A small business website in the UK usually costs £500–2,500 to build, plus £30–100 a month to keep running, or £20–50 a month on a pay-monthly plan that includes the build. A DIY builder is £12–36 a month and your own time.
Ask five people what a small business website costs and you will get five numbers, all of them honest. They are not disagreeing about the price. They are describing five different things that happen to share a name.
Four ways to buy a website
There are four common routes for a small business in the UK, and the price difference between them is mostly a difference in who does the work.
A DIY builder such as Wix or Squarespace sells you the software: templates, an editor, hosting and a certificate. You do the rest. This is the only route with every price published, so it is the one with exact figures below.
A freelancer builds the site for you, usually for a one-off fee, and may offer hosting and changes afterwards on a separate arrangement. The price lists UK freelancers publish put a small business site at around £500–2,500, and a care plan covering hosting, updates and small changes at £30–100 a month. Experience, location and scope move it either way, and we have found no survey of UK freelance pricing that we would trust enough to quote, so read it as the range of what is asked rather than a measure of what is fair.
An agency does the same with more people: a designer, a developer, sometimes a copywriter and a project manager. More people means more coordination and a higher fee, and for a five-page site for a local business it is often more process than the job needs. Agencies rarely publish a price list, but the guides they write about their own pricing put a small business site at about £2,500–10,000, with London at the top of that.
A pay-monthly studio builds the site and looks after it for a fixed monthly fee, often with little or nothing to pay at the start. The trade is usually a minimum term, or terms about who owns the site and the domain until a certain point. Read those terms before comparing the monthly figure with anything else.
| DIY BUILDERWix, Squarespace | FREELANCEROne person | AGENCYA team | PAY-MONTHLYA studio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | You do | They build, you may maintain | They build, you may maintain | They build and maintain |
| Up front | Nothing beyond the plan | £500–2,500, often in stages | £2,500–10,000, in stages | Little or nothing, depending on the studio |
| Every month | £12–36 on Squarespace's Basic to Plus | £30–100 for a care plan, if agreed | A retainer, if agreed | £20–50, covering both |
| Over two years | £360–1,000, plus your time | £1,320–5,200 | From about £3,300 | £480–1,200 |
| What to check | Which extras you will need to add | Who looks after it after launch | What is in the retainer | The minimum term and who owns what |
What the builders charge
These were checked in October 2026, and they will change. Check them on the day you decide rather than trusting a figure in an article, this one included.
Squarespace publishes sterling prices on its pricing page. Basic is £16 a month on monthly billing or £12 a month paid annually; Core is £24 or £17; Plus is £36 or £29; Advanced is £89 or £79. Annual plans include a domain for the first year, after which it renews at Squarespace’s standard rate.
Wix shows prices according to where it thinks you are, and from where we checked in October its plans page would not show sterling. The figures we checked in August, in Wix or a studio, were £11.50 to £19 a month on monthly billing for the plans that build a small business site, from £9 a month paid annually. Wix’s yearly plans include a voucher for a free domain for one year, valid only for a new domain bought from Wix.
Both are fair prices for what they are. What they are is software. The hours you spend writing the pages, choosing photos, and fixing the form when it stops sending are not in the figure, and they are the larger cost for most owners.
How much does a website cost per month?
Between £12 and £100 a month for a small business site in the UK, depending on who does the work and whether the build is paid for separately. Per month, it usually comes to one of these:
- A builder plan, £12–36, on Squarespace’s Basic to Plus, depending on billing. Domain renewal after year one and email at your domain are on top.
- A care plan from a freelancer or agency, £30–100, after a build fee. What these cover varies more than the price does. Ask for a list of what the fee covers, and what a change costs when it is not one of them.
- A pay-monthly fee that includes the build, usually £20–50. Higher than hosting on its own, because it is paying for the build as well, and almost always with a minimum term or an ownership clause attached. Ours is below.
A monthly figure on its own tells you very little. Ask what it includes (changes, backups, someone fixing the form), how long you are committed for, and what you have if you leave. Then multiply it by 24 and put it next to the other quotes.
The costs people forget
Whichever route you take, a site has running costs. Some are included in one supplier’s fee and billed separately by another, which is why two quotes that look far apart can come out close over three years, and the reverse.
The domain. Your address, renewed every year. Often free for the first year on a builder and then charged at the normal rate. Ask who it is registered to, because the person named on the registration is the person who controls it. .com or .co.uk, and who owns your domain covers that in more detail.
Hosting. The server that sends the pages. Included in every builder plan and in most pay-monthly fees; a separate line from many freelancers. For a small site it is not a large cost, and a quote where it is large deserves a question.
The certificate. The padlock in the browser, also called SSL. Certificates are available free from Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit certificate authority, and most hosts and builders install one at no charge. A quote that bills for one separately is charging for something widely given away.
Email at your own domain. Usually a separate subscription, paid per person per month to Google or Microsoft, and rarely included in a website price. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 compares the two.
