How much does a website cost in the UK? Real prices for 2026

Wix's UK plans run at £9 a month for Light, £16 for Core, £25 for Business and £119 for Business Elite on annual billing. Pay monthly instead and each tier rises by roughly 16 to 28 per cent. Squarespace has no free tier at all, only a 14-day trial, and its ladder runs from about £12 a month to £79 on annual billing, with monthly billing costing 13 to 41 per cent more. GoDaddy advertises from £7.99 a month, but its own May 2026 cost guide puts the standard Website Builder rate at £16.99 once the introductory year ends.

The extras are where the maths shifts. That free first-year domain renews at £10 to £20. Business email is not included, so Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 goes on top per user. Wix's App Market runs to hundreds of add-ons, and the useful ones — booking upgrades, review displays, better forms — carry subscriptions of £5 to £30 a month. A realistic builder-based business site lands between £250 and £500 a year.

For plenty of people that is the right answer. If your content changes weekly, or you are testing whether an idea has legs, you will get there faster than by hiring anyone. What you pay instead of money is evenings, plus a ceiling on how far the thing can be pushed later.

The £5 website is a myth that refuses to die. Real Fiverr listings start around $10 for someone swapping the demo content out of a template, $80 to $100 from an established WordPress or Squarespace seller, and $195 to $600 from a Vetted Pro. In sterling that top tier is roughly £150 to £470, the same conversation as a local freelancer, minus the local part.

The word carrying every one of those figures is "starting". Gig pricing is built around add-ons, and the add-ons tend to be things owners assume were included: a layout that behaves on a phone, more than four pages, a contact form that reaches your inbox, the right to the source files. Double or triple the headline and you are closer. For a tight, well-specified job the escrow protects you; open-ended work across a time zone gap is where it comes apart.

A UK freelance web designer typically charges £800 to £3,000 for a small business site, and most straightforward four to five page builds land at £1,200 to £2,000. Hourly rates sit at £25 to £50 for juniors, £40 to £80 for experienced designers and £70 to £120 for senior specialists, with day rates commonly £300 to £400. Broader guides put the whole freelance spectrum at £300 to £5,000 depending on scope.

Functionality and words push a quote up far more often than design does. A booking system, a members area, a product catalogue, a payment flow: each is real engineering time. So is writing. If you cannot supply the copy and the photographs, someone has to produce them, and that is often a third of the invoice nobody itemised. Check too whether the £1,500 includes hosting, or whether that arrives separately at £100 to £300 a year.

UK agencies charge £3,000 to £30,000 and upwards for a small business website. Regional agencies average roughly £3,000 to £8,000; London studios commonly start at £8,000. A basic ecommerce build sits around £4,000 to £12,000. Retainers frequently run £100 to £250 a month, and a 20 to 60 page WordPress site with real human labour behind it can be £175 to £250 monthly on its own.

It is easy to sneer at those numbers and wrong to. Some of that money buys what one person cannot supply: a strategist who argues with your positioning, accessibility testing to WCAG standards, cover when someone is on holiday. The trap is paying agency prices for freelancer output. If the discovery workshop produced a slide deck rather than a decision, and the site is a stock theme with your logo on it, you have bought overhead. Ask what share of the fee is project management, and ask to meet whoever will build the thing.

A .co.uk domain costs almost nothing in year one, sometimes under £1 on a promotion, and renews at roughly £7 to £16 plus VAT. The renewal is the number that matters, so read it before you register rather than a year later. Hosting a small brochure site separately runs £60 to £200 a year at a reputable UK host, and if a build quote is silent on hosting, assume it is coming.

Maintenance is the real recurring cost, and it stops being optional the moment your site runs WordPress. UK care plans cluster at £20 to £90 a month for updates, backups, security monitoring and small changes, rising past £100 to £150 once development time is bundled in. Most small businesses land at £40 to £100 monthly, so £500 to £1,500 a year for upkeep is realistic rather than gloomy.

Then there is content, which nobody quotes for and everybody underestimates. A commercial photographer's half day is roughly £400 to £650, and fixed-price brand shoots covering your team, premises and work run £500 to £1,500. That is frequently the highest-value spend on the list. Stock library pictures of a generic workshop persuade nobody. Twenty photographs of your own premises, your own staff and your own finished work will do more selling than the design does.

