How much does a website cost?

It’s the question I get asked most, and the honest answer is “it depends”. That isn’t much use when you’re trying to set a budget, so here are some real numbers, including my own.

The short answer

For a small business in the UK, roughly:

• Free if you build it yourself on a website builder’s free plan.
• £10 to £40 a month for a paid plan on a builder like Wix or Squarespace, with your own web address.
• £1,500 to £5,000 for a freelancer to build a typical small business site.
• £5,000 to £20,000 or more for a bigger site with a shop, bookings, memberships or other custom features.

Then there are the running costs, which I’ll come to. They’re smaller, but they never stop.

Can I create a website for free?

Yes. Most website builders have a free plan, and Google Sites is free too. You pick a template, add your words and photos, and you can be online in an afternoon.

The catch is that free plans put the builder’s name in your web address (something like yourbusiness.wixsite.com), and some show their adverts on your pages. To use your own domain you’ll need a paid plan. The real cost is your time: writing the words, choosing the photos and getting it all to look right.

If you’re just starting out and want to test an idea, a free site is fine. I’d also set up a free Google Business Profile. For a local business, it often brings in more enquiries than the website does.

Where DIY sites go wrong

I see a lot of sites that people have built themselves, and the same problems come up again and again:

• Phones. Getting a site to work on a phone exactly how you want it is often a real struggle.
• Looking professional. It’s easy to use images, text and headings in slightly the wrong way,, and that makes a site look less professional.
• Headings that nobody searches for. People tend to lead with something personal or emotional to them. Your customers search for plain words, like “physio in Winchester”, and those are the words your headings need.
• Photos. There are tons of free, royalty-free images online, but it’s hard to know where to find good ones. You can also tell when a site is full of stock photos or AI images. They have their place, but used all over a site they don’t look great. Pick your moments, or edit them to give them your own twist.
• Taking it to the next level. A simple site with a few pages and a contact form is fine on a website builder. Connecting it to another system, or selling online, gets complicated, and it can get expensive.

Winchester Lido is a good example. Their old site was on Wix, and when they wanted online membership and court booking, Wix’s own booking and membership tools took a much bigger cut than a custom build would. That was a real problem for them, and one of the reasons they moved away from Wix.

What changes the price

When you pay someone to build your site, you’re mostly paying for their time. These are the things that add to it:

• How many pages there are, and who writes the words.
• Photos: your own, stock images, or a photographer.
• Design: a template adapted to your brand, or something designed from scratch.
• Features such as an online shop, bookings, memberships, or forms that feed into your other systems.
• SEO set up properly from the start, so people can find you.
• Moving content across from an old site.

My websites start at £1,500. For that you get the standard pages a small business needs: home, about, contact and FAQs, plus terms and conditions, a privacy policy and cookie consent. The pages are kept fairly straightforward. You supply the words and a steer on the kind of images you’d like, and I design it, usually with some help from AI. That’s a pretty reasonable price for a smart, simple website with your own content in it.

Bigger sites, or ones with bookings or a shop, cost more, and you’ll know how much before we start.

Every job gets a fixed written quote, so the price won’t creep up halfway through. I’m not VAT registered, so there’s no VAT to add on top.

What it costs once it’s live

Whoever builds it, every website has some running costs:

• Your domain name, usually £10 to £20 a year.
• Hosting, from a few pounds a month for a simple site.
• Email at your own domain, through Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, paid per person each month.
• Updates and security. WordPress in particular needs its plugins updating every month, or it becomes a security risk.
• Changes, when your prices, team or services change.

My website care starts at £25 a month. It covers hosting, the security certificate, backups, uptime monitoring and security updates. When you need changes, you book them in half-day blocks, so you only pay for what you use.

How to compare quotes

Quotes for the same website can be thousands of pounds apart, and it’s rarely clear why. These questions help:

1. Who owns the domain and the website once it’s paid for?
2. What’s included: the words, the photos, SEO, moving old content?
3. Can I update it myself, and how?
4. What will it cost each month after launch, and what does that cover?
5. What happens if something breaks?

The first one matters most. If someone else registers your domain in their own name, it can be hard to get back.

Want a price for yours?

Tell me what you need and I’ll send you a fixed written quote. If a free site or a website builder would do the job, I’ll tell you that too.