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

Ask five people what a website costs and you’ll get five answers, and all of them can be right. A sole trader can get online for £9 a month. A London agency will happily quote £20,000 for the same five pages. Both exist, and the gap between them is where most small business owners get stuck.

So this guide puts real UK prices on every route, as they stand in October 2026. I’ve gone through the published price lists of the builders, the hosts, the registrars and a couple of dozen UK freelancers, agencies and pay monthly firms. Where a figure comes from a survey rather than a price list, I say so. All prices are before VAT unless I say otherwise.

The short answer

For a typical small business site of five to ten pages, this is what each route costs in the UK right now.

The rest of this article explains where those numbers come from, what they leave out, and what each route adds up to over three years. That last part matters more than the headline price.

Why one quote is £600 and another is £6,000

A website is mostly somebody’s time. The average web designer in the UK earns about £31,000 a year, according to Indeed’s October 2026 salary data. The average UK freelancer charges £390 a day, based on YunoJuno’s report covering 261,000 contracts. A five-page site that takes a competent designer four days to build, test and launch costs around £1,500 in labour before anyone has made a penny of profit. That’s the floor for professional work done in the UK.

Everything above that floor comes down to five things:

• How many pages, and who writes them. Ten pages take longer than five. Pages where the designer also has to write the words take far longer again.
• Template or bespoke. A site built on a good template is fast. A design drawn from scratch adds days of work and rounds of changes.
• Features. A contact form is cheap. Online booking, a members’ area, a quote calculator or a shop are not.
• Who you’re buying from. An agency has an office, a project manager and VAT to add. A freelancer working from home often has none of those.
• Where you are. London and the South East cost more. Regional freelancers charge £35 to £55 an hour, London agencies £100 to £200.

Option 1: build it yourself with a website builder

If you’re a one-person business and money is tight, this is where I’d start, and I say that as someone who sells the alternative. You pick a template, drop your words and photos into it, and Wix or Squarespace worry about the hosting, the security and the updates so you don’t have to.

What they charge in the UK at the moment, if you pay for the year:

• Wix: Light £9, Core £16, Business £25, Business Elite £119 a month. Pay monthly instead and Light rises to £11.50.
• Squarespace: Basic £12, Core £17, Plus £29, Advanced £79 a month before VAT. Squarespace shows prices with VAT included, so you’ll see £14.40 for Basic on their site.
• GoDaddy Website Builder: from £7.49 a month on an annual term. The monthly price is about a third higher.
• WordPress.com: around £3 to £30 a month depending on the plan. Their UK page prices in dollars, so check the checkout figure.

A few things the big “from £9” never mentions. The free domain covers the first year only, and a .co.uk then renews at £10 to £15 a year. Email isn’t included, so budget £3 to £10 a month per mailbox. And those yearly prices mean paying £108 to £300 up front, not £9 this month.

The real cost is your time. Plan on 20 to 40 hours to build a decent five-page site if you’ve never done it before, and a few hours a month after that. If your hourly rate as a plumber, accountant or therapist is £50 or more, the “free” build cost you £1,000 to £2,000 in lost work. Some people enjoy it. Most don’t.

So a realistic first year comes to somewhere between £150 and £400. Plus a lot of evenings.

Option 2: WordPress on your own hosting

WordPress runs over 40% of the web and the software is free. You pay for hosting, a domain, and usually a theme and a few plugins. Then you, or someone you pay, has to build the site and keep it updated.

UK hosting for a small WordPress site:

• Krystal: £7 a month, with no introductory discount to catch you out later.
• 20i: £1 for the first month, then £10 a month, no contract.
• SiteGround: £1.99 a month for the first year, paid up front, then £13.99.
• Hostinger: £1.49 a month, but only if you pay 48 months in advance (£71.52). It renews at £7.99.
• IONOS: the Plus plan is £1 a month for the first year and £9 after that.

The number to look at is the renewal, not the big one in the advert. That £1.99 host becomes £13.99 in year two, which is £168 a year, and by then your site is on it and moving is a faff.

Then there’s the software. A decent paid theme is £50 to £70, once. Paid plugins are the ones that creep. Elementor Pro for page building is $60 a year, Gravity Forms is $59, a caching plugin is about £45, and most are billed in dollars or euros so the price moves with the exchange rate. Three or four of those and you’re at £200 a year before you’ve touched hosting.

One thing you shouldn’t be paying for is the padlock. Let’s Encrypt hands out trusted certificates for nothing, every host I’ve listed includes one, and I still see quotes with “SSL certificate, £120 a year” on them. Query it.

Call it £150 to £500 a year for hosting, the domain and the software. Building it and keeping it alive is on top, whether that’s your weekends or somebody’s invoice.

