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How much does a website cost in the UK?
Nobody in this industry likes answering this. So here are the actual numbers, including ours, including the ones that turn up after you have signed.
A small business website in the UK costs £0 to £4,500 up front and £90 to £600 a year to keep running. A freelancer sits around £850, a design agency around £2,400, and a self-service builder around £192 a year with your own time on top. The gap is almost never design quality. It is how much of the work you are paying someone else to do.
Five ways to get a website, priced.
Ranges are UK, 2026, for a five to eight page business site. We have put ourselves in the same table rather than a separate one.
| Route | Up front | Per year | Time to live | You supply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design agency | £1,800 to £4,500 | £300 to £600 | 8 to 14 weeks | Brief, feedback, patience |
| Freelancer | £500 to £1,500 | £120 to £350 | 3 to 6 weeks | Copy, photos, chasing |
| DIY builder | £0 | £140 to £290 | 1 to 4 weekends | Everything |
| Template and a VA | £300 to £700 | £140 to £290 | 1 to 2 weeks | Direction and QA |
| Avago | £0 | £419.88 | About 5 minutes | A link |
Work out your own number.
Pages, photography, e-commerce and copywriting are where quotes move most. This is an indicative agency figure, not a quote from us.
What the quote does not mention.
The content deadline
Most agency delays are the client's copy, not the build. Budget two weekends of writing, or £400 to £900 for someone to do it for you.
Change fees after launch
Sixty to £120 an hour is normal once the project closes. A new phone number across a five-page site can cost £75.
Who owns the domain
If the agency registered it, moving is their decision rather than yours. Ask before you sign, not after.
Go deeper.
Four costs that come up often enough to deserve their own page.
What a small business website actually costs. →
Five pages, a contact form and somewhere to put your phone number. Here is what each route to that actually charges, and where the money goes.
What a website redesign costs. →
Usually more than the original, because someone has to work out what to keep. Here is the 2026 range, and an honest test for whether you need one at all.
What is actually in a website design package. →
Packages exist so agencies can quote without a call. That makes them useful for comparison and easy to misread, because the tier names mean nothing across two suppliers.
What an online shop costs to build. →
The build price is the part everyone quotes. The fees are the part that decides whether the shop makes money, and almost nobody puts those in the proposal.
Cost questions, answered.
Why do quotes for the same website vary by £3,000?
Almost entirely because of what sits around the design: copywriting, photography, revision rounds and ongoing support. Design hours themselves rarely vary by more than a factor of two between suppliers. When you compare two quotes, compare who writes the copy first and the design second.
Is a cheap website bad for SEO?
Not inherently. Google cares about speed, structure, mobile rendering and content, none of which require a large budget. What a cheap build often skips is the structured data, the redirects and the page titles, and those are the parts that matter. Ask whether they are included rather than asking what the site costs.
What should a five-page website cost in the UK in 2026?
Between £400 and £2,500 up front, depending almost entirely on whether the copy is written for you. Under £400 you are buying template configuration, which is fine as long as you know that is what you are getting.
What does hosting actually cost?
Between £40 and £300 a year for a small business site, and most of the range is service rather than servers. Avago includes hosting, SSL and your custom domain in the £34.99/mo publish price, so there is no separate hosting bill.
How long does it take to build a website?
An agency takes 8 to 14 weeks, a freelancer 3 to 6, and a DIY builder as long as you keep at it. Avago takes about five minutes, because it starts from what is already published about your business rather than from an empty page.