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

A professionally built website for a UK small business usually costs somewhere between several hundred and several thousand pounds to build, plus a smaller yearly amount to keep running. That range is wide because "a website" covers everything from five pages and a contact form to a catalogue with quotes, payments, and a booking system. My own builds start at £750, and this guide explains what sits between that figure and a quote five times higher.

I am a freelance web developer, and most of my clients are small businesses in the UK and the UAE. So this is written from the side of the person pricing the job: what I look at, what changes the number, and what to check in any quote you get, mine included.

The short answer

For a brochure site that explains what you do and brings in enquiries, expect a fixed fee in the hundreds to low thousands of pounds from a freelancer, and more from an agency. A site that sells online, takes bookings, or connects to other software costs more, because each of those is real engineering work rather than another page. Running costs after launch are mostly hosting, the domain, and any help you pay for with changes.

These are my published starting prices, so you have at least one fixed point to compare against:

Online stores are quoted after I have seen the catalogue and the payment setup, because a shop with 20 products and one with 2,000 variants are different jobs that happen to share a name.

What actually moves the price

Page count is the number most people lead with, and it matters less than they expect. These are the things that change a quote.

Page types, not pages

Six service pages that share one layout are mostly one piece of design and build work, repeated with different words. A homepage, a service page, a gallery, a pricing page, and a blog are five different templates, and each one is designed, built, and tested on its own. When you count your pages, count the kinds of page.

Who writes the words

Copy is the cost that hides in most quotes. If you supply the text, the price stays lower, but the project waits for it, and late content is one of the most common reasons a small site launches weeks after the plan said it would. If the developer or a copywriter writes it, that is extra time and should be a line on the quote.

What happens when someone gets in touch

A single contact form is simple. A quote request on every service, a callback request, a WhatsApp button with the product already filled in, or a form that routes enquiries to different people takes more work. It is also usually the work that pays for itself, because it decides whether a visitor turns into an enquiry.

Selling online

Taking payments means product data, stock, VAT, delivery rules, emails, and a checkout that has to be correct every time. The payment integration is a job in its own right: on one client store the checkout signs every payment request on the server, so the secret key never reaches the browser. That kind of detail is invisible to a customer and is where the hours go.

Replacing a site that already gets traffic

If your current site ranks on Google, the rebuild has to carry those rankings across: a crawl of every existing URL, a redirect for each one, and checks after launch. Skipping that step is how a business can lose much of its search traffic in the weeks after the new site goes live. It is why a rebuild of a ranking site starts at £3,000 with me, not £750. The checklist for redesigning without losing rankings covers what that work involves.

Software beyond the website

Member logins, booking calendars, staff dashboards, and anything that stores records are software, not pages. They are priced as software. One client, a gym, has a public website and a separate members and fees system that both of its branches run on.

What a scope looks like on real sites

I do not publish what clients paid, but you can look at what each scope contains on sites that are live today.

• A service business with quote requests. Laser Magic UK, a laser cleaning company in the West Midlands, has six cleaning services, each with its own quote request, plus a page explaining the technology, a media page, a homepage FAQ, and a blog. That is a typical shape for a local service business.
• A trade catalogue with quotes and payments. Stainless & Aluminium, a metal stockholder with 10 locations, needed grade-first product search, a quote path next to every product, and a card checkout. That sits well above a brochure site in price, because most of it is product structure and payment work.
• A website plus software. Fazal Fitness has a public website and a separate system for members, fees, and attendance across two branches. The second part is priced like the software it is.

Running costs after launch

The build is a one-off. These are the costs that continue, and a good quote tells you about each of them up front.

• Domain.A .co.uk or .com renews every year, usually for a small amount. Make sure it is registered in your name, not the developer's.
• Hosting.Most of the sites I build run on Vercel's Pro plan or a similar host for a small monthly fee, with no server to patch. A WordPress site also needs plugin and theme updates, and premium plugins often renew as yearly licences, which is worth adding up before you compare.
• Email. Business email on your domain through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is billed per person, separately from the website.
• Changes and support. Optional. Some owners make their own edits; others pay for a monthly arrangement. Mine starts at £600 a month and covers maintenance, content changes, and improvements.

Website builder, freelancer, or agency

A website builder such as Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify is the cheapest way to start and the right choice for testing an idea. You pay monthly, you do the work, and you are limited to what the platform allows.

A freelancer gives you one person who designs, builds, and answers your emails, without an agency's overheads in the price. The risk is that everything depends on that person, so insist on owning the code and getting written handover notes. Mine come with every project, so the site never depends on me to keep running.

An agency gives you a team, a project manager, and more capacity, at a higher price. It makes sense when the project needs several specialists working at once, or when you need a contract with a company rather than a person.

A note on VAT

A VAT-registered business adds 20% VAT to its invoices, and many quotes and builder prices are shown before VAT. Ask whether a number includes VAT before you compare two quotes, because a 20% gap can make the cheaper quote the dearer one.

Questions to ask before you sign

1. Who owns the domain, the hosting account, and the code when the project ends?
2. Who writes the text, and who supplies the photos?
3. How many rounds of changes are included, and what does an extra round cost?
4. What search engine work is included? Page titles, descriptions, a sitemap, and structured data should be part of the build. Ongoing SEO content and link building are a separate service.
5. If you already have a site, what happens to its old URLs and the traffic they bring in?
6. What will hosting and renewals cost each year, and who pays them?
7. What happens if something breaks a month after launch?
8. When will it go live, and what could delay it?

How long it takes

A typical business website takes me three to six weeks. What usually stretches a schedule is waiting: for text, for photos, or for a decision. Having those ready before the build starts is the cheapest way to keep a project on time and on budget.

Getting a useful quote

You will get a far more accurate number from any developer if you send four things: your current website if you have one, a list of what the site has to do, two or three sites you like, and your deadline. If you send them to me through the contact form, I will reply with a range and the questions I need answered to fix the price. I reply within one business day.

For what is included in a build, see business website design and development, or look at the live client sites first.