How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?

The honest answer to “how much does a website cost in the UK?” depends on what the site has to do, who writes it and who looks after it once it is live. Those three choices decide whether you pay a subscription and your own evenings, or a project fee to a freelancer, a studio or an agency, and how much the site costs you every year after launch.

I will not give you a made-up UK average. I found no independent survey of UK website prices, so this guide sticks to what I can check: published platform prices, a large survey from France, where I also work, the yearly bills people forget, and how I price my own projects.

If you are planning the whole project, from choosing a platform to launch day, start with my guide to small business websites.

How much does a website cost in the UK, route by route

There are five ways to get a business website. Two cost mostly your time, plus a subscription or a domain name. The other three are a project fee, then running costs.

At the time of writing (October 2026), UK pricing guides list Squarespace at £12 (Basic), £17 (Core), £29 (Plus) and £79 (Advanced) a month on annual billing, VAT included. Those figures may predate the rise Squarespace announced in July 2026: in the US, Basic went from $16 to $19, Core from $23 to $29 and Plus from $39 to $49 a month on annual billing, while Advanced stayed at $99. I found no confirmed new UK prices, so check the official pricing page before you subscribe. Code injection, which I use to add custom code for clients, starts with Core.

For the build itself, the most solid figures I know come from France. La Fabrique du Net’s July 2026 price survey gathers 1,312 project budgets declared by 175 agencies: half of the brochure sites cost between €2,000 and €8,000 (roughly £1,700 to £7,000), with a median below €4,000, and the median for all types of site is €5,200. These are agency prices in another market, so treat them as an order of magnitude, not as a UK price list.

What drives the price of a website

Two quotes for “a five-page website” can be far apart because they do not cover the same work. These are the lines that move the price.

Pages and page templates

A home page, four service pages and a contact page make one project. Add a blog, a portfolio, a page for each town you serve or a second language, and the design, the writing and the SEO work grow with them. Pages built from one template, such as product sheets, cost less each than pages designed one by one.

Who writes the words

Copywriting is often the line a cheap quote leaves to you. If the price assumes you will supply every text, count the evenings it would take you to write ten pages that persuade people to call and that rank on Google. In my own projects, SEO research and copywriting are a full stage of the work, not an afterthought.

Photos and visual identity

For a website, I need pictures from the client; otherwise I generate or buy them. Your own photos of your team, your premises and your work beat any stock image, and they cost nothing extra if you already have them. A logo and a visual identity are a separate piece of work, so check whether the quote includes them.

Features beyond pages

Contact forms are standard. Online booking, payments, a shop, a members’ area, a price calculator or a link to your customer software each add design, building and testing time. Some come as a builder feature or an extension; others need custom code, or a small web app built into the site.

The platform, and who maintains it

Squarespace includes hosting, security and updates in the subscription. WordPress software is free, but hosting and premium plugins are not, and someone has to run the updates. A custom-coded site usually needs a developer for anything beyond simple content changes. My Squarespace vs WordPress comparison goes through these trade-offs in detail.

The running costs that come back every year

The build is paid once. These lines come back every year, whoever builds the site:

Google lists its prices by country on its help page on payment plans. At those prices, a Squarespace site you build yourself on the Core plan (£204 a year), with a .co.uk domain and one Google Workspace mailbox (£70.80 a year), comes to about £280 a year before VAT on the mailbox, and before your own time.

Watch renewal prices in particular. Some providers advertise a cheap first year and charge much more afterwards; in my experience, Spaceship and Namecheap do not. Email is the other line people forget: I used to run email on Microsoft and found it a pain, which has not been the case with Namecheap and Spaceship. My guide to domains, hosting and email explains how the three fit together.

What a cheap website really costs

A low quote is not always the cheap option. These are the places where I see the bill come back.

WordPress with nobody looking after it

Every client who has called me in an emergency called about a WordPress site. Pilotech, an air conditioning and heating installer in the Paris region, called me when its WordPress site was hacked: it needed the old site recovered and a new one built. The software costs nothing; you pay for the updates, or for the repairs when nobody runs them.

A site that looks cheap

I want my clients’ prospects to take them seriously from the first page, even to be a little intimidated. A site that looks amateur invites haggling: if a prospect doubts that you are a serious company, they also doubt that you are worth your price. My guide on how to make your website look professional shows what changes that first impression.

A free site from a friend or a relative

A website is not a one-time gift. Whoever builds it for free signs up for maintenance for life, unless you agree up front that changes will cost something, and free sites attract endless edit requests. My guide to website maintenance covers what upkeep involves and what it costs.

A powerful tool you have to learn alone

Wix Studio and Webflow can produce excellent sites in a specialist’s hands. For a solo owner who has to learn them alone, they cost hours, and the Wix editor has always felt laggy to me, on every device and connection I have tried. If you choose either, budget for a specialist as well.

How to compare website quotes

Send the same brief to every provider, then compare the answers line by line:

1. Pages: how many are designed, and how many are written and filled in for you?
2. Copy: who writes the texts, and is keyword research included?
3. Photos and visual identity: included, bought, generated, or yours to supply?
4. SEO: what is done before launch, and what is left for later?
5. Platform: which one, and will you be able to edit the content yourself?
6. Revisions: how many rounds, and what counts as an extra?
7. After launch: what support, for how long, and at what price?
8. Year two: subscription or hosting, domain, email and maintenance, in writing.
9. Payment: deposit, stages and payment options.

How I price my own website projects

My website projects have a fixed price per project, with payment options. I do not publish a price list: the price follows the scope, and I set it once I know what the site has to do.

The fixed price follows my process: questions about your business, your offer and the clients you prefer to work with; a visual identity; page templates; SEO research and copywriting; then the metadata, a few SEO articles prepared in advance and the connection to your domain. My web design process walks through each step.

Two rules keep a fixed price fixed. The client confirms the design before I build the rest, and requests that arrive after that confirmation are paid extras. I allow up to three rounds of changes; it never comes to that, because the design is agreed first.

AI has changed my side of the work too. My delivery times have shrunk, which sometimes leaves room to look for extra solutions for a client and to build more complete ones.

Your website budget checklist

Before you ask anyone for a quote:

1. Write down what the site must bring in: calls, quote requests, bookings or sales.
2. List the pages: one per service, plus home, about, contact and legal pages.
3. Decide who will edit the site after launch, because that decides the platform.
4. Gather your photos, your logo and any texts you already have.
5. Set two budgets: one for the build, and one for every year after it.
6. Send the same brief to two or three providers and compare their answers with the list above.

If you are hands-on and only need a simple brochure site, you can build a website with AI and host it for free on GitHub Pages, within its limits: your main costs are then the domain and a few evenings, and GitHub Pages is not meant for a shop. If you will edit the site yourself, a builder subscription is a cost you know in advance. And if the site has to bring in clients from Google from the start, put the money into the copy and the SEO groundwork, because that is what turns a website into enquiries.