These are typical rather than guaranteed. Year three totals assume the site stays broadly as built with a few changes along the way, and exclude photography and copywriting, which apply to every route equally.

Two things stand out once the numbers line up. The gap between doing it yourself and paying a professional narrows sharply by year three, because builder subscriptions never stop and a build fee does. And what separates the middle rows is less the build than who picks up when something breaks two years after launch.

The bottom row is mine, and it is the only price here I can speak for directly rather than summarise from a published rate card. Why the figure sits where it does, and what you give up in exchange, belongs on the about page — it says more about how the business runs than about what websites cost.

Portfolios are easy to assemble and tell you very little about what happens after launch. These four work on a builder's sales page, a marketplace seller, a freelancer and an agency alike, and how quickly the answer arrives tells you nearly as much as the answer itself.

1. Is the domain registered in my name, at a registrar I can log into myself?

   The domain is the one thing that cannot be rebuilt over a weekend. If it sits inside a supplier's account, leaving means asking them to release it, and that conversation happens exactly when relations have already soured. Ask which registrar holds it and check you can sign in today.

2. What do I own if we part company?

   There are two honest answers: the source files, the content and the hosting account travel with you, or you hold a login to a platform you cannot export from. Either can be a fair deal — a builder subscription is a rental and priced like one — but you want to know which one you bought before the day you need it.

3. What is the total cost in year two, in writing, including hosting and anything billed per change?

   Year one is the marketing number. Year two is the real one: introductory rates end, the domain renews at its proper price, and per-change fees start showing up on invoices. A supplier who will not put a year-two figure in an email is telling you something worth hearing.

4. When the contact form quietly stops delivering on a Tuesday morning, who notices and how fast is it fixed?

   Small sites fail silently. A host changes a setting, a certificate lapses, a plugin falls out of step, and the owner finds out from a customer who says they emailed a fortnight ago. Ask who is watching, what the response time is, and whether that work sits inside the fee or gets billed by the hour.

Should I just build it myself on Wix?

Possibly. Put a value on your own hours and do the sum. Budget £250 to £500 a year once the domain renewal and add-ons are counted, then add two or three evenings a week for the first fortnight. If those evenings are worth more spent quoting jobs, pay someone. If you enjoy the fiddling, a builder will serve you well for years.

If I start on a builder, can I move to something else later?

Your words and pictures come with you; the site itself does not. Builder platforms are rented, and what you assemble inside one cannot be lifted out and dropped onto ordinary hosting, so moving later means rebuilding. That does not make a builder the wrong place to start while you are still working out whether the business needs a site at all, but the eventual rebuild belongs in the sum when you compare three-year totals.

Why does the same brief get quoted at £500 and at £5,000?

Because "five-page website" describes the shape of the thing, not the work. The £500 version usually means your text poured into an existing template. The £5,000 version usually includes someone writing the pages, a photographer, a proper structure for search, and a named person accountable afterwards. Ask each quote which of those it contains and the gap stops being mysterious.

Is it cheaper to pay for a builder monthly or annually?

Annually, by a wide margin. Wix charges roughly 16 to 28 per cent more on monthly billing, Squarespace 13 to 41 per cent more, and GoDaddy's monthly rates run 52 to 60 per cent above its annual ones. Monthly billing earns its premium only while you are still deciding whether the business needs a site at all.

Do I have to pay separately for an SSL certificate?

No. Let's Encrypt certificates are free, are included as standard by virtually every reputable UK host, and renew automatically on a 90-day cycle. If a provider lists SSL as a paid line, ask what it gives you that Let's Encrypt does not. For an ordinary business site the honest answer is nothing.

What should a small change cost once the site is live?

It depends on whether you are inside a care plan or outside one. Inside, swapping a phone number or adding a paragraph is normally covered. Outside, you are into hourly work at £40 to £80, and some designers apply a minimum charge, so a two-minute edit becomes a half-hour invoice. Establish which arrangement you are in before you need the first change.