What a website should cost in 2026 (and what it shouldn’t)

Website pricing is the only significant purchase most business owners make where they have no reference point at all. You know roughly what a van costs. You know what an accountant costs. Websites arrive as a number with nothing attached to it, and the honest answer to “is £6,000 a lot?” is: it depends entirely on what is inside it.

So let us take the number apart.

Why the same brief gets a £500 quote and a £20,000 quote

Because “website” describes an outcome, not a piece of work. Two quotes for “a five-page website for a plumbing company” can be honest, competent and thirty times apart, because one of them means put your text into a template I have used forty times and the other means work out what your customers need to see, design it, build it, write it, and be responsible for it afterwards.

Both are legitimate purchases. They are just not the same purchase, and nobody tells you which one you are being offered.

The price is not really for the pages. It is for how much thinking happens before the pages exist.

The five things you are actually paying for

Every website quote, whatever the number, is some mix of these five. When you compare quotes, you are really comparing how much of each you get.

• Thinking. Working out who visits, what they need to see, in what order, and what you want them to do. This is the part that decides whether the site earns anything, and the part that gets cut first when a quote is cheap.
• Design. Something made for your business rather than adapted from a theme. Not decoration: layout, hierarchy, and the decisions about what gets prominence.
• Build. Turning the design into something fast, accessible, editable by you, and working properly on a five-year-old Android phone as well as a new MacBook.
• Content. Words and pictures. Most projects that run late run late here, and most cheap quotes assume you will supply everything, finished, on day one.
• Aftercare. Hosting, updates, backups, security, and someone who answers the phone when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday.

What each price bracket actually buys in the UK

These are the brackets we see across the UK market in 2026. They are ranges, not rules, and a good freelancer at £3,000 will beat a bad agency at £12,000 every time.

The most common mistake is not buying the cheap one. It is buying the £1,200 site when the job needed the £5,000 one, then paying to have it built again eighteen months later. That is the expensive route, and it happens constantly.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

Ask about all of these before you sign anything. Any of them can quietly add a few thousand pounds to a project that looked fixed.

• Copywriting. If the quote says “client to supply content”, you are writing the website. Most people underestimate this by about a month. Expect £800 to £2,000 for someone else to do it.
• Photography. Stock photos of people in headsets are the fastest way to look like everyone else. A half-day shoot is typically £600 to £1,500 and improves a site more than another £2,000 of design.
• Hosting and care. A site is not a one-off purchase. Budget £25 to £150 a month for hosting, updates, backups and someone to call. If a quote has no ongoing cost at all, ask who is responsible when it breaks.
• Integrations. Your booking system, CRM, accounting software or stock feed. Each one is real work and each one is often assumed to be free.
• The domain and the email. Small, but genuinely forgotten in about half of the projects we take over.
• Getting found. A new site does not arrive with visitors attached. SEO or ads is a separate ongoing cost, and pretending otherwise is how people conclude their website “did nothing”.

How to compare two quotes properly

Put them side by side and ask the same six questions of both. The differences will be obvious within ten minutes.

• Is the design bespoke or a theme? Both are valid. You just need to know which you are buying.
• Who writes the words? The single biggest hidden difference between two quotes.
• Who can edit it afterwards? If you need to pay someone to change a phone number, the site will go stale.
• What happens after launch? Get the ongoing cost in writing, and what it includes.
• Do you own everything? Domain, hosting account, code, images. The answer should be yes, in every case, with no argument.
• What is not included? The most useful question on the list, and the one people never ask.

If a quote cannot tell you what is not in it, it is not a quote. It is a hope.

What we charge, and why

We start at £3,500 for a bespoke brochure site, and most of our projects land between £3,500 and £15,000. We do not compete at the template end, because the thinking is the part we are actually selling and there is no honest way to do that in a day.

Every project is quoted as a fixed price after a conversation, so the number you agree is the number you pay. Hosting and care is separate, from £95 a month, and you own everything from the first day.

If you want a rough number before speaking to anyone, our ballpark calculator takes about twenty seconds and gives you a real range rather than a form to fill in.