Guide · 9 min read
What a small business website costs in the UK
Agency, freelancer, template builder or AI: real UK price ranges for a small business website, plus the second bill nobody quotes for.
There are two numbers, and most people only ask about one
Ask what a website costs and you get a build price. That is the figure on the quote, it is the one everybody compares, and it is the smaller of the two numbers that matter.
The other number is what it costs to change. A website for a plumber in Swindon is not a finished object. You drop a service, you add a town, your call-out fee goes up, you take on a second van. Every one of those is an edit. Over three years the edits often cost more than the build did, and unlike the build, nobody quotes for them up front.
So when you compare the routes below, hold both in your head. What it takes to get live, and what it takes to keep the site telling the truth.
Note. Before you agree to anything, ask one question: what does it cost me to change a paragraph of text? The answer tells you more about the next three years than the build price does.
The four ways to get a website built
Broadly there are four routes: an agency, a freelancer, a template builder such as Wix or Squarespace, and an AI builder. The prices below are what small UK service businesses actually pay for a five to eight page site — a one-van or one-shop operation. Not a booking system, not a shop, nothing bespoke.
The last two are cheap in money and expensive in evenings. Reckon on fifteen to twenty-five hours to get from a blank template to something you would put on the side of a van. If an hour of your time on the tools is worth £35, that is £500 to £900 of work you did instead of earning. It appears on no invoice, which is why nobody counts it.
| Route | To get live | Per month after | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | £1,500–£6,000 | £100–£400 retainer | Changes go through someone else's diary |
| Freelancer | £400–£2,000 | Nothing, then hourly | Depends on whether they still answer the phone in a year |
| Template builder | £0–£300 | £12–£30 | You are the one filling in every box |
| AI builder | £0–£150 | £10–£30 | Still needs you to say what is true about the business |
Why one quote is £1,500 and the next is £5,000
Those ranges overlap for a reason. A £1,500 agency site and a £900 freelance site are frequently the same WordPress theme with your logo dropped into it. What separates them is not the code. It is how many hours someone spent working out what you actually do, and then writing it down in the words a customer would use.
That thinking is the expensive part, and it is the first thing cut when a quote comes down. Push an agency from £4,000 to £2,200 and you are rarely getting the same site cheaper. You are getting a site where nobody interviewed you, the service pages were written off your old brochure, and the photographs came from a stock library.
There is a real case for the top of the range, and it is worth saying plainly, because the cheap routes tend to be argued for by the people selling them. What you are buying is somebody to own the problem. They will sit with you, work out that the money is in bathroom refits rather than tap washers, build the pages around that, take photographs that are not blurry, and chase the ten small things you would forget. For a business turning over a few hundred thousand a year that knows which service it wants more of, £3,000 for that is often fair.
What you are not buying, whatever the proposal implies, is a guaranteed number of leads. Nobody can promise that. Be careful too with deals that fold the build into a monthly fee of £150 to £300 across three years. The arithmetic comes to £5,400 to £10,800, and in a fair few of those contracts you do not own the site at the end of it.
Note. If a proposal will not separate the build cost from the monthly cost, that is your answer. Ask in writing who owns the domain and the files if you leave.
The bill nobody budgets for: changing it later
A price change. A new town. Swapping a photo. Taking down a service you have stopped offering. Small jobs, all of them. On a retainer they come out of your monthly hours, which is fine until the month you need four of them. Off retainer, expect £50 to £120 for a small text change and a wait of a few days.
The wait is the real cost, not the fee. What happens in practice is that the change gets judged not worth the hassle, and the site sits there quoting a call-out fee from two years ago, or listing a service you gave up in 2024. You then spend your own time on the phone correcting a website you paid for.
- Your call-out fee or hourly rate changes — twice, maybe three times, over a few years
- You add a town, or drop one that turned out to be too far for the diesel
- A service comes off the list, or a new certification goes on
- New photographs of finished work, which ought to happen every few months
- Opening hours change, or you close for a fortnight at Christmas
Domain, hosting, SSL and the bits nobody explains
These are the running costs, and they are smaller than most people are led to believe. Some of that confusion is deliberate on the seller's part, so here are the numbers.
