How much does a small business website cost in the UK?
A small business website in the UK costs from £800 with us for up to five pages, before VAT, and a single landing page costs from £450. A Business website of five to ten pages, with an editor so you can change the words and photos yourself, starts at £1,300. Once it is live, hosting costs £10 a month, plus the domain.
Most owners who ask us this already hold two quotes a long way apart, one from a freelancer a friend recommended and one from an agency with a twenty-page proposal. Both can be honest. What separates them is usually scope that nobody wrote down: how many pages, who writes them, and what the site has to do once someone lands on it.
What moves the price
The number of pages moves the price more than anything else, because each page needs its own words and its own reason to be there. Woodio International Trade, a wholesaler in Watford, works across seven areas, from industrial chemicals to facade work, and a buyer for one has no interest in the rest. We gave each area its own page with its own route to a quote. Quote requests went from about two a month to about ten.
Next comes the content. An owner who arrives with a paragraph per service and photos of real jobs gets a cheaper site than one who needs every page written from an interview. Our price calculator takes 15% off a tight scope with the content ready, and adds a quarter when there are integrations or pages to write. Custom features, or moving a large old site across, add half.
Selling online is a different build. A shop, from £2,550, has to take payments and handle orders at three in the morning with nobody watching, and that is where most of its cost goes. At the other end, an owner whose site still works but looks dated may not need a new one at all. A redesign from £900 keeps the pages and the address Google already knows, and rebuilds the parts that lose enquiries.
What a website costs to run
Running a small website costs £10 a month for hosting on our server and £10 a year for the domain, which is registered in your name and billed at cost. Some owners add a care plan from £40 a month, which hands the backups and the updates to us.
What owners tend to forget is the tools around the site. A professional email address or a booking system is billed by its own provider from the day you add it, and we would rather you added each one when the business needs it than paid for it from launch day.
Nor does the build have to be paid at once. Any project can be split 50/50, or 40% up front and three monthly payments. Twelve monthly payments add a 12% plan fee, which puts a Starter website at £75 a month for a year. The calculator shows each option worked out for your own project.
What is not worth paying for
A promise about where you will rank is not worth paying for. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a first-place ranking, and tells owners who are offered one to find someone else. What a build owes you is a site that loads fast on a phone and says plainly what you do and where. Keeping a business visible in local search is monthly work, and a separate decision.
Pages your customers will not read are the other waste. A page of company values, or a team page with three stock handshakes, costs as much to build as the page for your best-selling service, and only the service page answers what people search for. We would rather build five pages that each answer a customer's question than ten that pad out the menu.
If you already hold a quote, send it to us with a line about your business, and we will tell you what it leaves out and what the same site would cost here. The calculator gives you a figure on your own first, if you would rather start there.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published
Read the Woodio International Trade case study