How much does a website cost in the UK?
Nobody publishes real numbers for this, which is why every answer you find online is a range so wide it is useless. Here is what UK website pricing actually looks like in 2026, and more importantly what changes the number.
The short answer
For a small business brochure site in the UK, expect £800 to £2,000. For a site with custom functionality — booking, member accounts, integrations with software you already run — expect £2,000 to £10,000. Above that you are into web application territory, which is a different kind of project priced on scope rather than page count.
What actually drives the price
Page count matters far less than people expect. These are the things that genuinely move a quote:
- Custom functionality — booking systems, calculators, member areas, payment flows. This is the single biggest factor.
- Integrations. Connecting to your accounting software, CRM or supplier feeds means handling someone else's API and its failure modes.
- Content. If you need copywriting and photography rather than supplying your own, that is real work and it gets billed.
- Design originality. Adapting a proven layout is quicker than designing something genuinely bespoke from a blank page.
- Whether you need to edit it yourself. A CMS adds build time, because someone has to make the editing experience sane.
The DIY builders
Wix, Squarespace and similar cost roughly £150 to £300 a year. For a very simple site they are genuinely fine, and any developer telling you otherwise is protecting their invoice. The honest trade-offs are these: you are limited in technical SEO control, page speed is generally worse than a hand-built site, and you hit a ceiling on what is possible. If your website is essentially a business card, those trade-offs cost you nothing. If you are competing for search traffic in a contested market, they start to cost more than the build would have.
WordPress
A WordPress site from an agency typically runs £1,000 to £5,000. The critical detail is how it is built. A lean custom theme is fast and maintainable. A bought theme running Elementor or Divi with thirty plugins is slow, and no amount of caching fully fixes that. Both get sold as 'a WordPress website' at similar prices, so ask which one you are getting.
Ongoing costs
The build price is not the whole picture. Budget for these regardless of who builds it:
- Domain: £10 to £20 a year
- Hosting: £60 to £300 a year for a small business site
- SSL: usually free and included
- Maintenance and updates: £0 if you handle it, £200 to £1,000 a year if someone else does
Where people waste money
Three patterns come up repeatedly. Paying for pages nobody reads — a fifteen-page site where four pages get all the traffic. Paying monthly forever for a site you do not own, so you cannot leave without rebuilding. And paying for a redesign when the actual problem is that nobody can find the site, which is a marketing problem no redesign will fix.
What to ask before signing
- Do I own the code and the domain outright?
- What happens if I want to move to another developer?
- Is the quote fixed, or an estimate that can move?
- What is included after launch, and for how long?
- Is it built on a page builder, or hand-coded?
The answers tell you more about who you are dealing with than the number does.