This is the most-searched question in our entire industry, and it usually gets one of two useless answers: a vague "it depends" that tells you nothing, or an inflated range designed to anchor your expectations high. We are going to give you a genuinely useful breakdown - what different types of websites actually cost, what drives those costs, and what you should be suspicious of at different price points.
We will also be transparent about our own positioning in this landscape, because understanding where we fit helps you decide whether we are the right choice for your project.
The honest price ranges
DIY website builders
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify
£0 - £50/month
Legitimate options for very small businesses, sole traders, and businesses where the website is genuinely not a commercial priority. The limitations are real - limited performance optimisation, template-constrained design, ongoing platform dependency - but for the right situation they are perfectly adequate.
Cheap agency or offshore
Buyer beware territory
£300 - £800
At this price point you are almost certainly getting a WordPress site on a pre-built theme with stock photography and minimal SEO setup. The site may look reasonable initially. It will typically perform poorly, require significant ongoing plugin maintenance, and be difficult to improve later without rebuilding.
Freelancer custom WordPress
Highly variable quality
£1,000 - £3,000
At the better end of this range you can get genuinely good work from a skilled individual. At the lower end you are getting the same theme-based approach as cheap agency work but with less support structure. The quality depends almost entirely on the individual, not the price.
Professional agency build
Custom design, clean code, SEO foundations
£3,000 - £8,000
This is where you start getting genuinely custom design, clean custom code, proper SEO foundations built in, conversion-optimised structure, and a site that performs well technically. Most established businesses getting serious about their digital presence are in this range.
Large agency or enterprise
Complex requirements
£8,000 - £50,000+
For businesses with complex requirements - large product catalogues, custom application functionality, multi-location site architectures, very high performance requirements. Not relevant for most small and medium businesses.
What drives the cost of a website
Number of pages is the most obvious factor but often not the most significant one. The difference between a five-page and a twenty-page website in build time is meaningful but not enormous if the pages use the same templates.
Custom design vs template. A website that starts with a blank canvas and is designed specifically for the business is more expensive than one that adapts an existing theme. Custom design takes more time but produces a result that is distinctive and can be built to exactly the right technical specifications.
Custom functionality. Contact forms are standard. A booking system, a product configurator, a membership portal, a custom calculation tool - these add significant development time and therefore significant cost.
Content requirements. A website built with the client's own content (copy already written, photography already taken) is cheaper and faster to build than one where the agency needs to produce or source the content. Photography, copywriting, and video production are often underbudgeted.
SEO foundations. A website built by someone who understands SEO from the start is more expensive than one that is not - but the cost of retrofitting SEO onto a badly-structured site is usually much higher than building it in from scratch.
What you should be suspicious of
Very low prices for custom work. Below around 1,500 pounds for a "custom" website from an agency, you should ask very specific questions about what custom means in this context. It almost certainly means a pre-built theme, not a genuinely bespoke build.
Prices that require a long-term hosting or support contract to be viable. Some agencies price the build cheaply and lock you into expensive ongoing hosting or maintenance contracts. Make sure you understand the full cost of ownership, not just the upfront build fee.
Agencies that cannot explain their technical approach clearly. If they cannot tell you clearly what platform they build on, whether they use page builders, how they handle SEO setup, and what the site will score on PageSpeed Insights, that is a meaningful warning sign.
No mention of SEO, performance, or conversion. A website that looks good in a presentation but loads slowly, is not optimised for search, and does not convert visitors into enquiries is an expensive disappointment.
Where Codesky fits
We work with small and medium businesses across Lincolnshire and the UK. Our projects typically fall in the 2,500 to 7,500 pound range for business websites, depending on scope and complexity.
We do not publish fixed prices because every project has genuinely different requirements, and quoting a number without understanding what you need would be doing you a disservice. What we do offer is a transparent scoping process - we will understand your requirements, give you a clear itemised quote, and explain specifically what is and is not included.
If our quote is higher than you expected, we will explain exactly why and what you would be trading off with a lower-cost option. If a cheaper option would genuinely serve your needs, we will tell you that too. We would rather lose a project than take it on and deliver something we are not proud of.
Whether you need a small business website, an e-commerce site, or something more bespoke, get in touch and we will give you a straight answer.