The short answer: in the UK a small business website costs nothing to about £30 a month if you build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace, roughly £500 to £2,000 from a freelancer, £3,000 and up from an agency, and around £20 to £200 a month if you pay monthly for one that's built and looked after for you. Running costs come on top of a one-off build, and they're the part people forget.
Ask ten people what a website costs and you'll get ten answers, because they're describing different things. This guide puts every common option side by side in one table, explains what each price band really buys, adds up the running costs, and shows where our own plans sit, including where they're not the cheapest answer. Every figure is rough and general. Your own quote will move with scope, sector and who you hire.
How much does a website cost in the UK? The table
Here's the whole market at a glance, from free to five figures. The first column of money is what you pay to get the site built. The second is what it costs to keep it running each year once it's live, which is the column most quotes leave out.
| Option | To get it built | To keep it running, a year | Who does the work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free builder plan | £0 | £0, with the builder's ads and no own domain | You |
| Paid DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £0 plus your time | About £110 to £360, plus a domain | You |
| Freelancer | £500 to £2,000 | £150 to £400 for domain and hosting, plus paid changes | The freelancer, then you |
| Small agency | £3,000 to £10,000 | Usually a monthly care plan or an hourly rate | The agency |
| Bespoke or custom build | £10,000 and up | Usually a support contract | The agency |
| Pay monthly, managed | £0 | About £240 to £2,400 (£20 to £200 a month) | The provider |
| Pay monthly to own | £0 | About £600 to £3,300 a year for one to three years | The provider |
What you actually get at each price band
Free to about £30 a month, DIY or AI. On the plans a small business would actually use, Wix runs from about £9 to £25 a month and Squarespace from about £12 to £29, paid yearly, and a bit more if you pay month by month. AI site generators will now produce a first draft in minutes. You get a working site and full control, but you do the work: you choose the template, write the words, wrestle the layout, and own every future fix. Fine if you enjoy it and have the time. We set out where that's the right call in website builder vs hiring a designer.
Roughly £500 to £2,000, a freelancer. Someone competent builds it for you once. The quality swing is huge, from excellent to abandoned, and the risk is what happens after launch. Many one-off builds quietly rot because nobody's paid to maintain them. We've looked at what that band really buys in the average cost to hire a web designer in the UK.
£3,000 and up, an agency. More polish, more process, and usually a bigger scope. Good value if you genuinely need it, overkill for a simple five-page site. Above ten thousand you're into custom territory, with bespoke features and integrations, which most small businesses don't need.
£20 to £200 a month, pay monthly. Nothing up front, and the monthly fee covers the build, hosting and upkeep together. There are two kinds, and the difference matters. On a managed plan the provider usually keeps the design and code while you subscribe. On a payment plan you're buying the site over one to three years and own it at the end, which costs more each month. We explain both in what a pay monthly website is.
The bands haven't moved much at the top. AI pushed the floor down, not the ceiling.
Why do website quotes vary so much?
Three things move the price more than anything else. Who does the work: one freelancer, an agency team, a monthly studio, or you. How much of it's bespoke: a well-chosen template set up properly costs a fraction of a design drawn from scratch. And what the site has to do: a five-page site that gets people to ring you is a very different job from one that takes bookings, sells products or talks to your other software.
Then there's what happens after launch. Two quotes for the same build can be a thousand pounds apart because one includes hosting, changes and support for a year and the other ends the day the site goes live. Always ask what's included after launch before you compare the headline numbers. The hidden costs of web design lists the extras that tend to turn up after you've signed.
What AI changed, and what it didn't
AI tools are genuinely good at producing a decent-looking first draft fast. If your goal is a single tidy page to point people at, you can now get there for very little money and a weekend of your time. That's a real gain, and for some businesses it's enough. We say so plainly on our AI website builder comparison.
But cheaper to build isn't the same as cheaper to run, or cheaper to get results from. AI drafts the layout. It doesn't write copy that reflects how you actually win customers, decide what a plumber's site needs that a solicitor's doesn't, wire up a booking flow that works, keep the thing secure and updated, or fix it at 8pm when a form breaks. The build was always the quick part. The judgement and the upkeep are the parts that cost money, and AI hasn't removed those.
The build was always the quick part. Judgement and upkeep are what you pay for.
