Website quotes for the same brief routinely vary by a factor of ten, and buyers are rarely told why. Here are honest UK price bands for 2026 and, more usefully, an explanation of what actually moves a quote.
The bands
£1,500 to £4,000 — template-based brochure site
Five to ten pages on an existing theme, lightly customised to your colours and logo. Content supplied by you.
Appropriate for a new business establishing a presence, or a trade business where the site is a credibility check before somebody phones. Genuinely fine for that purpose and there is no shame in it.
What you are not getting: original design, content help, performance work beyond the theme's defaults or anything bespoke.
£4,000 to £12,000 — bespoke design and build
Design work specific to your business, a proper content structure, a content management system you can actually use, performance and accessibility done deliberately and usually some help with the writing.
This is where most established UK small businesses should be. The site is a working part of how you win business rather than a brochure.
£12,000 upwards — e-commerce, integrations, applications
Online sales, customer accounts, booking systems, connections to your other business systems. The cost is driven by functionality rather than by page count, and the range is wide because the requirements are.
What actually drives the cost
Not the number of pages, which is what most people assume and what most quotes are structured around.
Content
The single largest hidden variable. Writing good copy for fifteen pages is a genuine piece of work — days of it, done properly. A quote that includes content is worth substantially more than one that does not, and projects that stall almost always stall here rather than in the build.
If you are supplying content, be honest about whether you will. The commonest cause of a website taking nine months is a business that promised copy in a fortnight.
Design, and how much of it is original
Template with colour changes, template with a custom layout or designed from your brand upwards. Each step is meaningfully more work and meaningfully more distinctive.
Functionality
Contact forms are trivial. Booking systems, customer portals, quote calculators, payment handling and connections to your CRM are not. Each one is a small application.
Integration
A site that pushes enquiries into your CRM, pulls stock from your inventory system or syncs with your booking platform costs more than one that emails a form. It is usually worth it, because the alternative is somebody retyping.
Page count is the worst possible basis for pricing a website and it is the basis most quotes use, because it is the only thing both parties can count.
What cheap builds leave out
Not always, and reliably enough to check:
- Performance. Heavy themes with a dozen plugins load slowly, and speed affects both search ranking and whether people wait.
- Accessibility. A legal consideration for many organisations and a commercial one for everybody, since an inaccessible site excludes customers.
- SEO structure. Not keyword stuffing — proper heading structure, metadata, structured data, a sensible URL scheme, an XML sitemap. Retrofitting this is more expensive than doing it during the build.
- Content management you can use. Some cheap builds are effectively locked, so every change is a paid request.
- Training. An hour showing you how to update your own site pays for itself within months.
- Ownership. Check that you own the domain, the hosting account and the code. This matters enormously and is rarely discussed until somebody wants to leave.
The ongoing costs
Frequently omitted from the comparison entirely.
- Hosting — £10 to £50 a month for a small business site. The considerations are in web hosting for UK businesses.
- Domain — around £12 a year. Register it in your own name.
- SSL certificate — usually included now.
- Maintenance — updates, backups, security monitoring, small changes. £30 to £120 a month depending on the platform.
Skipping maintenance is how a site gets compromised. Content management systems need updating and an unpatched one is found by automated scanning within weeks.
How to compare quotes properly
Ask every provider the same five questions and compare the answers rather than the totals:
- Is content writing included, and for how many pages?
- Who owns the domain, hosting and code at the end?
- Can we edit every page ourselves, or only some?
- What are the ongoing costs, itemised?
- What happens if we want to move to another provider?
Question two catches more problems than the other four combined.
What a website should return
Be specific about this before spending anything. A site that generates two additional enquiries a month, at whatever your average job is worth, tells you exactly what the budget should be.
If you cannot articulate what the site is for beyond having one, that is worth resolving first — and it usually means the answer is a smaller build than you were about to commission.
Our bespoke websites team quotes against what a site needs to achieve rather than against a page count, and we will tell you when a smaller build is the right answer. Get in touch for an honest scope.
