A website in the UK costs between £100 and £15,000 depending on who builds it. A DIY builder runs £100 to £500 a year. A freelancer is usually £500 to £3,000. A design studio is £2,000 to £10,000. A larger agency starts around £10,000 and goes up from there.
That’s the answer. Here’s why nobody gives it to you.
Every article on website costs is either a builder platform telling you websites are basically free, or an agency telling you “it depends” before asking for your email address. Both are selling something. So below is the full breakdown: what moves a quote, what nobody puts in it, and what you actually get at each level.
At Future Faced, projects start from £2,000 and most land between £3,000 and £7,000. I’ll break down exactly what moves a project around inside that range, because that’s the part most studios keep vague.
How much does a website cost in the UK?
Website costs in the UK fall into four bands, set by who builds it rather than by how many pages you need.
- DIY website builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy): £100 to £500 a year, plus a lot of your own time
- Freelancer: roughly £500 to £3,000 depending on experience and scope
- Design studio or small agency: £2,000 to £10,000 for most projects
- Larger agency or complex build: £10,000 to £15,000 and beyond
Those are build costs. Running costs are separate and covered further down, because they’re the part that surprises people.
What is a reasonable budget for a small business website?
For most UK small businesses, £2,000 to £7,000 is the realistic range for a website built by someone else that’s genuinely designed rather than templated.
Below £1,000 you’re looking at a builder or a junior freelancer, and that’s a fine starting point if you need a presence rather than a sales tool. Between £1,000 and £2,000 you’re buying build without much thinking, which works when you already know exactly what the site needs to say.
Above £7,000 you’re paying for complexity: integrations, portals, large content estates, ecommerce at scale. Worth it when the functionality demands it, unnecessary when it doesn’t, whatever the agency pitching it tells you.
Why is the range so wide?
Because you’re not buying pages. You’re buying thinking.
A website is positioning, copy, design, build and search foundations all working together. A five page site with proper strategy behind it costs more than a fifteen page template job. And it should, because the five page site is the one that wins the enquiry.
When two quotes for “the same website” are £1,500 apart, it’s almost never the technology. It’s how much thinking is included. One quote covers building what you ask for. The other covers working out what your business actually needs first, then building that.
What drives the price up or down?
Six things move a quote. Know them and you’re in control of the conversation with whoever you hire.
Custom design or template
A template gets adapted to your brand. Custom design starts from your positioning and builds out from there. Custom costs more, and it’s worth it when how you look is part of how you win work. For founder-led businesses, it almost always is.
Copywriting
Every site we build includes copywriting, drafted with AI assistance and then refined together until it sounds like you. Fully handwritten content from scratch costs more, and for some businesses it’s the right call.
Branding
If you arrive with a logo, some colours and fonts, that’s enough to build from. If the brand needs building or rebuilding properly, that’s a separate piece of work with its own price. Be suspicious of anyone offering “full branding” inside a £2,000 website. Something’s being skipped, you just won’t find out what until later.
Page types, not pages
Ten pages using three layouts costs less than five pages that each need their own design. When you’re comparing quotes, ask how many unique templates are included, not how many pages.
Functionality
Booking systems, client portals, membership areas, ecommerce. Each one is its own project sitting on top of the site. A brochure site with a contact form and a site with a customer portal might look similar in the proposal. They’re not.
Custom assets
Custom graphics designed in Figma, motion pieces built separately. It’s a big part of why our sites don’t look like everyone else’s. It’s also work, so it’s part of the price.
How much does a 10 page website cost?
A 10 page website costs roughly the same as a 5 page website if it reuses the same layouts, and considerably more if every page is designed from scratch.
This is the single most common misunderstanding in web design quotes. Page count is a poor guide to price because pages are cheap to duplicate and expensive to design. Ten pages built from three templates is three design jobs and seven copies. Five pages that each need their own layout is five design jobs.
A 20 page site follows the same logic. If it’s a services site with one service template used twelve times, the extra pages mostly cost copywriting time. If it’s twenty genuinely different pages, you’re close to doubling the design work.
So when you get a quote, ask how many unique page templates are included. That number tells you far more about the price than the page count does.
Is it cheaper to build a website yourself?
Yes, in money. No, in time.
A DIY builder costs £100 to £500 a year against £2,000 or more for a designed site, so the gap is real. What it costs instead is somewhere between twenty and eighty hours of your own time, and a ceiling you’ll hit sooner than you expect.
Build it yourself when the site needs to exist rather than perform: you’re pre-revenue, testing an idea, or the website is a business card rather than a sales channel. Pay someone when the site is how people decide whether to contact you, when you’re competing on search, or when the hours you’d spend on it are worth more somewhere else in the business.
The honest version of the maths: if your time is worth £40 an hour and the build takes you forty hours, the free website cost £1,600 and you still have to maintain it.
How much does GoDaddy charge for website design?
GoDaddy’s UK website builder plans start around £8 a month on annual billing and run to about £14 a month for the higher tiers, but the renewal price is the number that matters.
The entry rates are promotional. GoDaddy’s own 2026 cost guide puts standard Website Builder pricing at around £17 a month outside of sales, which works out at roughly £200 a year for a basic site and about £435 a year for the online store tier. Paying monthly rather than annually costs meaningfully more again.