What a website costs to run each year
The number that matters isn't what a site costs to build. It's what it costs to keep working over a few years. If you pay for a one-off build, these are the bills that carry on afterwards. On a managed monthly plan most of them are already inside the fee.
| Running cost | Typical UK cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10 to £20 a year | More if you want a .co.uk and a .com |
| Hosting | £3 to £100 or more a month | Cheap shared at the bottom, managed at the top |
| SSL certificate | Often free | Sometimes only on a paid tier |
| Business email | From about £5 a month per mailbox | Often sold separately from the site |
| Updates, security and backups | Your time, or a care plan | Skipping them is how sites get hacked or break |
| Changes and fixes | Paid by the hour, or included | Ask the rate before you need it |
Add the obvious bits and a self-managed site often runs £150 to £400 a year before anyone touches it, and a few paid call-outs for changes can add several hundred more. The real cost of running a website adds up a full year line by line, and how much website hosting costs breaks down the hosting bill on its own.
So do the sum over three or five years, not just on launch day. A cheap build with no upkeep can end up costing more, in your time or in an emergency developer bill, than a dearer one that's looked after. We've worked through that comparison in fixed fee vs monthly web design: the 5 year cost.
A cheap build with no upkeep can cost more than a dearer one that's looked after.
How much does a website cost per month?
If you're thinking in monthly terms, the range is a few pounds to about £30 for a DIY builder, £20 to £200 for a done for you pay monthly website, and £100 and up for an agency retainer, often on top of a build fee. We've written a whole guide on that question, with what each monthly figure buys and how to tell if a price is fair: how much a website costs per month in the UK.
If you've already decided monthly suits you and want to know who to pay, we've compared thirteen UK providers on price, minimum term and who owns the site in pay monthly websites UK compared. It includes the ones who beat us, and says why.
Where our plans sit
We're a pay monthly studio, so here's where we fit in the table above. There's no setup fee and no minimum term, and you can cancel any time. Starter is £20 a month for a single page. Business is £50 for up to six pages with keyword research. Professional is £100 for up to ten pages with a blog and the option of AI add-ons. Enterprise is £200 with unlimited pages and Google Business Profile management included. All prices are plus VAT, and every plan includes the design, build, hosting, your domain, business email, security, daily backups and changes made for you.
Over a year Starter comes to £240 plus VAT and Business to £600, with nothing to pay up front. If a typical job earns you around £300 in profit, Starter is covered by one extra job across the whole year.
On the monthly plan we keep the design and code, which is what lets the price start at £20. Your domain, your content and your data are yours from day one. If you want the site itself, you can buy it outright at any point, and the price comes down the longer you've been with us. How that works is set out on our pay monthly website page.
Where we're not the answer: if you enjoy building and maintaining a site yourself, a Wix or Squarespace plan is cheaper and you should take it. If owning the site outright quickly matters most, some providers hand it over after twelve payments, and our comparison names them. And if you need a large bespoke system, that's agency territory, though we do build custom software too.
So what should you actually spend?
Be honest about what the site is for. If it's a simple presence you'll happily maintain yourself, a DIY or AI builder is a sensible, cheap choice, and we'll not pretend otherwise. If the website's meant to bring in enquiries and you've got a business to run instead of a site to babysit, paying for it to be done and kept working usually earns its keep.
The trap is spending money in the middle: a one-off build with nobody maintaining it, or an agency price for a site you didn't need. Match the spend to the job, and think in years, not in launch-day pounds. If your budget's genuinely tight, how to get an affordable professional website sets out where it's safe to cut and where it isn't.
Your situation changes the number
If you're weighing up building it yourself against paying someone, the invoice is the smaller half of that decision. DIY versus hiring a professional works through the time cost as well as the price. If you already have a site and it's the look that's bothering you, check whether you need a rebuild at all before you spend, because a website redesign and a decent tune-up are very different bills.
Selling online moves the number most. An online shop costs more than a business website to build, and considerably more to keep running, and plenty of businesses don't need one yet. At the other end, a trade business website needs far less than most people will try to sell you: fast pages, a tappable phone number, and proof that you do good work.
See what you'd get before you pay
Prices only get you so far. The useful comparison is the actual work. When you order with us, the first step is a prototype of your new homepage, usually within three working days, so you see exactly what you're getting before we build the rest. There's no brief to write, and nothing's charged until your site is live.
If the prototype isn't right, we refine it with you until it is. Try it on your phone, hold it next to your current site or the other quotes you've got, and decide from there. How it works has the full picture.
We last checked the figures in this guide in November 2026. Squarespace's prices are from its own UK pricing page. Wix's pricing page shows dollars, so its UK figures come from current UK plan breakdowns. Both change from time to time, so check the builder's own pricing page before you commit.