How much does a website cost in the UK? (2026)

The price ranges

Website pricing in the UK sits across four broad tiers. Each has a different type of provider, a different level of quality, and very different outcomes for your business.

£0 – £500: DIY and template builders

Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy Website Builder let you build a site yourself using drag-and-drop templates. You pick a design, add your text and images, and publish.

• What you get: a functional website that looks like a template. Limited customisation. Your domain will likely include the platform name unless you pay extra.
• Who it suits: startups testing an idea, very early-stage businesses with no budget, side projects.
• The hidden cost: your time. Building a site yourself takes longer than you think. And if it does not convert visitors into customers, the real cost is the missed enquiries.
• What to watch for: locked-in pricing that rises after the first year, limited SEO tools, and difficulty moving your site to another platform later.

£500 – £1,500: freelance and offshore

At this level, you are hiring someone to build a site for you. This could be a freelancer on a platform like Fiverr or Upwork, or a developer working from a lower-cost country. You will usually get a WordPress site with a purchased theme.

• What you get: a WordPress website using a pre-built theme. Customisation is limited to what the theme allows. You may get a few pages of content populated.
• Who it suits: businesses that need something online quickly and have a very tight budget. Businesses comfortable managing their own hosting, updates and security.
• The hidden cost: ongoing maintenance. WordPress sites need regular updates, security patches, and plugin management. If you do not know how to do this yourself, you will need to pay someone, or risk the site breaking or getting hacked.
• What to watch for: poor mobile performance, slow loading speeds, generic design that looks like a hundred other sites, and no strategic input on what will actually convert.

£1,495 – £5,950: professional agency or studio

This is where most professional Mousehold Studio website work sits. Our public anchors are one-page launch sites from £795, professional brochure websites from £1,495 and growth websites from £2,495, with final scope confirmed before build.

• What you get: a custom-designed, mobile-first website. Usually up to five core pages. On-page SEO foundations built in. A contact form with enquiry routing. Basic analytics setup. Hosting included for the first year. A strategy call before anything is built.
• Who it suits: established small businesses, tradespeople, clinics, professional services firms, and any business where the website needs to generate real enquiries, not just exist.
• What you are paying for: strategic thinking, custom design, clean code, fast performance, local SEO foundations, and direct access to the people doing the work.
• Typical timeline: two to four weeks from confirmed brief to launch.

£5,000 – £20,000+: custom software and complex builds

At the upper end, you are looking at custom web applications, booking systems, membership portals, e-commerce platforms, or bespoke business software.

• What you get: a fully custom solution built around your exact operational needs. Dashboards, integrations, automated workflows, mobile apps.
• Who it suits: businesses that have outgrown off-the-shelf tools, businesses with complex booking or scheduling needs, businesses needing customer portals or internal systems.
• What you are paying for: discovery, specification, design, development, testing, launch, and ongoing support. These are multi-month projects with multiple stakeholders.

What about ongoing costs?

A website is not a one-off purchase. Like any business asset, it needs maintenance. Here is what to budget for after launch:

• Domain name: £10–£20 per year. Buy it yourself and keep control.
• Hosting: £10–£50 per month. Often included for the first year with a studio build.
• Maintenance and support: £79–£249 per month. Covers security updates, content edits, uptime monitoring, and performance checks.
• Content updates: included in a care plan, or charged per update if ad-hoc.
• SEO or Google Ads: separate from the website build. Monthly retainers vary by scope.

The real cost of a cheap website

A website that looks unprofessional, loads slowly, or does not show up on Google costs you more than the money you saved building it. It costs you trust. It costs you enquiries. It costs you the customers who opened your site, spent three seconds judging it, and went back to the search results to click on your competitor. When you think about website cost, think about cost per missed opportunity, not just the upfront price.