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.
DIY website builder
£10 - £30 / month (£0)
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy
Cheapest way to get something online, and fine for testing an idea. The costs are your evenings: you do the design, the copy, the SEO and the updates yourself, and the site tends to look like the template it came from. The monthly fee also never ends, so by year three a builder has often cost more than a built site.
Freelancer
£500 - £3,000 (typical one-off)
Local designer or developer
Can be great value if you find a good one. You get one person's skills, one person's availability and one person's blind spots, and when they move on to bigger contracts, maintenance and fixes can get hard to arrange. Ask who looks after the site in a year before you sign.
Small studio
£0 - £500+ build fee (fixed quote)
Northbytes and studios like us
Developer-built sites without agency overheads. You get proper engineering, design, technical SEO and accessibility as standard, a fixed quote before work starts, and a team that's still there when you need changes. On the simplest sites we charge no build fee at all: you host with us for the first year and the source code is yours after twelve months.
Full agency
£5,000 - £30,000+ (often day rates)
Established design agencies
The right choice for big brands that need strategy workshops, brand campaigns and a large team. For a small business the extra spend mostly buys process, not a better website: much of the fee funds account managers and meetings rather than the build itself.
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
Why does my business need a website?
What a website does that a Facebook page can't, when you honestly don't need one yet, and the sum to do before you spend anything.
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.
How much does it cost to build an app in the UK?
Cost by app type and feature, native versus cross-platform, the store fees and maintenance nobody quotes for, and six questions to ask any quote.
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