How much should a small business website cost?

The four price brackets

Almost every quote in the UK falls into one of these. Working out which one you are holding tells you more than the number does.

Under £500, or a few pounds a month

A website builder you drive yourself, or someone assembling a template over a weekend. You get something live and findable, which is better than nothing.

What is not included is the thinking: no research into how your customers choose, no copywriting, no page-per-service structure, and no one looking after it afterwards. The real cost is usually your own evenings, which nobody counts. We have written about when that is the right choice, and it genuinely sometimes is.

£500 to £1,500

A freelancer, often part-time, usually building on WordPress with a purchased theme. At the better end this is good value and plenty of small businesses are well served by it.

Two things to check. Ask who writes the words — at this price it is almost always you, and that is where most projects stall for three months. And ask what happens afterwards, because a theme-based site needs updating and this bracket rarely includes it.

£1,500 to £5,000

Where most serious small business sites sit, ours included. You should expect original design, copy written for you, a real page for each service, the local search groundwork done, and someone contactable afterwards.

This is also the bracket with the widest variation in what you actually receive, so it is the one where the questions further down matter most.

£5,000 and up

An agency with a team, or genuine complexity: a shop with real stock control, memberships, bookings tied into other systems, several languages.

If you are being quoted this for a nine-page site about a local service business, ask precisely what the extra is buying. Sometimes it is strategy and research worth paying for. Sometimes it is account managers.

Why the same brief gets wildly different prices

Four things account for nearly all of the spread.

• Who writes the copy. This is the single biggest hidden variable. Writing eight pages properly is days of work. If it is not in the quote, it is on you, and that is usually what delays a site for months.
• Template or built for you. A theme costs £50 and a day. Designing for how your particular trade gets chosen costs considerably more and is most of the difference in results.
• How many real pages. A five-page brochure and a site with a page per service are different amounts of work, and only the second ranks for the searches that bring work in.
• What happens after launch. Hosting, updates, backups, security and changes are either included, sold separately, or quietly nobody’s job. The third is the most common and the most expensive eventually.

The costs that arrive later

Ask about every one of these before you sign anything. They are where a cheap quote becomes an expensive website.

• Hosting — typically £5 to £30 a month, and watch for a low first year that renews much higher.
• Your domain — £10 to £20 a year. Make sure it is registered to you, not to your developer.
• Updates and maintenance — on WordPress this is real, ongoing work. If nobody is doing it, the site is a liability rather than merely dated.
• Changes — often £50 to £100 an hour with a minimum charge, which is how changing your opening hours costs £75.
• Premium plugins and licences — frequently invisible in the quote and payable annually forever.
• The rebuild — the biggest one. A site nobody maintains needs replacing in three or four years, so a £1,000 build is really £1,000 every three years plus the months it spent broken.

Monthly or upfront?

Both are legitimate. Upfront means you own the thing — worth paying for if you have the capital and want the asset. Monthly means no capital outlay and, usually, that maintenance and changes are included and someone has a reason to still care next year.

The trade-off to pin down with any monthly provider is ownership: who owns the design and code while you are paying, and what happens if you stop. Ours is set out on the pay monthly page, including the point at which buying outright works out cheaper. Any provider who is vague on that question is worth pressing.

Six questions that reveal the real price

1. Who writes the copy, and is it in this price?
2. Is this a template or designed for us? If a theme, which one — then go and look at it.
3. How many pages, and is there one for each service we sell?
4. What does month two cost? Hosting, updates, changes, licences, all of it.
5. Who owns the domain, the code and the content, and what do we leave with?
6. What does a small change cost and how long does it take? Then ask for an example from a current client.

A good supplier answers all six without hesitating. Hesitation on the fourth and fifth is the useful signal.

What we charge, for comparison

So you can place us: from £45 a month with nothing upfront, including design, copywriting, UK hosting, SSL, support and changes every month. Buying outright starts at £1495. If you already have a site that works, looking after it is £15 a month.

Full detail, with what each plan includes, is on the pricing page. We publish it because the first thing you wanted to know was the price, and sending you to a contact form for it would be irritating.