Option 3: hire a freelance web designer

Most small businesses I talk to end up here, wanting more than a template but not an agency bill. The trouble is that “freelancer” means anything from a student with a Wix login to a developer with fifteen years behind them who got sick of agency life. That’s why quotes for the same five-page site land anywhere between £500 and £3,000 in 2026.

Hourly, most UK freelance web designers charge £40 to £70. Regionally it’s £35 to £55. Day rates for digital designers average £380 to £390. A £1,500 quote for five pages is roughly four days’ work at those rates, which is about right for a template-based build with your content supplied.

Two things to know about freelancers:

• Many don’t charge VAT. Below £90,000 of turnover they don’t have to register, so a £1,500 quote is £1,500. An agency quoting the same figure means £1,800.
• Hosting and upkeep are separate. Some freelancers offer a care plan at £30 to £90 a month. Others build it, hand over the logins and that’s the last you hear from them. Find out which kind you’re dealing with, and ask the awkward question: what happens to my site if you go and get a job?

The extras are where a £1,500 site turns into a £3,000 one. A professional copywriter’s day rate sits around £440, the median from ProCopywriters’ 2026 survey of 383 freelancers, which works out at £50 to £150 a page. A commercial photographer wants £500 to £1,000 for a day. A logo can be £100 or £1,000 depending on who draws it.

For a five-page site I’d expect to pay £1,000 to £2,500 to a good freelancer, then £10 to £60 a month to keep it hosted and cared for.

Option 4: use a web design agency

With an agency you get a team. There’s a designer, a developer, probably a copywriter, and a project manager whose job is to keep the other three on schedule. All four of them are on your invoice. Every UK price guide I read this year put a small business site from an agency somewhere between £2,500 and £10,000. Push past fifteen pages with a custom design and it’s £5,000 to £15,000. London is its own market: nothing much starts below £8,000 there, and £30,000 raises no eyebrows.

Hourly, it’s £60 to £150 outside London. Inside the M25 it’s £100 to £200. Half up front and half on launch is normal. An agency that wants the whole lot before it has drawn a line is one I’d walk away from.

Running costs after launch are higher too. Agencies tend to charge £20 to £100 a month for hosting and £100 to £500 for a retainer. For context, somebody went through 18 published UK price lists in September 2026 and found the median entry-level care plan was £50 a month. So if you’re handing over £300 a month, you should be getting hours of real work for it, not just backups.

Is it worth it? For a firm with twenty staff, a brand to protect and a site that has to do several jobs, often yes. For a plasterer who needs to come up in local search and get the phone ringing, almost never. You’d be paying for a project manager you don’t need.

Option 5: a pay monthly website

This is the route most of the price guides skip, which is odd, because it’s how a growing share of small businesses now buy. The idea is simple. Rather than finding £1,500 up front, you pay a monthly fee and the supplier builds the site, hosts it, keeps it secure and makes the changes. One supplier, one bill, and if it goes wrong there’s one phone number to ring.

UK prices run from £19 a month for a basic five-page site to £250 and beyond for agency-grade monthly plans. Most fall between £40 and £90 a month. It’s the same product as a freelancer or agency build, just paid for differently, so the same quality questions apply.

The detail is where pay monthly plans differ, and it’s the detail that decides whether it’s good value:

• Setup fee. Many charge nothing. Some charge £199 to £399. One big national brand has charged hundreds up front and then a monthly fee on top of that.
• Minimum term. Some have none. Twelve months is the most common. I’ve seen 24 and even 36-month minimums in the small print. On a £30 a month plan a 36-month term is a £1,080 commitment.
• Who owns the site. This is the big one. Some providers hand you the files and domain if you leave. Others keep the design and code “as security” and you leave with nothing. One provider’s terms say they can keep your domain name if you cancel in the first year. Read the terms before you sign, not after.
• What “updates” means. Software updates are not the same as changing your opening hours. Check how many content changes are included each month, and what the turnaround is.

For what it’s worth, this is how we do it at Ubie. Our pay monthly websites are £39, £69 or £89 a month, there’s no setup fee, hosting, email, security, backups and content changes are included, and after 12 months the site is yours. I’m telling you that so you can compare like with like, not because every business should pick us. If you’re on a tight budget, our affordable website design page sets out what you get at the lower end, and the cheap website design page is blunt about the trade-offs.

Realistic cost: £40 to £90 a month for a good five-page site, all in. Over three years that’s £1,440 to £3,240, which lands in the same place as a freelancer build plus a care plan.

What an online shop costs

Selling online adds a layer of cost that brochure sites don’t have: the shop software, and the card fees on every sale.

