“How much does a website cost?” is the question everyone asks first, and it’s the one that gets the most slippery answers. Ask ten web people and you’ll get ten different numbers, most of them followed by “it depends”. So let’s do this honestly. The truth is that a website can cost anything from nothing to tens of thousands, and the reason for that enormous range is simple once you see it: “a website” means wildly different things depending on who builds it and how. Here’s a straight guide to the real options and roughly what each costs, so you can work out what actually makes sense for your business.
The three ways to get a website
Broadly, there are three routes, and they explain almost the whole price range.
Do it yourself with a builder. Tools like the well-known drag-and-drop platforms are cheap to start, often a low monthly fee, sometimes nearly free. The catch is that the real cost is your time and the result. You’re the designer now, and most DIY sites look and perform like DIY sites: fine as a stopgap, rarely something that competes for customers. And you’re renting it, stop paying and it disappears.
Hire a freelancer. A good freelancer builds you a proper, custom site for a fraction of agency money, typically anywhere from a few hundred pounds to a couple of thousand, depending on size and experience. You deal with the person actually doing the work, so there’s no agency overhead inflating the bill. This is the sweet spot for most small businesses, and it’s where I sit: my sites start at £249 as a fixed price.
Use an agency. Agencies bring a team, designers, developers, project managers, and the price reflects it, usually running from a few thousand pounds well into five figures. For a large organisation with complex needs, that can be money well spent. For a typical small business, you’re often paying for overhead you don’t need and layers between you and the person doing the work.
What actually drives the price
Within any of those routes, a few things move the number:
- Size and complexity. A tidy five-page site costs far less than a big site with lots of sections, or a shop, or custom features. More to build, more it costs, simple as that.
- Custom vs template. A genuinely bespoke design built around your business costs more than a template with your logo dropped in, and it’s usually worth it, because a template looks like what it is.
- Who builds it. The single biggest lever. The same site can cost £249 from a freelancer or £5,000 from an agency, largely because of overhead, not quality of outcome.
- What’s included. Is hosting, getting-found-on-Google groundwork and aftercare part of it, or extra? A cheap headline price with everything bolted on afterwards isn’t as cheap as it looks.
What I charge, plainly
No games: my websites start at £249, agreed as a fixed price before any work begins, for a proper custom site built by one person, me, on your own domain, which you own outright with no lock-in. Bigger or more involved builds are more, but always a single clear price agreed up front. If you’d rather spread it, there’s a pay-monthly route from £69/mo (dropping to £30/mo once the build’s paid off) covering the build, hosting and care. The full detail lives on my pricing page.
The real question isn’t “how cheap”
Price matters, but the honest way to think about a website isn’t “what’s the cheapest I can get away with”, it’s “what gives me the best return”. A free site that never brings an enquiry is the most expensive option of all. A fairly-priced site that gets you found and turns visitors into customers pays for itself many times over. That’s the lens worth using, and it’s the one I’d want you to use even if you didn’t hire me. There’s more on getting genuine value without overpaying on my affordable web design page.
I’ve also written a plainer walk-through of what a small business website costs if you’d like the short version.
If you’d like a straight, fixed price for your actual project rather than a range, let’s have a chat.