How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?

Ask ten UK web designers what a website costs and nine will say “it depends” and point you at a contact form. It does depend. But you can still be given ranges, told what moves the number, and shown a supplier’s actual prices, which is what this article does.

One honesty note before the numbers. There is no official register of what UK websites cost. The ranges below are indicative: what we see quoted publicly, what clients tell us they were quoted elsewhere, and what we charge. They are a map, not a survey.

Three kinds of supplier, three kinds of price

Most of the spread in “how much does a website cost” comes from who you ask, not what you need. The same five-page site for a physio in Hamilton can be quoted at three very different numbers depending on the door you knock on.

None of those tiers is a con. They are different products. A studio charging £4,000 is not ripping you off and a freelancer charging £400 is not necessarily cutting corners. The question is which product your business actually needs, and most small businesses need less than they are sold.

What actually moves the price

Inside any one tier, the number moves on a short list of concrete things. If a quote goes up and the person cannot point at one of these, ask why.

• How many pages. A one-page site for a mobile barber is a different job from twelve pages covering services, team, locations and case studies. With us, up to ten pages is standard, then £15 a page.
• Whether people book or pay on it. A contact form is a page. A live booking calendar, a payment flow or a client login is software, and it is priced as software. We wrote more on where that line sits in what a rebuild actually costs.
• Whether the words and photos exist. If you have decent copy, photos you like and a clear idea of what goes where, most of the work is done. Starting from a blank page means writing, which is time.
• Rebuild or from nothing. Rebuilding what you already have, properly this time, is quicker than deciding a new structure and a new brand from scratch. That is why our two prices differ.
• What happens after launch. Hosting, the certificate, backups, a person to email when something breaks. Some quotes include it. Some charge it monthly. Some never mention it, which is the one to watch.

The costs that never make the quote

A website quote is rarely the whole bill. These sit around it, and the cheaper the headline price, the more of them tend to turn up later.

• The domain. Yours, in your own name, renewed separately — usually around £10–15 a year. Never let a supplier register it under their account.
• Hosting and the SSL certificate. Either in the price for a period, or a yearly line on top. Ask which.
• Email. Business email on your domain is a separate service from the website. It should never need to move because your site does.
• Plugins and add-ons. On builder platforms this is where the money goes: a booking widget here, a review app there, each a small monthly charge. We added it up in the real cost of free website builders.
• Your own hours. The biggest hidden cost on a DIY build. Twenty hours is a conservative estimate for building a site yourself, before you learn the platform or write a word of copy.

What we charge

Since the point of this article is to give you numbers, here are ours, exactly as they appear on our pricing page.

• A rebuild of the site you already have: from £175. Hand-coded, mobile-first, first year’s hosting and SSL included, an enquiry form wired to your inbox, the search basics built in. You own the files.
• Built from nothing: £215. Same build, plus the words written, the brand worked out and the structure decided with you.
• Then from year two: Care at £99 a year (hosting, SSL, daily backups — £8.25 a month), Found at £39 a month if you want the search work done for you, or Growing at £79 a month for a new page every month.
• Live in under a week, depending on the build. And you don’t pay the balance until you love it. The build is invoiced the day it goes live, once you have seen it and signed it off.

Those numbers are low for the UK market, and it is fair to ask why. The answer is not that corners are cut. It is that we don’t run an office, we don’t run discovery workshops, and the build is the founder doing the work rather than a team passing it along. Booking systems, members’ areas, shops and apps are quoted separately, in writing, before anything starts.

How to compare two quotes properly

Price alone tells you very little. Put the two quotes side by side and ask the same five questions of each.

1. What exactly is included? Pages, forms, hosting, SSL, page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, analytics. Get it as a list.
2. Who owns the site and the domain when it is done? The answer should be you, with the files in your hands.
3. What happens after launch, and what does that cost? A site with nobody minding it fails quietly. A cheaper quote that goes silent after launch is a bill deferred.
4. How do I change a price or swap a photo? If the answer involves an invoice every time, that is part of the cost.
5. Can I see three sites you built that are live right now? Not mockups. Live, with a URL you can open.

If one quote answers all five clearly and the other needs a call to explain itself, you have learned something about how the next two years will go.

The cheapest way to decide

You don’t have to decide from a description. Send us your website, or just your Instagram, and we rebuild a few of your pages properly and send them back as a real link, free. No call, no card. Then the price is the one you have already read here, and you are judging something you can open on your phone rather than a quote in a PDF.