Shopify is the one most people have heard of. In the UK it’s £19 a month for Basic if you pay for the year, or £25 month by month, then £49 for Grow and £259 for Advanced. The bit people miss is the card fees. Shopify Payments takes 2% plus 25p on every online card payment on Basic, easing to 1.5% on Advanced, and if you’d rather use your own payment provider Shopify charges another 2% on top. Turn over £3,000 a month on Basic and you’re paying £19 for the plan and about £70 in card fees.

Squarespace does something similar. Its £12 Basic plan takes 2% of every sale, the £17 Core plan takes nothing, and card processing of 2% plus 25p applies on both.

WooCommerce is the WordPress option and the software itself costs nothing. What you pay for is hosting that can cope with a shop, which is £10 to £40 a month from UK hosts, and any paid extensions you bolt on at $29 to $299 a year each. Stripe and PayPal take roughly what Shopify does on each card payment. You do save on software, but somebody has to set it all up and keep it patched, and that somebody is either you or a developer.

Having a shop built for you is a different budget again. A freelancer or small agency will want £2,000 to £10,000 and a bigger agency £8,000 to £30,000. Pay monthly providers usually treat a shop as an add-on. With us it’s a one-off £299 on top of the Premium plan.

Whatever route you choose, the biggest hidden cost is the products themselves. Each one needs a photo and a description. Fifty products at twenty minutes each is nearly 17 hours of work before you’ve sold anything.

The running costs that aren’t in the quote

This is the part most guides skim, and the part that catches people out in year two. A website is never a one-off purchase.

Add it up and a professionally built site that’s properly looked after costs £500 to £2,000 a year to run, before any new work. That’s the figure to compare against a pay monthly fee, because a pay monthly fee usually includes most of this table.

What each route costs over three years

Nobody buys a website for a month. The fair comparison is the total over a realistic life. So this is a five-page small business site over three years. Hosting, domain and basic upkeep are included. VAT, copywriting and photography are not.

• Website builder: £500 to £1,000. Wix Core at £16 a month comes to £576 over three years. Add two domain renewals and a mailbox and you’re near the top of that range. What you can’t put on the chart is the forty-odd hours you spend building it, and the evenings you spend fiddling with it afterwards.
• WordPress you manage yourself: £500 to £1,500. Hosting at £7 to £14 a month, a domain, a theme and a couple of paid plugins. Cheaper than it sounds, until something breaks on a Sunday and you’re the one who has to fix it.
• Pay monthly: £1,400 to £3,200. That’s £40 to £90 a month with, in most cases, nothing else to buy. The £19 a month plans bring it under £700, if you can live with the terms attached to them.
• Freelancer: £1,900 to £4,500. I’ve assumed a £1,500 build, a tenner a month for hosting, the domain, and a care plan at £30 to £60. Drop the care plan and the number falls, but then you’re the care plan, and most owners I know are terrible at it.
• Agency: £5,000 to £16,000. A £4,000 build, which is the modest end for an agency, with £50 to £300 a month going out for hosting and a retainer after launch.

The honest conclusion is that a pay monthly plan and a freelancer-plus-care-plan cost about the same over three years. The difference is cash flow, who holds the risk, and how many suppliers you’re dealing with. An agency costs two to four times more and should be giving you two to four times the result.

How to spend less without getting a worse site

1. Write your own words, or at least a rough draft. Nobody knows your business like you, and content is the slowest, most expensive part of any build. A page of notes from you saves a designer hours.
2. Launch with five pages, not fifteen. Home, what you do, who you are, what customers say, how to get in touch. That’s a business website. The area pages and case studies can come once it has paid for itself.
3. Use a template and spend the saving on photos. Real photos of you, your van, your shop and your work do more for enquiries than a bespoke layout ever will.
4. Register the domain yourself, in your own name. A tenner a year, and nobody can ever hold your web address over you when you want to leave. I’ve had to untangle this for new clients more times than I’d like.
5. Do the three-year sum before you sign anything. The £1.49 host that renews at £7.99. The £9 builder that needs another £10 of email. The £30 a month plan with 36 months in the small print. They all look cheap on day one.

So what should you pay?

One-person business, more time than money? A website builder at £9 to £16 a month will do the job for now, and nothing stops you moving up later.

Want it done properly and looked after by someone else? Budget £40 to £90 a month on a pay monthly plan, or £1,500 to £2,500 up front with a freelancer and £50 a month after that to keep it healthy. If a friend asked me, those are the two routes I’d point them at.

If you’re bigger, with a brand to manage and a site that has to do real work, an agency at £5,000 to £10,000 earns its fee. Below that budget, you’re paying agency overheads for freelancer output.

And whichever route you take, get the ownership question answered in writing before any money changes hands. Who owns the domain, the design and the content if you leave? A good supplier answers that in one sentence. A bad one changes the subject.

If you’d like a straight answer on what your own site should cost, send me a few lines about your business and I’ll tell you honestly which route fits, even if it isn’t ours.