An agency: usually from around £2,000 to £3,000 for a small site, with specialist ecommerce agencies often quoting £5,000 to £35,000 or more.
• Running costs: a properly looked after business site typically costs somewhere between £50 and £300 a month once you add the platform, apps, hosting and someone to maintain it.

Those ranges are wide because “a website” covers everything from three pages and a contact form to a shop that takes weekly subscriptions and checks delivery postcodes. The rest of this guide breaks down where the money goes, so you can tell a fair quote from a bad one.

What You’re Actually Paying For

A quote for a website is mostly a quote for time. Whoever builds it is charging for some or all of these:

• Planning: working out what the site needs to do, who it’s for and how people will order.
• Design: how each page looks on a desktop and a phone, built around your products rather than a generic layout.
• Build: turning the design into a working site, setting up products, payments, shipping and tax.
• Content: the words, photos and product descriptions. This is the part that’s most often missing from cheap quotes.
• Testing and launch: checking every page and the full checkout on real devices, then putting it live on your domain.
• Handover: showing you how to change a price, add a product and see your orders.

When two quotes look very different, it’s usually because one includes planning and content and the other doesn’t. Those are the parts that decide whether anyone actually orders, so they’re worth paying for.

Typical UK Prices by Type of Website

These are typical ranges from UK pricing guides updated this year. Treat them as a sense check rather than a price list, because scope matters far more than the label.

Hourly rates follow the same pattern. Freelance web designers in the UK typically charge around £25 to £50 an hour, small agencies around £50 to £150, and larger agencies £75 to £200 or more. You’re paying for the team, the project management and the overheads, which can be worth it on a big project and wasted on a small one.

The Running Costs Nobody Mentions

The build is a one-off. These costs keep coming, and for a shop they can add up to more than the build over a few years.

Apps deserve a special mention. As one example, the Appstle subscriptions app for Shopify has a free tier for very small volumes, then paid plans from about $10 to $100 a month depending on how much subscription revenue you take. That’s a fair price for what it does, but add a box builder, a delivery date picker and a reviews app on top and the monthly bill grows quickly.

What Pushes the Price Up

• The number of different page designs. Ten pages that share one layout cost less than five that are all different.
• Selling features beyond a basic shop. Subscriptions, build-a-box ordering, postcode checks, delivery days and order cutoffs all take real work to get right.
• Content. If I’m writing the copy, sourcing images or styling product photos, that’s time on top of the build.
• Integrations. Connecting the site to accounting software, a courier, a CRM or a stock system adds setup and testing.
• Moving from another platform. Migrating products, customers and order history, and keeping your search rankings, needs care.
• Brand work. A new logo, colours and type is a project in its own right.
• Tight deadlines. A site needed in a week means other work gets moved, and that usually costs more.

Where Cheap Websites Get Expensive

I’m not against cheap websites. A simple builder site can be exactly right for a new business testing an idea. The problem is a cheap site that quietly costs you orders, or one that has to be rebuilt within a year.

The common ones I see are sites that look fine on a laptop but are awkward to order from on a phone, shops with no clear delivery information, and food businesses paying three or four separate monthly app fees to do something that could have been built once. Over a few years, those subscriptions can cost more than a proper build. That’s why on my Box and Stay packages the build-a-box is made for the business and there’s no monthly fee to an outside company for it.

Freelancer, Agency or Doing It Yourself

• Doing it yourself is cheapest in cash and most expensive in time. It suits a new business with a small range and a tight budget, as long as you’re comfortable writing your own copy and taking your own photos.
• A freelancer gives you one person who designs, builds and answers the phone. You’ll usually pay less than an agency for the same site, and you deal with the person doing the work. The trade-off is capacity: one person can only take on so many projects at once.
• An agency brings a team, which helps on large or complicated projects with lots of people involved. For a small business site, much of that cost is overhead you don’t need.

What I Charge

I’d be a bit of a hypocrite writing this without being open about my own prices. I build ecommerce sites on three packages:

• Shop, from £1,000, about 2 weeks. A bespoke homepage and a store, designed around what you sell, laid out for desktop and mobile and launched on your domain.
• Box, from £1,500, about 3 weeks. Everything in Shop, plus a postcode check, a custom hero image and a build-a-box your customers use themselves.
• Stay, from £2,000, about 4 weeks. Everything in Box, plus weekly or monthly subscriptions, search-ready copy and a refresh of your branding.

The prices are a starting point, and they’re negotiable. Tell me your budget and I’ll shape the work to fit it. Payment is 25% to start and the rest when the site goes live, with flexible options to spread the cost. If you want ongoing help, Partner is £150 a month for six months after launch and covers product and menu changes, fixes and one planned improvement a month. Your platform plan, domain and card fees are separate from the build, so include them in your first year’s budget.

How to Budget for Your Website

• Write down what the site has to do. Sell products, take subscriptions, deliver locally, take bookings. This is the biggest driver of cost.
• Pick the platform for how you sell. My Shopify vs WordPress vs Squarespace guide goes through the trade-offs.
• Budget for the first year, not just the build. Add the build, twelve months of the plan, the domain, any apps, card fees on the sales you expect and any maintenance.
• Get two or three quotes that cover the same things. Ask each one to list what’s included so you’re comparing like with like.
• Ask what isn’t included. Copywriting, photos, product upload, training and fixes after launch are the usual gaps.
• Check ownership and handover. Your name on every account, and a walkthrough before launch.
• Keep a little back. Something always comes up once real customers start using the site, so leave room for a few small changes.

What I’d Recommend

Don’t judge a website on the build price alone. Look at what it will cost to run for a year, who will look after it and whether it does the job your customers need, especially on a phone. A site that’s a little more expensive up front but saves you a few monthly fees, or brings in more orders, usually pays for itself.

If you’d like a straight number for your business, book a free consultation and I’ll talk it through with you, in person around the North East or on a video call. You can also get a rough estimate online, or see the sites I’ve built for businesses like yours.