Ask five agencies what a website costs and you’ll get five numbers, and none of them will be wrong. The price depends on what the site has to do, who’s building it and what’s included afterwards. We’ve built more than 500 websites since 2016, for one-van trades and for shops turning over millions, and the range between the cheapest and the dearest is enormous. This guide explains what drives the figure, what you should expect for your money at each level, what’s usually not in the price, and the questions to ask before you sign. Whoever you end up choosing, you’ll know what you’re buying.
What actually drives the price
Five things, in roughly this order.
How many pages, and what’s on them. A five-page brochure site is a different job from a forty-page site with a service page for every town you cover. More pages means more design, more content and more time, but the real cost is in the thinking: working out what the pages should be and how people move between them.
What the site has to do. A site that shows what you do and gives people a phone number is the simplest kind. Add online booking, a members’ area, a quote calculator, a shop with a hundred products and a stock system to talk to, and each one adds build time and testing. Functionality is where quotes diverge most.
Design from scratch or from a template. A template is a design someone else made that gets your logo and colours dropped in. It’s quick and cheap, and it looks like it. A design from scratch starts with your business and your customers and ends up looking like nobody else’s. It costs more because a designer spends days on it rather than hours.
Who writes the words and takes the pictures. A surprising amount of website cost is content. If you’re supplying the text and photos, the price is lower and the timescale depends on you. If the agency is writing and shooting, it’s higher and faster.
Who’s building it. A freelancer working from home has lower overheads than an agency with an office and a team, and charges less. The trade-off is usually in what happens when they’re on holiday, ill or busy, and in who you can ring in three years when something breaks.
The three kinds of website people actually buy
We’d rather describe what you get at each level than put a number on it, because numbers without context are how people end up with the wrong site.
A starter site. Five to eight pages, a template or a light custom design, your content, a contact form and the basics of SEO set up. For a new business that needs to exist online and look credible. It should be live in a couple of weeks. The risk is that it’s built on a page builder with a template, which is fine until you want to change it or it slows down.
A business site built for enquiries. Ten to twenty pages designed from scratch, planned around what your customers search for, with proper local SEO foundations, fast loading, tracking set up so you know where enquiries come from, and the ability to grow. This is most of what we build. The sites we built for BJC Electrical, Buildable and Mogensen are this kind, and each one took its business from a handful of leads a month to 20 or 30 once marketing was pointed at it.
A shop or a system. E-commerce with a real product range, payments, delivery rules and integrations, or a custom build with a portal, booking engine or something else off-the-shelf platforms can’t do. These are projects, not purchases: specified in writing, built in stages, tested properly. Mobiquip’s shop started as an idea and now takes more than £2 million a year, but it’s been developed continuously since the first build.
What’s usually not in the price
This is where people get caught out. Ask about every one of these.
Hosting. The server the site lives on, paid monthly or yearly. Cheap shared hosting is a few pounds a month and worth exactly that. Managed hosting, where someone keeps the site patched, backed up and monitored, is more. Ours starts from £30 plus VAT a month.
Maintenance. WordPress, plugins and themes need updating, and someone has to do it and check nothing broke. Some agencies include a year, some charge monthly, some leave it to you. If nobody’s doing it, the site will eventually be hacked or stop working.
Content. Text, photography, video. If it’s not in the quote, you’re writing it.
The domain. Usually a small annual fee. Make sure it’s registered in your name, not the agency’s.
SEO and marketing. Building a site and getting it found are different jobs. A quote for a website almost never includes ongoing SEO or advertising, and a site nobody can find is a very expensive business card.
Changes after launch. Some agencies include a round of changes, some charge per hour, some have a monthly package. Ask.
Why a cheap site often costs more
A site that costs very little usually saves money in one of three places: a template instead of a design, a page builder instead of coded, or an overseas developer you’ll never speak to. Each saving comes with a bill later. The template looks like your competitor’s. The page builder slows the site down and breaks when a plugin updates. The developer isn’t there when you need a change. We rebuild sites like this regularly, and the rebuild plus the original often costs more than doing it properly once.
That’s not an argument for the most expensive quote. It’s an argument for understanding what each quote includes and what it doesn’t.
How we price a website
We don’t publish a starting price, because the honest range is too wide to be useful and a “from” figure tends to become the figure people expect. What we do is give you a fixed, itemised quote with timescales after a first conversation, so you know exactly what you’re paying for, what’s included and when it’ll be live, before anything starts. A small business site usually takes about two weeks from sign-off; almost everything we build is finished within two months. Once it’s paid for, the site, the design and the content are yours, and the domain is in your name from day one.
Ten questions to ask any agency
- Is this a template or a design from scratch, and can I see examples of each?
- Is it built with a page builder or coded? (And what happens to speed and updates either way?)
- Who writes the content and who takes the photos?
- Is hosting included, and what does it cost after the first year?
- Who updates WordPress and the plugins, and what does that cost?
- Do I own the site, the design and the content once it’s paid for?
- Is the domain registered in my name?
- What’s the timescale, and what do you need from me to hit it?
- What happens if I want to leave? Can I take the site with me?
- Who do I ring when something goes wrong, and when are they there?
If an agency can’t answer these plainly, that tells you something too.
Talk to us
If you’d like a quote, tell us what the site needs to do. You’ll get a fixed price with timescales, and an honest view on whether you need everything you’ve asked for. Ring 0800 699 0037 or email hello@codesky.co.uk.
