What a Website Actually Costs in 2026

Ask five designers what a website costs and you'll get five answers between £500 and £15,000. None of them are lying. The spread exists because "a website" describes anything from a one-page template to a bespoke system with bookings, payments and a dozen integrations — and because what you're buying is mostly someone's time and judgement, not a product with a list price.

The honest ranges, and what sits inside each

These are broad bands for a small business site, not quotes. Where you land depends far more on scope than on who you hire.

• Under £500 — a template you configure yourself, or a very junior freelancer applying one. Fine for a simple brochure site if you supply everything and expect no strategy.
• £1,000–£3,000 — where most small business sites genuinely land. A handful of pages, a working contact or booking form, decent mobile behaviour, someone who has done this before.
• £3,000–£8,000 — custom design rather than a template, more pages, content help, integrations with a booking or CRM system.
• £8,000 and up — e-commerce with real catalogue complexity, membership areas, multi-location, or anything where the site is the business rather than a shop window for it.

Currency barely matters here; the same bands hold in dollars or euros. What matters is that the jump between bands is almost always scope, not quality of work.

What actually drives the number

Designers price from the things that eat days. In rough order of impact:

1. Page count and uniqueness. Twelve pages that share one layout cost far less than four pages that each need their own.
2. Who writes the words. Content is the single most common reason projects stall and budgets grow. If you supply finished copy, you save real money.
3. Functionality beyond pages. A form that emails you is cheap. A booking system that checks availability, takes a deposit and sends reminders is a different project.
4. Integrations. Every system the site must talk to — payments, CRM, calendar, stock — adds work and adds things that can break later.
5. Design from scratch or from a system. Bespoke visual design is genuinely expensive. Starting from a well-chosen framework is not a lesser result, just a cheaper route.
6. How many people must approve it. Two decision-makers roughly doubles revision rounds. That's a cost even though nobody writes it on the quote.

The costs that don't appear on the quote

A build price is not the cost of owning a website. Budget separately for:

• Domain — roughly £10–£20 a year, forever
• Hosting — free to around £20 a month for a small site; more if it's busy or runs a shop
• Email — a few pounds per mailbox per month, and worth paying for rather than using a free address on your own domain
• Platform or plugin licences — booking tools, galleries, shop extensions, often £100–£500 a year combined
• Maintenance — updates, backups, the occasional break. Either a retainer or your own time
• Changes — new staff, new prices, new services. Ask up front whether you can edit these yourself

A £2,000 site with £80 a month of running costs is a £3,000 site over its first year. That's not a hidden fee, it's just the real shape of the thing.

Why the cheapest quote often costs most

The failure mode isn't a bad-looking site. It's a site nobody can update, built by someone who has moved on, on a platform you don't control, with no handover. Two years later a rebuild costs more than the gap you saved.

The questions that separate a cheap quote from a false economy: who owns the domain and hosting account, can you edit text and prices yourself, what happens if you want to leave, and is anything here locked to one person's tools.

What a fair quote looks like

Price alone tells you very little. A quote worth trusting states the number of pages, how many rounds of revisions are included, who supplies text and images, what's explicitly excluded, and what it costs to change something after launch. One that says only "Website — £2,500" is an invitation to an argument later.

Asking for that breakdown is not being difficult. Any designer who has been burned by vague scope will be relieved you asked.

For the designer reading this

If you quote and lose, it's rarely because you were expensive. It's because the client had no way to compare, so they compared the only number they understood. Publishing a range on your site and breaking the quote into scope lines does more for your close rate than lowering the price.

And it's worth knowing which prospects can afford you before you spend an hour quoting. A business whose current site is broken and whose competitors all rank above it has a reason to spend; one that simply wants a refresh usually doesn't. That judgement is cheap to make early and expensive to skip.