For a small UK business, a properly designed and built website from a small studio costs between £3,000 and £10,000 in 2026. A freelancer will typically charge £1,000 to £3,000, a DIY builder £0 to £500 plus a great deal of your own time, and a larger agency £10,000 upwards. The right figure depends less on page count than on how much of the thinking, writing and search work you want done for you.
What you get at each price band
Prices for websites are confusing because the word "website" covers everything from a Wix page knocked up on a Sunday to a six-month build with a team of eight. The bands below are what we see in the West Midlands market this year, and what each one usually includes.
| Route | Typical cost | What is usually included | Who it suits | |---|---|---|---| | DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) | £0–£500 in the first year, then £150–£400 a year | Template, hosting, your own time writing and arranging everything | A brand new business testing an idea, or a hobby that might become one | | Freelancer | £1,000–£3,000 | A template or theme customised to your brand, 5–8 pages, you usually supply the words | Sole traders and small trades who need something respectable, fast | | Small studio | £3,000–£10,000 | Custom design, proper development, copywriting help, technical SEO, structured data, performance and analytics set up | Established businesses that get most of their work from search and referrals | | Larger agency | £10,000–£50,000+ | Discovery workshops, strategy, custom platforms, integrations, ongoing account management | Multi-location firms, e-commerce, organisations with procurement processes |
None of these is wrong. A window cleaner in Wordsley does not need a £6,000 site. A solicitor's practice in Stourbridge town centre competing for conveyancing and probate work probably should not be on a £400 template.
Why is the range so wide?
The price difference is almost never about how many pages you get. It comes from how much work sits behind them.
Design. A template gives you a layout someone else designed for nobody in particular. Custom design starts with your customers, your competitors and what you need people to do on the page. That costs days of skilled work, not hours.
Words. Most site quotes silently assume you will write the content. Most business owners will not, or will do it six weeks late and in a hurry. Copywriting is where a good chunk of a studio's fee goes, and it is the part that decides whether the site ranks and converts.
Development. A page-builder site and a hand-built site can look identical on launch day. Under load, on a cheap Android phone on a bus, or three years later when a plugin update breaks everything, they behave very differently. Our web development work is priced on building things that stay fast and keep working.
Search. A site can be launched invisible to Google, or launched with the page structure, titles, internal links and structured data that let it rank. The second is cheaper to do at build time than to bolt on later.
Photography. Real photographs of your premises, team and work do more for trust than any design decision. A half-day with a local photographer is £300 to £600 and worth every penny of it.
What should be included in a quote?
If you are comparing two quotes and one is half the price, look for what is missing rather than what is cheaper. A complete quote for a small business site should state, in writing:
- The number and purpose of pages, not just "up to 10 pages"
- Who writes the content, and what happens if it is late
- Mobile design, not "mobile responsive" as an afterthought
- Performance targets. We commit to good Core Web Vitals scores on real mobile devices, and we test them before launch
- Technical SEO basics: page titles, meta descriptions, sitemap, redirects from old URLs, LocalBusiness schema
- Analytics and Search Console set-up, with phone and form tracking
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the code when it is finished
- What happens after launch: how bugs are handled, and for how long
The last point matters more than people expect. We have taken on more than one business whose previous developer disappeared with the login details.
What costs are not in the quote?
A website is not a one-off purchase, and the ongoing costs are where a cheap build often becomes an expensive one.
- Domain: £10–£30 a year for a .co.uk or .com.
- Hosting: £5–£50 a month depending on platform. Fast, well-configured hosting is not the place to save £8.
- Email: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, roughly £5–£12 per user per month.
- Maintenance: for WordPress sites, plugin and security updates need doing. Budget £30–£100 a month, or accept the risk. Hand-built sites need far less.
- Content: someone has to add the new project, the new service, the price change.
- SEO: if you want the site to be found for anything beyond your own name, expect an ongoing retainer. For a single-location business, £500 to £1,500 a month is typical. Below that, very little gets done. Above it, you are usually paying for a multi-location or national campaign.
A £2,000 site with £900 a month of SEO behind it will almost always outperform a £9,000 site with nothing behind it. The build is the start.
How long should it take?
For a small business site, four to ten weeks from the first conversation to launch is realistic. Faster than that and something is being skipped, usually the words. Slower is often the client's content arriving late rather than the studio dragging its feet.
| Stage | What happens | Typical time | |---|---|---| | Discovery | What the business does, who it is for, what competitors do, what needs to rank | 1 week | | Design | Structure, then visual design, then revisions | 1–3 weeks | | Content | Writing and photography, running in parallel with design | 2–4 weeks | | Build | Development, performance work, structured data | 2–3 weeks | | Launch | Testing, redirects, analytics, Search Console, go live | 1 week |
Search results take longer. Expect three to six months before new pages settle into their positions, and six to twelve before the compounding effect of reviews, content and links is obvious.
Is a cheap website actually cheap?
Imagine a dental practice in Hagley that spends £400 on a template site and skips the rest. It launches, it looks fine, and nothing happens. Two years on, it has cost £400 plus £360 a year in subscriptions, and it has produced perhaps a handful of new patients, all of whom already knew the practice.
Now imagine the same practice spends £6,000 on a site built around implants, Invisalign and emergency care, each with its own page, backed by structured data and a review routine. Say it brings in three new implant patients a month once it is ranking. At the prices a Hagley practice charges, the site has paid for itself before the first year is out.
Those numbers are illustrative. The pattern is not. We watched it happen with Your Local Mechanic, where a rebuild plus local SEO took monthly visits from Google from 73 to 366 within a year, with no advertising spend.
How to judge value rather than price
Price tells you what you will pay. Value tells you what you will get back. A few things that separate the two:
- Ask what it will do, not what it will look like. A designer who talks about enquiries, calls and rankings is thinking about your business. One who only talks about aesthetics is thinking about their portfolio.
- Look at their own site. Run it through PageSpeed Insights. If a web studio's own site scores poorly on mobile, it tells you what standard they work to.
- Check the work is still live. Sites that have been quietly replaced or abandoned tell their own story.
- Understand who owns what. You should own the domain, the hosting account and the finished site outright.
Our web design work sits in the small-studio band, and we are open about what that buys. If your current site is doing a job but not the whole job, it may be worth reading Should I redesign my business website? before spending anything.
Where to go next
If you are budgeting for a new site and want a straight answer on what it should cost for your kind of business, tell us what you do and what you need it to achieve. We will give you a number and explain it. Start a project, or look through recent work first to see what the money buys.