Ask five providers what a website costs and you’ll get five confident, completely different answers — because they’re answering five different questions. Here’s the honest 2026 map of what each price band buys in the UK, and the one calculation to run before you spend anything.

The four price bands

DIY builders (£10–£40/month). Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You get a template and an evening of your time. Fine as a placeholder. The catch: templates aren’t built around your customers’ searches, so these sites tend to exist rather than earn. If nobody searches for you by name, nobody finds it.

A freelancer (£500–£2,000). Wide quality range. A good freelancer at this price is real value; the risk is what happens after launch — updates, hosting, security, and “can we change the opening hours” emails that stop getting answered when they take a full-time job.

A small studio (£2,000–£6,000). This buys a site built around how customers actually find and choose you: pages for the services and places you want to win, a Google Business Profile that’s wired up, lead capture that goes somewhere, and speed on a phone. Built properly, this is the band where a website stops being a brochure and starts being a system.

An agency (£10,000+). Discovery workshops, brand decks, stakeholder calls. At small-business scale you’re mostly funding their process, not your result.

The costs nobody quotes

  • Hosting and domain: £50–£300/year. Anyone charging much more for a small site is marking up commodity hosting.
  • Content: the words. If the quote assumes you’ll write them, the site launches late and reads like it.
  • Maintenance: the real question for any quote — “who owns it, and what does month thirteen cost me?” If you can’t leave with your site, you’re renting it.

The only maths that matters

Price is the wrong number to compare. Compare cost per customer. One of our clients — a reptile and aquatics shop in Ashford that had never had a website — got 1,500 visits, 39 enquiries and roughly 20 new customers in month one, with 75% of traffic straight from Google search. Against any build price in the bands above, that maths ends the conversation. A cheap site that brings in nobody is the most expensive option on this page.

How to choose

Decide what the site is for: if you just need to look legitimate when someone Googles your name, a DIY builder is genuinely enough. If you want the site to bring you customers, buy from someone who talks about searches, enquiries, and follow-up — not templates. That’s the system we build: site, Google presence, and lead capture as one machine, scoped fixed-fee after a conversation about what you’re trying to win. Start with the call — if a £15/month builder is the right answer for you, we’ll say so.