A small business website in the UK costs roughly £500 to £6,000 as a one-off build, or £30 to £350 a month if it is managed for you. The range is wide because “a website” covers everything from a one-page template to a bespoke multi-page build with ongoing search work attached.
What each price band actually gets you
£500 – £1,500 one-off
A freelancer working from a purchased theme. You get a handful of pages, your logo and colours applied, and a contact form. Copywriting is usually yours to supply. This band is honest value if you need a presence rather than a sales channel, but budget separately for hosting, SSL and someone to call when it breaks.
£1,500 – £4,000 one-off
The standard small agency project. Two or three custom page layouts, the rest reused, plus basic on-page SEO — titles, descriptions, a sitemap submission. One round of revisions is typical, with further rounds billed hourly.
£4,000 – £6,000+ one-off
Custom design throughout, content strategy included, and often a booking system or CRM integration. At this level you are buying a project team rather than a person.
The number that gets left off the quote
Almost every one-off quote stops at launch. Hosting, SSL renewal, plugin and framework updates, security patching, content changes and performance work all sit outside it. In practice a £3,000 build costs another £600 to £1,200 a year to keep functional and findable.
That gap is not a sales trick — it is real work. Core Web Vitals thresholds move, Google ships algorithm updates, and AI assistants keep changing how they crawl. A site that was fast two years ago is mid-table today. If nobody is doing that work, you own a depreciating asset.
Comparing one-off against managed, properly
Run the arithmetic over the period you actually plan to keep the site.
Over three years, a £3,000 build plus £60 a month of hosting and maintenance comes to £5,160. A £59 a month managed plan with no setup fee comes to £2,124.
Over ten years, assuming you never redesign, the build reaches £10,200 and the subscription £7,080. Still cheaper, but the gap narrows — and nobody runs the same site for a decade, so the build side would absorb a second project somewhere in there.
Managed loses in one specific case: you need something genuinely bespoke, such as a custom booking engine or an integration with an industry-specific system. That is a software project, not a website, and it should be priced as one.
Five questions that make quotes comparable
- What is the total cost over three years, including hosting and maintenance?
- Who owns the domain, and can you take it with you?
- What is the turnaround for a content change, and is it billed?
- Is performance and SEO work included, or a separate retainer?
- Is there a minimum contract term?
The last one separates the market more than price does. A provider confident in its ongoing service does not need to lock you in.
Where we sit
We charge monthly with no setup fee and no contract, because the ongoing work is the actual product — the full pricing is published rather than quoted per enquiry. If the choice between models is what you are stuck on, subscription vs one-off build works through it in detail, and the design examples show the standard of build the fee covers.