It’s the first question almost everyone asks, and the honest answer is the one nobody likes: it depends. But “it depends” shouldn’t be a way of dodging the question, so here’s what it depends on, what the range really looks like, and how to work out where your project sits before you talk to anyone.
The range
We don’t sell website packages. The sites and platforms we’ve built have cost from around £2,000 to around £250,000.
That’s not a sales trick. A focused site for a sole trader and a platform with bookings, payments, accounts and live data are both “a website”, in the same way a garden shed and a house are both buildings. The useful question isn’t “how much is a website?” It’s “how much is the thing I need?”
Why we don’t do packages
A package prices the template, not your problem. “Five pages for £X” tells you what you’ll get, not whether it will bring in a single enquiry. It tends to go one of two ways: you pay for things you don’t need, or you discover halfway through that what you do need isn’t included. We’d rather work out what the site has to do, then price that.
What moves the price
1. What the site has to do
This is the big one. In rough order of how much each one adds:
- Tell people who you are and how to get in touch. The simplest job, and plenty of businesses need nothing more.
- Publish regularly: news, articles, case studies, managed by your own team.
- Sell things: products, variations, stock, delivery rules, payments, stock that has to match what’s in the shop.
- Take bookings, subscriptions or memberships, with accounts, emails and payments that have to work every time.
- Connect to other systems: your CRM, stock system, accounting, a data feed, a booking platform.
- Do something nobody else’s website does: a custom platform, an app, AI tools, live data.
2. How much there is
Ten pages and a thousand pages are different jobs. So are twenty products and two thousand, especially with sizes, colours and personalisation. One clothing shop we look after has 37 products and more than 900 variations between them.
3. Design: tailored or template
A well-chosen template, set up properly, is a perfectly good answer for a lot of small businesses. A fully bespoke design, built around your brand and your customers, costs more and is worth it when how you look is part of what you sell.
4. Moving from an old site
If your current site has years of search history, moving it properly is a job in itself: every old address mapped to a new one so you don’t lose rankings. It’s one of the most commonly forgotten costs, and one of the most expensive to skip. (More on migrations here.)
5. Content
Someone has to write the words, take or source the photos, and load the products. If that’s you, the build costs less and the project takes longer. If it’s us, it costs more and arrives finished.
The costs people forget
- Hosting and support. Updates, security, monitoring and someone to call when something breaks. A website isn’t finished at launch; it’s where the useful bit starts.
- Your domain and email, which renew every year.
- Payment and platform fees on a shop: card fees, and on some platforms a monthly fee or a cut of every sale.
- Getting people to it. A new website with no plan for search, social or ads is a very nice shop on a street nobody walks down.
- Your time, answering questions, approving designs and providing content. Budget for it.
The cost of nobody checking
Some of the most expensive website problems aren’t in the build at all. They creep in afterwards, as content, plugins and people change. Things we’ve found this year on sites we look after:
- A shop whose home page was 10 MB and took up to a minute to appear on a phone, because banner photos were saved in the wrong format.
- Live sites still loading images and fonts from their old test copy, one switch-off away from breaking.
- A layout built to one fixed width, which pushed the page sideways on every normal laptop.
- Tracking that had recorded nothing for six months because the tag behind it no longer existed.
None of those needed a new website to fix. All of them cost the business something until someone looked. That’s why looking after a site belongs in the budget from the start. The cheapest build isn’t the one to worry about; the one nobody checks afterwards is.
How to get a useful quote
Before you ask anyone for a price, write down:
- What the site has to achieve. More enquiries? Online sales? Bookings? Fewer phone calls asking the same question?
- What it has to do to get there: sell, book, integrate, publish.
- What you already have: an old site with search history, a brand, photos, content.
- Who will run it day to day, and how comfortable they are doing that.
- Your budget range. It isn’t a trap. It lets an agency tell you what’s realistic, instead of guessing and missing.
And when you compare quotes, ask each agency the same questions: What happens to my old site’s search rankings? Who owns the site and the content? What does looking after it cost each year? How fast will it load on a phone? What happens if you’re not around?
If you’d like a straight answer for your own project, tell us what the site needs to do and your rough budget, and we’ll tell you honestly what it would take, including when a simpler, cheaper option is the right one. More on how we build in web design, ecommerce and platforms and AI.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
