How much does a small business website actually cost in the UK?
Short answer: anywhere from £10 a month to £30,000, depending on who builds it and what it does. That range is useless on its own, so here's the honest breakdown - what each option really costs, what drives the price up, and what a small business should sensibly expect to pay in 2026.
By Lucas Reddington, full-stack developer and AI engineer, Northbytes. Last updated .
Your four realistic options
Almost every small-business website in the UK gets built one of four ways. Each one is the right choice for somebody; the expensive mistake is picking the wrong one for you. There is a longer version of this comparison if you are still deciding which route to take at all.
DIY website builder
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy
£10 - £30 / month (£0)
Freelancer
Local designer or developer
£500 - £3,000 (typical one-off)
Small studio
Northbytes and studios like us
£0 - £500+ build fee (fixed quote)
Full agency
Established design agencies
£5,000 - £30,000+ (often day rates)
What we charge, specifically
Since this guide will be read next to our own services, here are our numbers rather than a coy "contact us for pricing". Every project gets a fixed, plain-English quote before we start; these are the starting points, current at the date on this page.
from £0
Simple website
Landing or brochure site with a contact form: no build fee. Host with us for the first year (£45 a month) and the source code is yours after twelve months.
from £500
Site with database or backend
Shops, bookings, customer accounts, or anything with custom API work behind it.
from £1,500
Web app or platform
SaaS products and full platforms - websites that are really software.
Why those prices are lower than typical agency quotes: our developers use state-of-the-art AI tools for the mechanical parts of the work and their own judgement for everything that matters, so you're not billed for the slow parts. Every line still gets reviewed and owned by a real engineer.
The five-year sum nobody does
Upfront price is the wrong comparison, because two of these four options never stop charging. Here is the same small business site costed over five years, with the assumptions written down so you can argue with them.
| Route | Upfront | Per year | Five years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builder at £20 a month | £0 | £240 | £1,200 |
| Freelancer, then ad-hoc fixes | £1,500 | £300 | £3,000 |
| Our simple site, hosted with us | £0 | £540 | £2,700 |
| Agency build, then a care plan | £8,000 | £1,200 | £14,000 |
Assumptions: a brochure site of under ten pages, no shop, no logins, content supplied by you, domain excluded at roughly £15 a year on every row. The builder row assumes you do the work yourself, so the real figure includes your evenings. The freelancer row assumes a modest annual spend on fixes, which is optimistic if they move on. Our row is the no-build-fee offer at £45 a month, and the source code becomes yours after twelve months, so years two to five are a choice instead of a lock-in. Figures current at the date on this page.
What actually drives the price
Two quotes for "a website" can differ by thousands of pounds because the word covers everything from a digital business card to a piece of software. These are the factors that move the number, whoever you hire.
Number of pages and templates
A five-page site costs less than a fifty-page one, but not ten times less: most of the work is in the design system, and extra pages reuse it.
E-commerce and payments
Product pages, baskets, checkout and Stripe integration are real engineering. Shops start meaningfully above brochure-site prices.
Bookings, accounts and portals
Anything where customers log in, book or manage their own data turns a website into software, which is why these land nearer platform pricing.
Content and copywriting
If you have your text and photos ready, you save money. If you need copy written and images sourced, that's extra work someone has to do.
Integrations
Connecting your site to a CRM, accounting tool, mailing list or calendar adds cost per integration, and usually pays for itself in saved admin.
Ongoing hosting and upkeep
Every option has a running cost: builder subscriptions, a freelancer's ad-hoc invoices, or a studio's monthly hosting and maintenance fee. Ask what happens after launch, whoever you choose.
Rough it out in thirty seconds
Answer four questions and see a range, plus which answers moved it. It is a planning aid built from our published prices, not a quote - the real number is fixed and agreed before anything starts.
Likely range for this shape of project
£500 – £800
Then £45 a month: hosting and maintenance, £90 if it runs a database.
What moved the number
Nothing yet - this is our published starting point. Simple brochure sites carry no build fee at all - this starts at the £500 figure for anything with a database or custom backend.
Assumes a UK-based team, no regulated-sector requirements, and that you own the result. The spread is real: the same brief lands differently once we have seen the actual data and the actual systems. Anything genuinely unusual we would rather scope properly than guess at.
Get the fixed numberCommon questions
Is a £15-a-month builder good enough to start with?
Sometimes, honestly, yes. If you're testing whether a business idea has legs and you have more evenings than money, a builder gets you online this weekend. The time to upgrade is when the site needs to win customers rather than just exist: that's when speed, search visibility and a design that doesn't look like a template start paying for themselves.
Why do agency quotes vary so wildly?
Because you're quoted for the team, not just the site. A £15,000 agency website and a £2,000 studio website can be built on the same technology to the same standard; the difference is account managers, strategy days and office overheads baked into the price. Ask any quote to be broken down into build work versus everything else, and the comparison gets much clearer.
What ongoing costs should I budget for?
A domain runs £10 to £30 a year. Hosting for a small business site is typically £10 to £50 a month depending on what the site does, and maintenance - updates, backups, security patches, small fixes - is either your time or a modest monthly fee. For comparison, our own hosting and maintenance is a flat £45 a month, or £90 if your site runs a database, with fixes included. Be suspicious of anyone who quotes a build price and goes quiet about what happens after launch.
Sources
Figures quoted from outside Northbytes come from these sources, checked on 26 July 2026. Our own prices are our published rates.
Read next
Website builder, freelancer, studio or agency?
What Wix, a freelancer, a studio and an agency really cost, who each one suits, and how to compare quotes fairly.
Website design packages
Our packages with real prices: a £0 build fee brochure site, database sites from £500, web apps from £1,500, and what each one does not cover.
How much does website maintenance cost?
Why hosting and maintenance are not the same product, the four price bands, six exclusions to read for, and our £45 plan itemised.
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