What each price band buys you
A quote means little until you know the work behind it. Here is what each band buys, based on what UK agencies and freelancers deliver at each level.
Starter or brochure site: £800 to £2,500
Five to eight pages: home, about, contact, and a page for each core service. At £800 you get a proven template with your logo, colours, and photos applied, a contact form, and titles and descriptions set for search. Near £2,500 the homepage and service pages move to custom layouts and the copy gets written for you. This band fits trades, consultants, and firms that win work through referrals and need a site that confirms a decision the buyer has made.
Small business site: £1,500 to £5,000
Eight to fifteen pages with custom design throughout. The budget covers keyword research that shapes the page list, copy written for each page, enquiry tracking wired in from launch, and speed work that holds loads under two seconds. Booking calendars, quote forms, and service-area pages for local search push a project toward the top of the band. Spend here when the site has a weekly job to do: a plumber who needs ten enquiries a week sits in this band, and so does a solicitor who needs three.
Ecommerce store: £3,000 to £15,000
£3,000 buys a lean store on Shopify or WooCommerce: a theme customised to your brand, up to 50 products loaded, payment and delivery rules configured, and VAT handled at checkout. Between £6,000 and £10,000 you add custom product page design, filtered search, abandoned-basket emails, and migration from an older platform with rankings intact. The top of the band covers hundreds of products, subscriptions, trade pricing, and stock feeds from a warehouse system. Product count drives cost more than any other factor, so trim the catalogue before you brief.
Custom build or web app: £10,000 to £50,000+
This band covers software: client portals, booking engines, dashboards, and marketplaces. Price scales with screens, user roles, and the systems the app must talk to. A portal with two user types and ten screens lands near £15,000. Add payments, an admin back end, and integrations with your existing tools, and £50,000 arrives fast. Scope these builds in phases and ship the core first; the second phase gets sharper once real users touch the first.
What moves the price up
Five factors explain most of the gap between an £800 quote and a £15,000 one for what sounds like the same site.
Pages and content volume. Each page needs design, copy, and build time. Moving from 8 pages to 25 adds £1,500 to £4,000, and most of that pays for the writing and layout.
Ecommerce complexity. Fifty products on a standard template cost little to set up. Five hundred products with size and colour variants, subscription options, or multi-currency checkout add £2,000 to £6,000 in configuration and testing.
Custom design. A template saves £1,000 to £3,000 up front. Custom design earns that back in markets where three competitors run the same theme and buyers spot the repeat. Ask any agency which template they would use for you; the answer tells you what you are paying for.
Integrations.Each system the site connects to adds £300 to £1,500: a CRM, a booking platform, a stock feed, an accounting package. The price depends on the quality of the other system’s API, which is why two integrations can differ by a factor of five.
Copywriting. Agencies charge £75 to £150 per page for copy that sells and ranks. Write it yourself and you save the fee; budget two to four hours per page of your own time, and expect the agency to edit for search terms.
What it cost our clients
Published bands only go so far, so here is one of our own numbers. One of our clients came to us for a site at the lower end of the bands above. In its first year that site returned 19 times what it cost to build.
The figure reframes the question this guide answers. A site that returns 19 times its cost is cheaper than a free site that returns nothing, because the cost that matters is the gap between what you spend and what comes back. Two quotes £2,000 apart look far apart on paper and mean little next to one missed customer a month.
That is why we scope to a target before we price. Each build starts with the number the site must move: enquiries a week, bookings a month, revenue a quarter. The quote covers the work that moves the number and leaves out the work that decorates. When you compare agencies, ask each one what their last three sites earned for the clients who paid for them. Agencies that measure can hand you figures within the hour.
The ongoing costs to budget for
The build price gets the attention and the running costs get the surprise. Budget for five lines from day one.
- Hosting: £10 to £50 a month. Shared hosting sits at the bottom and suits low-traffic brochure sites. Managed hosting with backups, staging, and support sits at the top. Slow hosting wastes an expensive build, so treat £20 a month as the floor for a business site.
- Domain: £10 to £25 a year for a .co.uk or .com renewal.
- SSL certificate: £0.Let’s Encrypt issues them free and any competent host installs them. A host charging £50 a year for SSL is charging for a free product.
- Maintenance: £50 to £200 a month for software updates, security patches, backups, and small content changes. WordPress sites need this most; an out-of-date plugin is the most common route into a hacked small business site.
- Licence fees: £50 to £300 a year for premium plugins and themes. Shopify replaces hosting with plans from £25 to £344 a month, so compare platform fees against hosting plus maintenance when you choose a stack.
Add it up and a small business site costs £800 to £3,000 a year to keep running. Ask for these figures in writing beside the build quote; we itemise them on ours, and any agency confident in its numbers can do the same.
Cheap website vs agency build: where each fits
Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify’s starter tier charge £10 to £30 a month and give you a live site in a weekend. That price fits a real set of businesses: a new venture testing whether an idea has customers, a photographer whose Instagram does the selling, a community club that needs opening times online. If the site’s job is to exist and look tidy, a builder does the job at the right price, and paying an agency £3,000 for it wastes £2,900.
An agency build earns its fee when the site has a revenue job. That work starts before design: keyword research to find what buyers search for, a page for each search worth winning, copy written to convert, load times under two seconds, and tracking that shows which pages produce enquiries. A builder can host pages like that, but someone has to do the research, writing, and measurement, and the £15 monthly fee includes none of it.
The test we give callers: put a value on one new customer. Worth £50? A builder plus your own evenings is a fair trade. Worth £2,000? A £3,000 build breaks even at two customers, and each one after that is margin. Run that sum before you read another pricing page.
How to get an accurate quote
A vague brief gets a padded quote, because the agency prices the uncertainty into the number. Bring five things and the number tightens:
- The job, as a number. “Ten enquiries a week” scopes a build. “A new website” scopes a guess.
- A page list, even a rough one. Fifteen minutes with a pen saves an hour of discovery calls.
- Two or three sites you rate, with a line on what earns the rating.
- What you own: logo files, photos, existing copy, brand colours.
- Your budget range and deadline. Agencies scope to both, and a hidden budget costs you a round of revised proposals.
Send those five through our contact page and we return a fixed quote within two working days. The quote lists each page, feature, and revision round, itemises the running costs beside the build price, and holds through the project. If the number moves, the scope moved first, and you signed off the change.