Guide · Updated October 2026
How much does a website cost in the UK?
Short answer: for a small business brochure website in 2026, expect somewhere between£500 and £5,000 as a one-off cost, plus roughly £12 a year for the domain. Everything above that range is buying agency process, and everything below it is usually buying a template.
The longer answer is more useful, because the range is so wide that the average tells you nothing. Two quotes for the same five-page website can differ by a factor of ten, and the difference is almost never the work.
What different suppliers charge
These are typical UK figures for a five-page brochure website — the standard small business job — in 2026.
| Type of supplier | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| DIY site builder | £120–£400 per year | Software and a template. You are the designer, and it shows. |
| Template + freelancer | £300–£800 | A bought theme with your content in it. Fast, generic, hard to change later. |
| Fixed-price studio (us) | £300 | Custom design and build, SEO, deployment, handover. You own everything. |
| Freelance designer | £800–£2,500 | Good work, but priced per day, so scope creep moves the number. |
| Regional agency | £2,500–£8,000 | A team, a process, a discovery phase and an account manager. |
| London agency | £8,000–£25,000+ | Strategy, branding, content, development. Genuinely more, at genuinely more cost. |
What actually drives the cost
1. The number of pages
This is the biggest single factor, and the one most quotes are vague about. Each page needs its own design decisions, its own content and its own SEO. Going from one page to five is roughly five times the work, which is why prices step up rather than scale smoothly.
2. Custom design versus a template
A template costs the designer £40 and an afternoon. Custom design costs a day or more. The difference is not purely cosmetic: a template constrains what you can do later, and it tends to look like the thousand other businesses using the same theme.
3. Ecommerce
Taking payments moves a project into a different category. Products, stock, tax, delivery rules, refunds and payment security are all real work. Any quote under £1,000 for a genuine store with hundreds of products should be treated with suspicion, including ours — we cap our ecommerce work at small catalogues for exactly that reason.
4. Content: who writes it and who shoots it
Copywriting and photography are commonly the hidden line item. If you supply your own text and images you save money; if the designer has to write five pages of copy and source imagery, that is days of work and it will be priced. Get this stated explicitly in any quote.
5. Integrations
Booking systems, CRM connections, payment providers, email marketing, stock feeds. Each one is a small project. Individually they are cheap. Five of them turn a brochure site into a systems integration job.
What does not drive the cost
Three things that sound expensive and mostly are not:
- Hosting. Static sites on Cloudflare’s free tier cost nothing at small business scale. Being told hosting is a premium add-on is a red flag.
- SSL certificates. Free, everywhere, for years. Any quote with an SSL line item is marking up something that costs nothing.
- “SEO”. The on-page basics — titles, descriptions, headings, structured data, a sitemap — should be part of any competent build, not a separate £500 line. Ongoing SEO work is real, but the basics are not an upsell.
The costs nobody mentions
The build price is the visible number. These are the ones that decide what a website actually costs you over three years.
| Cost | Typical | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10–£15/year | Unavoidable. Make sure it is registered in your name. |
| Hosting | £0–£60/month | Free on Cloudflare Workers. £20–£60/month on managed WordPress. |
| Plugin licences | £0–£300/year | WordPress only. Zero on a static build, because there are no plugins. |
| Maintenance and repairs | £0–£500/year | Plugin conflicts, PHP upgrades, security fixes. Unpredictable, and it always happens. |
| Content changes | £0–£100/hour | Free if you can edit the site yourself. Expensive if every comma is an invoice. |
On a WordPress site on £40/month hosting, that is roughly £1,500 over three years — before a single content change. On a static build on Cloudflare it is a domain renewal.
How to compare two quotes properly
When you have two quotes in front of you, ask these five questions. The answers matter more than the totals.
- Who owns the domain? If the answer is not “you”, stop there. It is the single most common trap in cheap web design.
- Is the price fixed or an estimate? “From £X” is not a price. Ask what the final invoice will be.
- What is the monthly cost after launch? Get a number, and ask what it pays for.
- Can I edit it myself? If not, what does a text change cost?
- Can I leave? If you move to another designer, do you take the website with you or start again?
What we charge, for reference
Since this guide is about price transparency, it would be odd not to state ours.
- £100 — a one-page website. Contact form, map, core SEO, deployed on Cloudflare. Enough for most trades and single-service businesses.
- £300 — up to five pages. A page per service, full on-page SEO, Analytics and Search Console, one round of revisions.
- £600 — a full site with AI features, a backend on Cloudflare Workers, a database and a CMS you can edit yourself.
All three are fixed and confirmed in writing before work starts. There is no hourly rate behind them. You can see the full breakdown on the website design cost page.
The bottom line
A small business website should cost somewhere between £300 and £2,000 for a straightforward brochure site, and it should pay for itself within a year. If you are being quoted five figures for five pages, you are buying process rather than output. If you are being quoted under £300, check very carefully who ends up owning the domain.
The most useful thing you can do is ask what the monthly cost is after launch. That is where cheap websites stop being cheap, and where the real difference between quotes shows up.
Frequently asked
How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?
For a small business brochure website, the realistic range is £500 to £5,000 as a one-off build cost. Below about £400 you are usually buying a template or a DIY tool rather than a service. Above about £8,000 you are into agency territory with a discovery process. Our own fixed prices are £100 for one page, £300 for up to five pages and £600 for a full site with AI and a backend.
Why is there such a huge range in quotes?
Mostly overhead, not work. An agency with an office, account managers and a sales team has to recover those costs from every project, and a London postcode multiplies them again. The actual production of a five-page brochure website is a similar amount of work whoever does it — which is why two quotes for identical briefs can differ by a factor of ten.
Is a cheap website a false economy?
It depends entirely on what makes it cheap. A low price because the production work has been automated is a genuine saving. A low price because the domain is registered in the designer’s name, or because the site is a stock template, or because there is a monthly fee that never ends — that is a false economy, and all three are common. Check who owns the domain before anything else.
How much does it cost to run a website each year?
Less than most people think, if it is built on the right platform. A .co.uk domain is about £10–£15 a year. Static hosting on Cloudflare is free at small business scale, and SSL and DDoS protection come with it. Compare that with managed WordPress hosting at £20–£60 a month, plus plugin licences, plus the occasional repair invoice.
Do I need to pay for hosting separately?
On a traditionally hosted site, yes — usually £15–£60 a month. On a site built on Cloudflare Workers, no. Static pages are served from Cloudflare’s free tier, which covers a small business website comfortably. If your designer is charging you monthly hosting, it is worth asking what it actually pays for.
How much should a small business spend on a website?
A reasonable rule of thumb is that a website should pay for itself within a year through enquiries it generates. For a tradesperson whose average job is £400, three extra jobs covers a £300 site. For a business with high-value contracts, a £600 site that brings in one client is an easy decision. The mistake is either spending £5,000 on a brochure site or spending £0 and having no online presence at all.
Are there cheaper options than hiring a designer?
Yes, and for some businesses they are the right answer. A DIY site builder costs roughly £10–£30 a month and you do the work yourself. If you have the time and the site only needs to be one page, that is a legitimate route — we say so on our AI web design page. Above roughly five pages, or if you need it to rank, the time cost of doing it yourself usually exceeds the saving.
A five-page website from aicod is £300.
Send us a couple of sentences about your business and we will confirm the scope and the exact price. If a cheaper route is genuinely right for you, we will say so.