What a small-business website actually costs in the UK
Published 2026 benchmarks for a five-page site, a ten-to-twenty-page site and an online shop, with the sources — and where a fixed price sits against each of them.
4 min read
By TeshTech in What things cost
Ask five UK studios what a website costs and you will get five variations of "it depends". That is not evasion, exactly — scope really does move the number — but it leaves you unable to tell a fair quote from a bad one. So here are the published 2026 benchmarks, with the sources, and then where a fixed price sits against them.
What the market charges
These are independently sourced ranges, not our numbers. Where the sources disagree, the spread is shown rather than averaged away.
| What you are buying | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace), per year | £240 | £300 | £360 |
| Freelancer, basic custom site | £1,500 | £2,000–£3,000 | £5,000 |
| Small-business site, 5–10 pages | £2,500 | £3,500 | £4,500 |
| Business site, 10–20 pages | £4,500 | £5,500 | £7,000 |
| UK agency, standard small-business site | £2,500 | £5,000 | £10,000 |
| E-commerce, entry level | £4,000 | £6,500 | £12,000 |
| Custom admin dashboard or internal tool | £3,000 | £6,000 | £10,000 |
The consensus that falls out of it: most UK small businesses pay £3,500 to £7,000 for a professional website in 2026. London is materially higher across every row.
The sanity check nobody shows you
A price is only meaningful next to the labour behind it. UK freelance developer day rates in 2026 run to a national median of about £500, with web development specifically averaging £431 — and £575 in London, a third above the rest of the country.
A real small-business build is fifteen to thirty developer-days once you include design, content, testing and the launch itself. At the median that is £7,500 to £15,000 of labour before anyone has paid for hosting or made a profit.
Run that arithmetic against a quote and it tells you something immediately. A £1,000 price for a site with a CMS, a few integrations and a working contact form implies an effective rate somewhere near £33 to £65 a day. Nobody can deliver that and still be there in eighteen months to answer the phone, which is the actual risk you are buying when you take the cheapest quote: not bad work, but an absent supplier.
Where the money goes
Roughly, and in the order it gets spent:
- Discovery and structure. What the site needs to do, and what it does not.
- Design. Either a template with your brand applied, or original work. This is the single biggest lever on price.
- Build. Templates and page structures, the CMS, forms, integrations.
- Content. Whoever writes the words is doing a job. If it is you, the price is lower and the project is slower.
- Testing and launch. Devices, browsers, accessibility, redirects, analytics.
The two rows that move the most are design and content. A studio quoting £2,500 and one quoting £6,000 are usually not disagreeing about the build; they are disagreeing about how much of the first and fourth items you are doing yourself.
Where we sit
We publish four fixed prices rather than quote per project. Launch is £1,750 for up to five pages with a template and your brand applied. Growth is £3,950 for up to fifteen pages with custom design, two concepts, and five pages of copy written for you. Commerce is £6,950. Custom software starts at £12,000. All ex-VAT.
Against the table above, Growth sits at the bottom of the "business site, 10–20 pages" band and Launch sits below the freelancer row. That is a deliberate position and it is not achieved by paying anyone less: it comes from selling the same four things repeatedly instead of scoping every project from scratch, and from the platform underneath them being ours rather than rebuilt each time.
The honest caveat is the one every fixed price carries. A fixed price is only fixed if the scope is, so the boundaries are published too — what each package includes, and what pushes a project into the next one. If your requirements do not fit, we will say so rather than absorbing it and finding out in week three.
You can read what each package includes, see the full price list including care plans and add-ons, or price your own build — the configurator asks about six things and gives you a number, without a form or a phone call first. If you would rather start with what a website project actually involves, our websites service page covers the shape of one end to end.
Sources
Figures in the tables above are drawn from published 2026 UK pricing research, including Duport, CloudSwitched, Red Eagle and Osdire's developer rate survey.