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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.
A five-page small business website in the UK costs £0 to £2,500 up front in 2026. 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. Roughly 40% of an agency quote is copywriting and project management rather than design or build.
Where the money goes.
| Line item | Typical | What you are paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and planning | £150 to £400 | A kick-off call, a sitemap and a written brief |
| Design | £400 to £1,200 | Usually 12 to 20 hours, and it varies less than you would think |
| Build | £300 to £900 | Turning the design into pages that work on a phone |
| Copywriting | £0 to £640 | The single biggest swing factor in any quote |
| Photography | £0 to £900 | Skipped more often than it should be |
| Avago | £0 to build | £34.99/mo to publish, including hosting, SSL and your domain |
Where small business quotes go wrong.
Three things that turn a £900 project into a £2,400 one, none of them design.
You supply the content
Most delays and most overruns are the client's copy, not the build. If you cannot write five pages in a fortnight, pay someone at the start rather than the end.
Revision rounds are finite
Two rounds is standard. A third is billable, usually at £60 to £120 an hour, and nobody mentions it until you are on it.
Year two is not free
Hosting, domain, SSL and a maintenance retainer land every year after. Budget £120 to £600 depending on who holds the keys.
Questions.
Is £500 enough for a small business website?
For a template build with your own copy and photos, yes. For a bespoke design with content written for you, no. Below about £500 you are buying someone's time to configure a template, which is a fair deal as long as you know that is what it is.
Why do quotes for the same brief vary by thousands?
Almost entirely because of what is included beyond the design: copywriting, photography, revision rounds and ongoing support. Design hours themselves rarely vary by more than a factor of two.
What does a small business website cost per year to run?
Between £120 and £600 in the UK. That covers hosting, a domain, SSL and any maintenance retainer. Avago is £34.99/mo, which is £419.88 a year with all of that included.
Other costs.
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.