So a GoDaddy site is genuinely cheap in year one and roughly £200 to £450 a year after that, forever. Over five years that’s £1,000 to £2,250, which is no longer obviously cheaper than a one-off build you own outright.
GoDaddy also offers a done-for-you design service, priced on consultation rather than published, which puts it in the same band as a freelancer.
The real trade-off isn’t price, it’s control. Builder platforms limit what you can do with sitemaps, structured data and technical SEO, which matters a great deal if organic search is how you expect to be found. If you’re not planning to compete on search, that ceiling may never bother you.
Can ChatGPT build a website?
It can build you a working website, and it cannot build you a website that wins work.
AI tools will produce a functioning site from a description in minutes, and the output is genuinely better than a bad template. For a landing page, an internal tool or a first version of something you’re testing, that’s often enough.
What you don’t get is the part that costs money. A model doesn’t know what makes your business different from the four competitors it was also trained on, so it writes what a business like yours usually says. It doesn’t know which objection loses you deals, which proof point actually converts, or what your buyer is worried about at the moment they land on the page.
The result is a site that’s competent and anonymous. It looks like a website. It reads like every other website.
Used well, AI shortens the work rather than replacing it. We use it in our own process, particularly for first copy drafts. The judgement about what to say, and what to leave out, is the part being paid for.
What do you get at each price point?
Under £500: a website builder. Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy will get something live. Worth it if you genuinely just need a simple template site to exist. You’re trading time for money, and you’ll feel the ceiling quickly.
£500 to £1,500: a freelancer or a very small build. A decent freelancer can do good work here. If your budget is below £1,000, that’s where I’d point you. For that amount we could put together a nice one or two page site, but not much more, and I’d rather tell you now than take the project and cut corners.
£2,000 to £7,000: studio territory. Positioning, custom design, proper copy, SEO foundations and a site you can edit yourself, all as one piece of work. This is where we sit, and it’s the right level for an established founder-led business whose website needs to carry real commercial weight.
£10,000 and up: complexity, not vanity. Large content estates, integrations, portals, ecommerce at scale. Worth it when the functionality demands it.
What are the ongoing costs of a website?
Budget £500 to £1,500 a year beyond the build, depending on how much support you want.
- Hosting and domain: from a few pounds a month on shared hosting to £30 or more for decent managed hosting. On our care plans both are included in the monthly price
- Plugin and software licences: quality WordPress sites run on premium plugins with annual costs
- Maintenance: updates, security, backups, monitoring. Our care plans start at £45 a month and include hosting, your domain, updates, security, backups and support, with higher tiers adding content changes and reporting
- The cost of doing it twice
That last one deserves a story.
A client came to us after paying someone £800 for a website. Three months later, nothing was live. No site, no updates, and eventually no replies at all. Just £800, gone quiet.
We had their full site designed, written and launched in about four weeks. They’re still with us today.
So the £800 website actually cost £800, plus three months of lost enquiries, plus the price of doing it properly. Turns out the most expensive website you can buy is the one you buy twice.
Which platform should you build on?
We build in WordPress, and we’ll keep doing so until something beats it.
It’s not nostalgia. WordPress means you own your site, organic search actually works, and you can make your own edits without calling us for every typo.
Framer is genuinely promising, especially for landing pages. But sending organic traffic to it is still difficult, and adding real functionality like portals gets awkward fast. Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy are fine if a simple template site is truly all you need. For a business that plans to grow on search, WordPress is still our answer.
Is having your own website worth it?
It depends what you feed it.
That’s why we build SEO foundations into every site instead of bolting them on later. One of our clients, Revive Windows, saw 114% more leads within six months of us managing their SEO. The site paid for itself, then kept going.
A bad website is a cost. A good one is the hardest working thing your business owns.
Read more about UK SEO pricing in 2026.
How we price at Future Faced
Projects start from £2,000. Most founder-led businesses invest between £3,000 and £7,000 depending on the levers above, at a fixed price agreed before we start.
A typical build takes around six weeks, though that flexes with how quickly content and feedback come back from your side. Sites move as fast as their founders do.
We work on a 50% deposit with the balance on completion. Monthly payment options are available, and for the right project we’re open to revenue share.
If that’s the right level for where your business is, have a look at how we approach web design or get in touch. If it’s not, I hope the breakdown helps you brief whoever you do hire.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay monthly? Yes. Our standard structure is a 50% deposit with 50% on completion, but monthly options are available, and for the right project we’ll consider revenue share.
Why do agencies charge such different prices for the same thing? Because it’s rarely the same thing. The variables are how much strategy and positioning work is included, custom design versus template, who writes the copy, and how much custom functionality is involved. Ask each quote to break those down and the price difference usually explains itself.
Is a £500 website ever worth it? Sometimes. If you need a simple presence and have more time than budget, a builder or junior freelancer at this level is a reasonable start. Just go in knowing it’s a starting point, not a growth asset.
What should I budget for year one in total? Beyond the build, allow for hosting, domain, plugin licences and maintenance. As a rule of thumb, £500 to £1,500 across the year depending on how much support you want. Our care plans start at £45 a month and include hosting and your domain.
How long does a website take to build? Around six weeks for a typical build. The biggest variable is responsiveness: sites move as fast as content, feedback and approvals come back.
