/ Craig Burgess
Most business websites we build cost £8,000 to £12,000. Here's where that number comes from, what the cheaper options get you, and why cheap usually ends up costing more.
Most of the websites we build cost between £8,000 and £12,000. The smallest start at £5,000. The big ones, with a shop or a booking system or a customer portal bolted on, go past £12,000 and keep going.
There you go. No discovery call needed. (Our prices have been on our pricing page for a while now and I’m not taking them down. That’s a rant for another day.)
That’s what we charge, mind. Ask ten agencies and you’ll get ten numbers, and a couple of them will be daft. So here’s how I’d think about it, after building over 400 websites since 2010 and seeing what people paid for the ones they came to us to replace.
What does a website cost at each budget?
These are rough bands, based on what lands on my desk:
| Budget | What you usually get |
|---|---|
| Under £500 | A DIY website builder, a mate’s nephew, or someone on a freelance marketplace. Fine for a hobby. |
| £500 to £3,000 | Usually a £50 theme with your logo stuck on it, on cheap hosting. This is the danger zone. |
| £5,000 to £6,000 | About the minimum for a properly designed, custom business website. |
| £8,000 to £12,000 | Where most established businesses end up. More pages, custom design, built to bring in enquiries. |
| £12,000+ | Ecommerce, integrations, booking, member areas, custom systems. |
They’re my bands. There’s no industry standard and nobody regulates any of this, which is half the problem.
Why is £3,000 the danger zone?
Three grand is a lot of money. It’s also just about enough for somebody to take it off you without doing very much.
I see the same thing over and over at that price. Somebody buys a £50 WordPress theme, swaps the logo and the colours, sticks it on the cheapest hosting they can find and sends you an invoice. Nobody updates it after that. Six months later it’s slow, the contact form’s stopped working, and you’re looking for another website.
So you end up paying £3,000 twice, when you could’ve paid £6,000 once.
Don’t get me wrong, there are good freelancers out there who charge less than us and do a decent job. But if somebody quotes you £3,000 for a “fully custom” website, ask how many hours that buys and what they’re paying themselves an hour. The maths rarely works.
What about £500? Or AI for £50?
“Sorry, our budget for a website is only £500.”
Fair enough. It won’t buy the website you’re picturing though. That’s Ferrari expectations on a £500 budget.
AI is the new version of the same conversation. Yes, you can ask ChatGPT or Claude to build you a website and it’ll do it. I built one in about 20 minutes with Claude to see what the fuss was about. The website was never the hard bit.
What it won’t give you is someone who knows why your contact form has stopped sending, why your cookie banner is breaking your Google Ads tracking, or what to do when script kiddies hack the thing and start emailing your dad 50 times a day about viagra.
If £500 is genuinely all there is, my advice is to save up. Put that £500 away every month until you’ve got about £6,000. It feels slow, but it still beats paying for the same website twice.
What actually changes the price?
Some people do pick a number out of the air. For us it comes down to this lot:
- How many pages you need. Five pages sits at the bottom. Every extra service page, location page or landing page is more to design, build and test.
- Custom features. Booking systems, quote calculators, login areas, dashboards.
- Selling online. A handful of products is simple enough. A big catalogue with variants, discount codes and shipping rules is a proper job.
- Connecting it to your other software. Your CRM, email marketing, payments, accounts.
- Words and photos. If you’ve got them ready, great. If we’re writing the copy or getting a photographer in, that’s extra, and it’s usually the bit that makes the biggest difference.
- Moving old content across. Ten pages is quick. Four hundred old blog posts is a job in itself.
It’s the same list that’s on our pricing page, because that’s what moves the number.
What does a website cost to run each year?
The build is only part of it. A website needs hosting, security, backups and somebody keeping WordPress and the plugins updated, otherwise it goes off like milk.
Ours is looked after by our sister company, Better Hosting, from £150 a month plus VAT. You can find bare hosting for a lot less. Just know that hosting and somebody looking after your website are two different things, and the cheap deals are usually only the first one.
Then there’s getting people to it. A website nobody visits is a very expensive business card, so set some money aside for Google Ads, content, email, whatever suits your business. Launch day is where the work starts.
Does spending more get you a better website?
Not automatically. I’ve seen businesses spend tens of thousands and end up with a turd. It looked lovely, it took forever to load, and nobody could tell what the company actually did.
More money buys more time and more skill. Whether you get a website that brings in work depends on whether the people building it care about that.
Wolf Laundry are a good example of what happens when they do. They were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads back, because their website took ten seconds to load and over half the people clicking the ads never saw it. We rebuilt it. It loads in about a second now. They had 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks of launch, and it’s 150 to 200 a month now.
That’s the question worth asking about any quote you get. What’s it going to bring back?
So what should you budget?
For an established UK business that wants its website to bring in work, I’d budget £8,000 to £12,000 for the build, plus a monthly amount for looking after it and sending people to it. If that’s too much right now, £5,000 to £6,000 gets you something properly built that you can add to later.
Under £3,000, be very careful who you hand your money to.
And if an agency won’t give you even a rough number until you’ve sat through an hour on Zoom, I’d be asking why.