How much does a website cost and what it buys

Ask three agencies to quote the same website and you will get £500, £4,000 and £15,000. The unhelpful answer is "it depends". The useful one is that those three numbers describe three different products, and only one of them is probably what you need.

What each price band actually contains

£300–800: a template you fill in yourself. Squarespace, Wix, or a WordPress theme someone installed for you. You get a site that looks fine and works on a phone. You do not get anyone thinking about who lands on it or what they do next. For a plumber who needs a phone number and three photos, this is not a compromise — it is the correct answer, and paying more would buy nothing extra.

£1,500–5,000: a site built around what you sell. Someone asks what your customers actually ask before they buy, writes pages that answer it, and connects the form to something that does not lose enquiries. The design is yours rather than a theme with your logo dropped in. This is where most small firms should be.

£8,000+: software with a website attached. A configurator, a booking system, a shop with stock feeds, an integration with the system your office already runs on. The price is high because you are paying for programming, not for pages.

⚠️ The trap sits between the first and second band. A £900 quote for what should be the second product usually means the pages will be written by whoever has an hour free, and the money reappears six months later, when the site brings nothing and someone has to start again.

The costs that continue after launch

The quote you compare is for building. Running the thing has its own bill, and it is the part people forget:

• Hosting. £5–40 a month for a small site. Cheaper exists and behaves like it.
• Domain. £10–20 a year.
• SSL certificate. Free, and anyone charging for it is telling you something.
• Updates and backups. £30–150 a month, or your own evening every few weeks. This is not optional: an unpatched site gets broken into eventually, and cleaning that up costs more than a year of maintenance.
• Changes. New page, new photos, new price list. Ask what an hour costs before you sign, not after.

A site that costs £3,000 to build and £100 a month to keep running costs £4,200 in its first year. Comparing build quotes alone compares the smaller half of the bill.

Three questions that separate the quotes

"Who writes the text?" If the answer is you, add the hours it will take — realistically a full day per page done properly. If the answer is them, ask to read something they wrote for a client in a trade nobody finds interesting.

"What happens to an enquiry after someone sends it?" A form that emails one address is not a process. Most enquiries are lost in the twenty minutes between arriving and someone deciding who answers them, and that is not a website problem that a prettier website fixes.

"What do I own when we finish?" Ask specifically about the domain, the hosting account, and whether you can move the site elsewhere without rebuilding it. A site you cannot take with you is rented, whatever the invoice says.

What we charge, since it would be odd not to say

A small business site built the second way (discovery, copy, design, build, measurement, and a month of corrections after launch) runs between £2,000 and £4,500 depending on how many pages actually need writing. Maintenance is £80 a month. We quote in hours, so you can see which part of the number you are arguing with.

If your budget is £800, say so at the start. There is an honest version of that project, it is simply the first product on this page, and we would rather point you to it than sell you a worse version of the second one.