How much should a small business website cost?

Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five answers between £0 and £15,000. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because "a website" describes wildly different things.

Here is what the numbers actually mean.

The realistic price bands

£0 to £100: DIY builders

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and similar. You do the work. The monthly fee is £10 to £25 and never stops.

This genuinely works for some people. If you are comfortable with the software, have a good eye and can spare a weekend, you can produce something acceptable. Plenty of small businesses do.

The catch is that most owners cannot spare the weekend, and the sites tend to look like the template they came from. You are also renting rather than owning, so if you stop paying, the site disappears.

£150 to £600: independent developers and small studios

This is where I sit, and where a lot of good value is.

You get a custom-built site, someone else does the work, and it is designed around your business rather than a template. Turnaround is usually days rather than months.

Be careful here, though. This band contains both genuine custom work and people installing a £40 theme and charging you £400 for typing your details into it. The difference is not obvious from the price alone, so ask to see three sites they have built and check whether they look like the same site three times.

£1,000 to £3,000: established freelancers and small agencies

More process. Discovery meetings, mockups you approve before build, sometimes a copywriter or photographer involved.

For a business where the website drives serious revenue, this is often money well spent. For a local plumber who needs to be findable and contactable, it is usually more process than the job requires.

£5,000 and up: agencies

Account manager, designer, developer, project manager, sometimes a strategist. Real value on complex projects: large ecommerce, multi-location businesses, anything with genuine complexity.

For a five-page site for a local business, you are largely paying for the structure of the agency rather than the website.

£10,000+: custom systems

At this point you are not buying a website. You are buying software: booking systems, customer accounts, payment processing, dashboards, integrations. Different product, different maths.

Where the money actually goes

For a straightforward small business website, the real work is roughly:

• Understanding the business. What you sell, who buys it, what makes someone choose you. Get this wrong and everything after it is decoration.
• Structure. Which pages exist, what goes on each one, how someone gets from landing to enquiring.
• Content. Most owners do not have copy ready. Someone has to write it.
• Design. How it looks and, more importantly, how it reads on a phone.
• Build. Actually making it.
• Technical setup. Domain, hosting, forms, search console, making sure the contact form reaches an inbox somebody checks.
• Testing. On real phones, not just a resized browser window.

Notice how little of that is "building the website". The build is maybe a third of the job. That is why two sites that look similar can cost very differently, and why a cheap site that skipped the first three steps is often worse than no site.

What actually changes the price

Number of pages. The most obvious factor, and the least important beyond about five.

Whether you have content. If you arrive with copy, photos and a logo, the job is dramatically faster. If someone has to draft the copy, that is real work.

Functionality. A contact form is nothing. Online booking, payments, customer logins or a shop are a different project entirely.

How many people are involved. Every extra person in the process adds cost. This is the single biggest driver of agency pricing.

Revisions. Two rounds of sensible changes is normal. Unlimited revisions either means the price has padding built in for it, or that you will hit an awkward conversation later.

What you should get at any price

Whatever you pay, insist on these:

• You own the domain. In your name, on your account. Non-negotiable.
• You own the site. If you part ways, you keep it.
• It works on a phone. Over half your visitors, often far more.
• The contact form is tested. Send a test enquiry yourself. You would be amazed.
• Real page titles and descriptions. Not "Home | Home".
• It loads fast. Under three seconds on mobile data.

If a quote does not include these, the price is not the problem.

The honest answer

For most small local businesses, a genuinely good website costs somewhere between £150 and £800, depending on size and who builds it.

Below that, you are usually doing it yourself or buying a template with your logo on it. Above that, you are paying for process, brand work or functionality, all of which can be worth it but should be things you specifically asked for.

My own launch packages start at £140 for a one-page site and £315 for up to five pages, because I am building a portfolio and those prices will rise. But the more useful thing to take from this is the framework, not my rates: work out which band your business actually needs, then judge the quote against that.