Numbers first. These are real UK prices as of 2026 — what we quote, what our clients tell us they've been quoted elsewhere, and what the platforms actually charge.
| What you're buying | Build cost | Ongoing | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY website builder | £0 | from £15/mo | Side projects, testing an idea |
| Starter site, 1–3 pages | £150–£500 | £15–£40/mo | Sole traders, new trades |
| Custom site, 5–10 pages | £600–£3,000 | £20–£50/mo | Most established businesses |
| E-commerce | £1,500–£6,000 | £30–£100/mo | Shops, product catalogues |
| Bespoke build or web app | £6,000–£25,000+ | Varies | Booking systems, portals |
Why the range is so wide
"Website" is doing an enormous amount of work as a word. It describes a £13-a-month template you filled in yourself on a Sunday, and it describes a six-month build with custom functionality. Both are websites. That's why quotes for what sounds like the same job can differ by a factor of ten.
In practice, three things move the price more than anything else:
- How much is bespoke. A template adjusted to your colours is a few hours' work. A layout designed around your specific business is days.
- How much content you supply. If you hand over finished copy and good photographs, you've removed the most time-consuming part of the job. If the designer has to write it and shoot it, that's a different project.
- How much has to work afterwards. A brochure site that sits there is cheap. A site with forms, tracking, bookings, integrations and someone accountable when it breaks costs more, because more is being promised.
A quote covering only the build will always look cheaper than a quote covering the build plus copywriting, hosting and support. It usually isn't cheaper by the end of year one — it's just quoted differently.
Doing it yourself: from £15 a month
Website builders start from around £15 a month. Wix and Squarespace both land near there once you're on a plan that lets you use your own domain, and that covers hosting, the domain for year one and an SSL certificate.
Being straight with you: for some businesses this is genuinely the right answer. If you're testing whether an idea has legs, or your customers all come from word of mouth and you just need somewhere to point them, a DIY builder is fine. Anyone who tells you every business needs a professionally built site is selling professionally built sites.
Two costs don't appear on the pricing page, though.
The first is your time. Most owners we speak to spent somewhere between twenty and forty hours on their first DIY build. If your day rate is £250 and you spent thirty hours on it, the "free" website cost you more than our custom tier.
The second is subtler and does more damage. Builders make it very easy to produce something that looks perfectly acceptable and converts badly — a homepage that opens with a stock photo and the word "Welcome", a phone number three scrolls down, a contact form nobody tests on a phone. It looks like a website. It just doesn't generate enquiries, and because it looks fine, the owner rarely suspects it's the problem.
Starter sites: £150–£500
One to three pages, professionally designed, mobile-friendly, with a contact form and a gallery. Enough to establish that you exist, look credible and can be contacted.
Our own starter websites for trades start at £249, which covers design, mobile responsiveness, a contact form and a photo gallery.
Here's the part most agencies won't put in writing: a starter site has a ceiling, and you should know where it is before you buy one. It's a brochure. It says who you are, what you do and how to reach you, and it does that well. What it won't do is rank for competitive search terms, because ranking needs depth — pages that actually answer what people are searching for — and three pages can't provide it.
Don't buy a starter site if your main goal is to be found on Google for something competitive like "builder in Swindon". You'll be disappointed, and it won't be the designer's fault. Buy a starter site if you need to look professional to people who already have your name.
Custom sites: £600–£3,000
This is where most established small businesses land, and where the money starts doing something measurable.
Our custom web design starts at £699 for up to five bespoke pages with mobile responsiveness, contact forms, SEO setup and analytics.
What actually changes at this tier:
- The layout is designed around your business rather than your business being squeezed into a layout. If your strongest asset is photos of finished work, the design leads with photos of finished work.
- The words are written to be found and to persuade. Separate pages for separate services, because that's how people search — nobody types "building services", they type "loft conversion Swindon".
- The technical foundations are there: proper page titles, structured data, sensible URLs, fast loading, and analytics wired up so you can tell what's working.
- Someone is accountable when a form stops sending or Google flags something.
If you only ever spend money on one website, spend it here.
Shops and booking systems: £1,500 and up
Online shops, booking systems, member areas and anything with a database behind it. Our e-commerce and web application projects start at £1,499, and genuinely bespoke systems run well beyond that depending on what has to be built.
