What a website costs in the UK depends less on the website than on who builds it and what it has to do. A DIY website builder costs a monthly subscription and your own time. A freelancer, a small studio or an agency charges for their time and skill, and the price goes up with the number of pages, who writes the words, online shopping, connections to your other systems, SEO and the care it gets after launch.
Our own prices are fixed and published: a Launch site is £1,490 + VAT, Studio is £3,990 + VAT, Shopify Commerce builds start at £6,500 + VAT and Bespoke builds start at £8,950 + VAT, with a care plan from £49/mo + VAT. The rest of this guide explains where those numbers come from, and how to compare quotes that look nothing alike.
The four ways to get a website built
1. A DIY website builder
You pay a subscription to a platform such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, pick a template and build the site yourself.
- Good for: a new business testing an idea, a hobby, or a one-page holding site.
- What you pay with: your time. The design, writing, photos and setup are all yours to do, and so is fixing it when something breaks.
- Watch for: templates that look like everyone else’s, and SEO settings you don’t know are switched off.
2. A freelancer
One person designs and builds the site, sometimes with a writer or developer they bring in.
- Good for: a straightforward site where you know what you want and can supply the words and photos.
- What changes the price: the freelancer’s experience, whether they write the copy, and whether hosting and updates are included.
- Watch for: what happens if they get busy, move on or are ill. Ask who hosts the site and who holds the logins.
3. A small studio
A small team, or one senior person with good tools, who plans, writes, designs and builds the site, and usually looks after it afterwards. This is what we are.
- Good for: a service business that needs the site to bring in enquiries, not just exist.
- What changes the price: how much planning, writing and SEO is included, and whether the build is template-based or designed for you.
- Watch for: a vague scope. A good studio puts pages, deliverables, dates and price in writing.
4. An agency
A larger team with project managers, designers, developers, writers and account managers.
- Good for: large sites, complex integrations, several stakeholders, and brands that need a big team on call.
- What changes the price: the size of the team and the number of people involved, as well as the scope.
- Watch for: paying for layers of management on a site that doesn’t need them.
None of these routes is wrong. The right one depends on what the site has to do for you and how much of the work you want to do yourself.
What changes the price of a website
Whoever builds it, the same few things move the number.
Pages. A five-page site and a forty-page site are different jobs. Every service, location and case study page has to be planned, written, designed and built. More pages is not automatically better: one strong page per service usually beats ten thin ones.
Content. Who writes the words and supplies the photos? Copywriting is often the biggest hidden cost. A quote that says “client to supply content” is cheaper because you are doing that part of the job.
Ecommerce. Selling online adds product pages, checkout, payments, shipping, tax and stock. The number of products, and whether they need moving from an old shop, matters a lot.
Integrations. Connecting the site to a CRM, a booking system, an email platform or practice software means building and testing those links, and keeping them working.
SEO. Some builds include the technical groundwork (speed, structure, schema, a page per service) and some don’t. Ongoing SEO, the monthly work that moves you up Google, is separate on every route. Our SEO service explains what that involves.
Ongoing care. Hosting, the domain, security updates, backups and small edits all cost something every month, whether you pay a supplier or spend your own time on them.
Design. A template adjusted to your brand costs less than a design made from scratch. Whether it is worth paying for depends on how much your site has to stand out from competitors.
How to compare website quotes
Two quotes for “a website” can differ a lot because they describe different jobs. Before comparing prices, get each supplier to answer the same questions in writing:
- How many pages, and which ones?
- Who writes the words, and who supplies the photos?
- What SEO is included in the build, and what isn’t?
- When does it go live, and is that date fixed?
- Who hosts it, and what does that cost each month?
- What happens after launch if something breaks or needs changing?
- Who owns the domain, the content and the accounts?
A higher quote that answers all of these can be cheaper than a lower one that answers none.
What we charge
Every price is fixed, agreed in writing before we start, and published on our pricing page. All prices are + VAT.
| Build | Price | What it is |
|---|
| Launch | £1,490 one-off | A focused site built to win one job, in one place. Live in 14 days. Offered to care homes first |
| Studio | £3,990 one-off | A design-led site for businesses with their brand in place, with copywriting support. Live in 14 days once brand assets are in |
| Commerce | From £6,500 one-off | A custom Shopify store, usually 4 to 6 weeks |
| Bespoke | From £8,950 one-off | A custom flagship build with no template underneath, for inbound and referral work only |
Every build comes with a care plan to keep it fast, secure and up to date: £49/mo for our Vercel and Astro sites, £149/mo for WordPress or Shopify.
If you want the site to keep bringing in enquiries after launch:
- Rank (local SEO), £650/mo on a 6-month minimum term, with weekly AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity.
- Fill My Diary, £799/mo on a 6-month minimum term: a care plan, Rank and Google Ads management (ad spend on top, paid direct to Google), with a lead guarantee.
- Google Ads management on its own is £450/mo plus your ad spend.
More on what goes into a build on our website design service page.
So what should you spend?
Work back from what a new customer is worth to you. If one extra enquiry a month would pay for the site within the year, the cheapest option is rarely the one that costs least today. If you are still testing whether the business works, a DIY builder is a perfectly sensible place to start, and you can move when the site starts to matter.
If you’d like a straight answer for your business, book a free 30-minute call. We’ll look at what you have, tell you what it would take, and give you a fixed price, including when the honest answer is “you don’t need us yet”.