A small business website in the UK costs somewhere between about £80 a year and £5,000 up front. That spread looks unhelpful until you know why it exists: you are not choosing between three prices for the same thing, you are choosing between doing the work yourself, renting a site somebody else looks after, and commissioning one built around your business.
Here are the numbers for each route, mine included. Where a price is published I name the provider so you can check it instead of taking my word for it, and where it isn't I say so. Everything is before VAT unless stated.
The short answer
| Route | Up front | Ongoing |
|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself | £0 | £80 to £350 a year |
| Pay monthly | £0 | £900 a year (£75 a month) |
| Commissioned build | £2,000 and up | £270 a year and up |
What you are actually paying for
Four costs sit behind every website. A quote only means something once you know which of them it covers.
The domain. About £8 a year for a .co.uk, and near enough the same figure at every registrar. Worth registering in your own name and not your web designer's.
Hosting. Where the site lives. Budget shared hosting comes in under £100 a year. Managed WordPress hosting is the tier above and starts around £275 a year, which is Kinsta at $30 a month, the figure on my own hosting page.
The build. Design, copy, and putting it together. This is where quotes differ by thousands.
Keeping it running. Updates, backups, security, fixes, and the small changes you will inevitably want. Free if you do it yourself, a line item if you don't.
The first two barely move. The last two are the entire conversation.
The three routes, priced
01 Build it yourself
Cost: £80 to £350 a year, plus your time.
On WordPress you buy the parts separately, so where you land depends on the tier you pick. At the bottom, budget shared hosting plus a domain is under £100 a year. At the top, managed hosting from Kinsta at $30 a month with an Elementor Solo licence at $7 comes to about £340 a year, which is the comparison already sitting on my hosting page.
Do not read the gap between those two numbers as cheap versus good. A mid-range shared plan will run a small business site with modest traffic perfectly well, and plenty of professionals host client work on exactly that. The managed tier buys speed and headroom you may not need yet.
What neither tier includes is anybody doing the work. The updates, the plugin that breaks a layout, the licence that quietly lapsed, the backup you find out about the day you need it. That is the cost that appears on no invoice at all.
One practical note: shared hosts discount hard for longer commitments, often around 25% for two years paid up front. If the cash flow allows it, that is the easiest money to save on this whole list.
Squarespace and Wix bundle hosting and the editor into one subscription, and I am deliberately not printing a figure for them. Both price by country and Squarespace reorganised its plans in 2025, so the number in any blog post is probably wrong by now. Squarespace's plans are currently Basic, Core and Advanced; open their pricing page in your own browser and read the price it shows you.
Cheapest on paper. The cost that never appears on an invoice is the weekend you lose to the layout, and then the Tuesday evening a plugin update breaks the homepage two hours before you noticed.
Worth it if you genuinely enjoy the work, or the site is a placeholder while the business finds its shape.
02 Pay monthly
Cost: £900 a year. Nothing up front.
Somebody builds it, hosts it and maintains it for a flat monthly fee. Mine is £75 a month with no build fee and no setup cost, live within a week, and the site is yours after twelve months. You will see this model advertised anywhere from about £50 to £150 a month, and the number on its own tells you very little.
Two questions decide whether any of them is a good deal. What counts as an included change, and what happens if you leave. Because there was no build fee to cover the work, a pay monthly site usually comes down if you cancel early; mine works that way for the first year and then hands over. Ask both questions and get the answers in writing before you sign anything.
Worth it if cash flow matters more to you than owning the asset on day one, and you would rather send an email than learn a page builder.
03 A commissioned build
Cost: from £2,000, once. Then hosting and maintenance.
This is the route where the price moves most, because it is quoted on scope rather than picked off a plan. My own builds start from £2,000 with a fixed price agreed before any work begins.
For everyone else I can only tell you what I see, because freelancers and agencies do not publish rate cards the way hosting companies publish prices. A freelancer will usually land somewhere between £1,500 and £5,000 for a small business site. An agency with a team and an account manager behind it starts higher and has no particular ceiling.
Paying more does not reliably buy a better website. It buys more people, more process, and more meetings, which is worth having on a complicated project and is dead weight on a five page site for a builder in Derby.
Worth it if the site has to do a specific job a template won't do, or you want to own it outright from the start.
What makes a quote go up
How many pages you need, before anything else. People expect that to be the main factor and they are right about it. A five page site and a fifteen page site are different amounts of design, copy and building, and on most quotes that is the biggest single line.
Then, in rough order:
- Taking payments or bookings. A checkout or a booking calendar is a system, not a page, and it has to be tested against the ways people get it wrong.
- Content you don't have yet. If copy and photography are on my list rather than yours, that is real days. It is also the single most common reason a project stalls.
- Integrations. A CRM, a booking platform, a stock feed, an accounting tool. Each one is a thing that can break later, so each one gets priced properly.
- Bespoke design versus a proven layout. Starting from a structure I know converts is faster than starting from a blank canvas, and for most small businesses it performs just as well.
- Approval by committee. Three people with opinions and no decision-maker costs more than the design does.
The costs that arrive later
VAT. Ask whether the number you have been given includes it. A £2,000 quote and a £2,400 invoice is a bad surprise.
Licences. Premium themes and plugins renew annually. They are cheap individually and easy to forget, until one lapses and stops updating.
Content changes. Most maintenance plans cover updates, backups and fixes, not new pages. Mine costs £270 a year and says so plainly: design work and new features are quoted separately. Check where that line sits on any plan you are offered, because "maintenance included" means different things to different people.
The rebuild. A site built cheaply on a page builder nobody documented is often quicker to replace than to fix. That is a cost you pay in year three for a decision made in year one.
Questions people ask
What is the cheapest way to get a small business website?
Build it yourself. On WordPress that is about £80 a year for shared hosting and a .co.uk domain, and a site builder subscription is in the same territory. It is the cheapest in money and by far the most expensive in your time, which is the trade worth being honest with yourself about before you start.
How much should a website cost per month?
Between about £6 and £150 depending on what the fee covers. At the bottom you are paying for shared hosting and doing everything else yourself. At the top somebody else is building, hosting and maintaining the site, and the monthly fee is standing in for a build cost you never paid.
Do I own my website if I pay monthly?
Not always, and this is the question to ask first. Because there is no upfront build fee, most pay monthly arrangements keep the site with the provider while you are paying. Mine hands over after twelve months if you want to take it elsewhere. Get whatever you are told in writing.
Why does an agency charge five times more than a freelancer?
Because you are paying for a team: a designer, a developer, a project manager, and the overhead of the office they sit in. On a large or complicated build that structure earns its money. On a five page site for a local business it mostly adds cost and handovers.
How long does a small business website take to build?
A pay monthly site can be live within a week, because it starts from a layout that already works. A commissioned build is more often four to eight weeks, and the part that decides which end of that range you land on is almost always how quickly the content arrives.
Is a cheap website worth it?
A cheap website that loads fast, says clearly what you do, and has one obvious next step will beat an expensive one that doesn't. The price is not the problem. Spending £4,000 on something nobody can find, and then having no budget left to drive traffic to it, is the problem.