The cost driver here isn't pages, it's logic. "Customers can book a slot" sounds like one feature. It's availability rules, deposits, confirmation emails, cancellations, calendar sync and what happens when two people book the same slot four seconds apart.
The costs nobody puts on the quote
This is the section that saves people the most money, because these are the numbers that turn a £699 website into a £1,400 first year if nobody mentions them.
- Domain name: £10–£15 a year for a .co.uk. Cheap, but check who it's registered to (more on this below).
- Hosting: £5–£25 a month for shared hosting suitable for a small business site.
- SSL certificate: should be free and included. If someone is charging you £80 a year for one, that's worth questioning.
- Maintenance and updates: if the site runs on WordPress, plugins and core need updating or it will eventually break or get compromised. Budget for it or buy a platform that doesn't need it.
- Copywriting: the most commonly underestimated line. Expect £75–£200 per page from a professional, or a lot of your own evenings.
- Photography: £300–£800 for a half-day shoot. For trades, this is frequently the highest-return money in the whole project.
We bundle domain, hosting, SSL, backups and support including minor updates into one £29/month plan, mostly so this conversation doesn't have to happen twice.
What a building contractor actually needs
We build for a lot of trades, and construction is its own case — different enough from a shop or a consultancy that the generic advice above misses.
Contractors don't win work the way most businesses do. Nobody chooses a builder because the website had a nice animation. They choose because they saw six photos of an extension that looked like the one they want, and the company appeared to be insured, accredited and still trading.
So the money goes to different places:
- Your photographs are the product. Before-and-afters, finished work, work in progress. A four-page site with forty good project photos will out-earn a twelve-page site with six stock images every time.
- Accreditations belong near the top. CHAS, Constructionline, SafeContractor, FMB, TrustMark, NHBC, Gas Safe, NICEIC — whichever you hold. These answer the question the customer is actually asking, which is "are you going to disappear with my deposit".
- Be explicit about where you work. "We cover Swindon, Cirencester, Chippenham and the surrounding area within 30 miles" earns you searches that "we cover the South West" doesn't.
- It has to work on a phone, on bad signal. Your enquiries arrive from people standing in a half-finished kitchen. Click-to-call and WhatsApp buttons matter more than a contact form.
- Individual service pages, not one "Services" list. Loft conversions, extensions, groundworks and refurbishments are four different searches and should be four different pages.
For most contractors that's a four to six page build in the £700–£1,500 range — provided the budget stretches to proper photography. If you're choosing between a bigger site and better photos, take the photos.
We've built for construction and commercial clients including Forest of Dean Building Contractors, and for commercial refrigeration specialists AK Refrigeration. If you want to see the approach applied to your business before spending anything, we'll design your homepage for free.
Questions to ask before you pay anyone
These five questions will tell you more about a web designer than any portfolio. We'd rather you asked us them too.
- "Will the domain be registered in my name?" This is the one that causes real damage. If the designer registers it under their own account, you don't own your web address — and if the relationship sours, you can lose it along with your email. It should always be registered to you, with you holding the login.
- "Is that price one-off or does it renew?" Some very cheap builds are effectively finance agreements with a long tie-in. Nothing wrong with that if you know; a lot wrong with it if you don't.
- "What happens if I want to leave?" Ask whether you can take the site elsewhere. On some proprietary platforms the honest answer is no, and it's better to hear it now.
- "Can I make small changes myself?" Changing a phone number shouldn't require raising a ticket and waiting a week.
- "What's included after launch, and for how long?" Get the boundary in writing — what counts as support, what counts as new work.
What we'd tell you on the phone
Don't buy the cheapest thing on offer. A bad website isn't neutral — it quietly costs you the enquiries it fails to convert, for years, and you never see the ones that didn't call.
Don't let anyone talk you into five figures for a business that needs six good pages either. Plenty of agencies price on what they think you can afford rather than what the work involves.
For most of the businesses we speak to, the answer is a custom build with any spare budget going into photography and copy rather than extra pages. That's our custom web design, which starts at £699 plus £29/month. If you're a trade and you need to be online this week rather than next month, our starter sites are £249.
And if you'd rather judge the work before you hear another price, we'll design your homepage for free — no cost, no card, no obligation. If you like it we'll talk. If you don't, you've lost nothing.