Maintenance. Updates, backups, monitoring, and somebody noticing when something breaks. On a builder this is partly done for you and partly yours. On a self-hosted site, WordPress being the common one, it is real work that somebody has to be paid to do or remember to do.
A privacy notice. If the site has a contact form, it needs one; does a small business website need a privacy policy says what goes in it.
Changes. New prices, a new service, a new photo, a staff member leaving. A site that cannot be changed goes out of date within the year. Ask whether changes are included, how many, and what one costs if they are not.
VAT. A supplier registered for VAT adds 20% at the standard rate. Registration is compulsory once turnover goes over £90,000 a year, so plenty of freelancers and small studios are below it and do not charge it. If you are not VAT-registered yourself, you cannot reclaim it, so compare prices including VAT.
What makes one site cost more than another
The number of pages matters less than people expect. These matter more.
- Who writes the words. Most quotes assume you supply them. Writing five pages well is days of work, and it is the work most often left off.
- Photography. Your own photos of real work beat stock every time, and somebody has to take them.
- Moving an existing site. If your current pages have been found on Google for years, their addresses need redirecting to the new ones. Done properly it takes time; skipped, it costs you the search traffic you already had.
- Things the site has to do. Bookings, payments, a shop, a members’ area. Each is a build of its own, and often a monthly fee to a third party.
- Design from scratch rather than a template. Worth it for some businesses and not for others. Ask which you are getting.
- What happens after launch. The largest single difference between quotes is usually whether looking after the site is in them at all.
How to read a website quote goes through the line items you will see, and which ones are padding. What you are actually buying explains why the build and the looking after are two purchases even when they arrive as one price.
What is a reasonable price to pay for a website?
For a five-page site for a local business, built by someone else and looked after properly, a reasonable two-year total is somewhere between £500 and £5,000. Where in that range depends far more on what is included than on who is asking. A cheap build with nothing after launch and a mid-priced one with hosting, changes and the domain included can cost the same over two years.
A price is reasonable when you can see what it buys. A £400 site with nobody to fix it in month seven is not cheaper than a £1,500 one that somebody looks after; it moves the cost to later. A £10,000 quote for five pages for a local trade is usually paying for process the job does not need. Below about £500 for a build, ask who writes the words and who looks after the site afterwards, because one of them is usually you.
How to compare
Put every option on the same footing before choosing.
- Add up three years, not one. A low build fee with a high retainer and a high build fee with nothing after are different shapes of cost, and only a total compares them.
- Write down what is not included. Domain renewal, email, changes, third-party apps. Add them to the total.
- Price your own time. If you are doing the work on a builder, count the hours at what an hour of your time is worth to the business.
- Read the exit terms. What you keep if you leave in month six, and what you keep if you leave in year three. Some arrangements never hand the site over.
- Ignore any promise about Google rankings. Nobody can sell you a position. What a supplier can commit to is the work, and evidence that it was done, as monthly SEO packages: what you should get explains.
What we charge, and what it costs us
We are a pay-monthly studio, so we are one of the four columns above rather than a neutral observer. Here are our own numbers, including the ones that changed.
Today: £29, £45 or £65 a month, and nothing up front. Essential is £29 for up to five pages, written for you, hosted, backed up and with three changes a month. Complete is £45 and adds bookings, payments and a blog. Portal is £65 and adds customer accounts and a staff area. We are not VAT-registered, so there is no VAT to add. The site, and the domain if we registered it, are ours until the twenty-fourth payment and yours from then. You can cancel in any month and owe nothing; what you give up by leaving early is the site and the address.
Until 21 August 2026 we also charged a build fee: £199, £499 or £999 on top of £25, £45 or £65 a month. That day we dropped the fee, kept the monthlies, and put the twenty-four month ownership term in its place, which is how most pay-monthly studios work. On 23 October 2026 Essential went from £25 to £29 a month. Over two years, that puts Essential at £696 against £799 before, Complete at £1,080 against £1,579, and Portal at £1,560 against £2,559. If a studio you are comparing still charges a build fee, add it to twenty-four of its monthly payments and set that total against ours.
Hosting is the smallest part of the price. Our sites are static pages served from Cloudflare, which does not charge per visit for serving static files, and we register domains through Cloudflare’s registrar, which sells them at cost. Almost all of what a monthly fee pays for, ours or anyone’s, is a person’s time: writing the pages, making the changes, checking that the form still sends. A quote where hosting is a large line deserves a question.
What it looked like for a real client. NTB Damp Proofing, a damp proofing and plastering firm in Heswall that has been trading for 38 years, paid on 7 September 2026. We registered ntbdampproofing.com through Cloudflare the same day, and the site was live the next. It started as four pages: home, their work, advice and contact. On 15 October we added six service pages, one each for rising damp, penetrating damp, condensation and mould, plastering, basement tanking and woodworm, because those are what people search for. That was a change inside the monthly fee, not a new quote.
The plans in full and the terms are on pricing. If a builder is the better answer for you, the questions in Wix or a studio will tell you, and we would rather you found that out before paying anybody.
If you want someone to look at your own website, the free review tells you the three things we would change first.