Where it goes wrong is bundling. A line on a quote reading "hosting and maintenance, £45 a month" is £540 a year for something that costs about £60 to provide. That is fair enough if the maintenance is real — updates, backups, somebody who answers the phone when the site is down at eight on a Monday morning. It is poor value if it is a shared server and nothing else. Ask what the £45 covers and how many hours sit inside it.
| Item | What it should cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.co.uk) | £8–£15 a year | First year is often £1–£5. The renewal is the real price |
| Domain (.com) | £10–£20 a year | Worth it mainly if you trade beyond the UK |
| Shared hosting | £3–£10 a month | Ample for any small service business |
| SSL certificate | Nothing | Let's Encrypt is free and hosts include it |
| Business email | £5–£12 per person a month | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 |
| Builder plan | £10–£30 a month | Hosting, SSL and often the domain are included |
What is genuinely free, and what is free like a printer
Two things are worth watching here. The first is SSL — the padlock in the address bar. It should cost you nothing. Certificates have been free since Let's Encrypt launched and every host worth using turns one on automatically. If a bill has a line for £70 a year of SSL on a five-page site, query it.
The second is your domain. Register it yourself, in your own name, on your own card, at a registrar you can log into. It is about a tenner a year and it is the one thing you cannot rebuild if the relationship with whoever built the site goes sour. Everything else can be remade in a week.
- Genuinely free: SSL, on any host worth having.
- Genuinely free: a Google Business Profile, which for most local trades brings in more calls than the website does.
- Genuinely free: photographs taken on your phone in daylight, which beat stock images every time.
- Free with a catch: a builder's free tier — usually yourname.thebuilder.com in the address bar, and their advert on your page.
- Free with a catch: a site from a directory or lead-generation firm. You are renting it, and the leads are theirs.
Note. A directory will build you a site for nothing because the site keeps you on their platform. The phone number may be a tracking number and the reviews may not be portable. When you leave, none of it leaves with you.
What to actually spend
Set the budget against what one job is worth. If a bathroom refit is £4,000 of work to you, a site that brings in two a year justifies almost any figure on this page. If you fit locks at £90 a call, the sums are different, and what matters is a low running cost and editing that is free.
Then spend on the words and the photographs before the design. A plain page naming the towns you cover, the jobs you want more of and a phone number will out-earn a handsome one offering quality workmanship at competitive prices. Design costs money. Being specific costs an hour of thinking, and it is the hour that pays.
- Under £500: a builder plan and your own domain. Write the words yourself — you know the job better than any copywriter does.
- £500 to £1,500: a freelancer for the build, then take the keys and do the edits yourself.
- £1,500 to £6,000: an agency, if there is a clear service you want more of and you want somebody else to own the problem.
- Any budget at all: your Google Business Profile, filled in properly, before a penny goes on the site.
Note. The test is the same six months on, whichever route you took. Open the site on your phone at the side of a job and look for anything out of date. If fixing it takes five minutes, you chose well. If it takes an email and a wait, you have found out what the second number costs.
Common questions
- Is £500 enough for a website?
- For a small service business, yes. That covers a domain, a year of a builder plan and a fair amount of your own time. What it will not buy is somebody else doing the thinking about what the pages should say.
- Why do quotes for the same site vary so much?
- Because most of the price is hours, not code, and firms allocate wildly different amounts of them. Ask for the quote split into build, content and photography, and the gap usually explains itself.
- Do I have to pay for an SSL certificate?
- No. Let's Encrypt certificates are free and any decent host installs one for you. A separate SSL line on the bill for a small brochure site is worth questioning.
- What happens if I stop paying the monthly fee?
- It depends on the contract, which is exactly why that clause is the one to read first. On a builder plan the site normally goes offline but the domain and your words remain yours. On some agency lease deals you lose the lot.
- Is it cheaper to build it myself?
- In money, yes. In hours, often not. Budget fifteen to twenty-five hours of evenings for a first attempt on a template builder, and be honest with yourself about whether those evenings exist.