Small business website packages are almost always sold by page count. One page, three pages, five pages, ten pages, with a price attached to each. The trouble is that a page count tells you nothing about whether the site will work for your business, and most people pick a size by guessing.
The better way to choose is to write down the jobs your website has to do, then see how many pages those jobs need. A dentist with six treatments and two locations needs more room than a mobile car valeter covering one town. Do that exercise first and the package almost picks itself.
What is actually inside a small business website package?
A package is two things bundled together: a number of pages, and the plumbing that keeps those pages online. The pages are the visible part. The plumbing is hosting, an SSL certificate so the address shows as secure, a domain name, business email addresses, and whatever ongoing support the seller offers.
Different sellers split that bundle differently. A one off build from a freelance designer usually covers the pages and nothing else, and you arrange hosting and email yourself or pay a separate annual fee. A DIY platform gives you the plumbing and expects you to build the pages. A rental package like ours puts the lot in one monthly figure.
None of those is wrong. They suit different people. What matters is knowing which parts you are buying, because a cheap headline price that excludes hosting, email and any future changes is not really cheaper. We have written about what the total actually comes to in how much a small business website should cost in the UK.
Count jobs, not pages
Before you look at any price list, write down what a visitor needs to be able to do on your site. Not what you want to say. What they need to do. A short list for a typical trade or service business looks something like this:
- Work out in five seconds whether you do the thing they need doing
- Check you cover their town
- See that other people have used you and were happy
- Get a rough idea of price, or at least of how pricing works
- See examples of finished work
- Contact you without hunting for a number
- Find answers to the two or three questions they always ask
Now group those jobs. Several of them can live comfortably on one page. Reviews, a gallery and a call button do not each need a page of their own, and a package that includes them as built in features rather than separate pages saves you paying for pages you do not need.
What genuinely needs its own page is a distinct service that people search for by name. If customers type "emergency boiler repair Grantham" into Google, that deserves a page with those words on it and a description of how the callout works. If they only ever search for your trade in general, you do not need six service pages to prove you exist.
How many pages does a small business website need?
Here is how the common sizes tend to shake out in practice. Our own prices are below as a reference point, and all of them exclude VAT.
One page
A single page works when you do one thing, in one area, and the decision is quick. Mobile services, single trade operators, a new business testing the water. Everything sits on one scrolling page: what you do, where you work, a few photos, reviews, contact details.
The honest limitation is that a one page site has very little room to target more than one search term. If you want to be found for five different services, one page will struggle. Our Starter is £49 a month excluding VAT, and it is genuinely enough for a lot of sole traders. If that is you, do not let anyone talk you into ten pages you will never fill.
Three pages
This is the size most small businesses land on and stay on. Typically a home page, a services page and a contact page, or a home page, an about page and a services page. It gives you room to explain what you do properly without leaving three pages empty.
Three pages suits a business with a clear offer and two or three related services. Our Essential is £79 a month excluding VAT.
Five pages
Five pages is where separate service pages start to earn their keep. Instead of one services page listing everything, you get a page per main service, each one written around the words customers actually use. That helps in search and it helps the visitor, because the page they land on is about the thing they wanted.
It also suits businesses where trust takes a bit of work: accountants, care providers, anyone dealing with a nervous or heavily researched purchase. Our Professional is £99 a month excluding VAT.
Ten pages
Ten pages makes sense when you have several distinct services, more than one location, or a customer who reads a lot before ringing. Construction firms, multi discipline consultancies, clinics with a treatment list. Each page can go deep on one thing rather than skimming five.
Be honest about whether you will fill them. Ten thin pages are worse than three good ones, both for the reader and for Google. Our Business is £149 a month excluding VAT. If you are staring at that number wondering whether you need it, you probably do not yet.
The parts of a package that are not pages
Two packages at the same page count can be very different once you read what else is in them. These are the items worth checking line by line.
- Hosting and SSL. Included or extra? If extra, what does it cost annually and who renews it? Our plain English guide to hosting covers what you are actually paying for.
- Business email. An address at your own domain rather than a Gmail one. Some packages include it, some do not, some hand you a bill for it a year later.
- Domain name. Free with the package, or bought separately? And crucially, registered in your name. There is more on that in choosing a domain name.
- Content changes. Changing your prices, swapping a photo, adding a new service. Ask whether that is included or charged by the hour. This is where surprise invoices come from.
- Design revisions. Almost every seller includes a limited number. Find out how many before you start, and get your feedback in one go rather than in dribs.
- Features rather than pages. Photo gallery, FAQ section, customer reviews, a floating call button on mobile. These do things a page cannot and they are worth more than an extra blank page.
For what it is worth, our packages include hosting, SSL, business email, a free .co.uk domain, an image gallery, an FAQ section, customer reviews, a floating call bar and a free redesign each year. One design revision is included at build. Content changes are unlimited and free, because charging you £40 to change a phone number is a daft way to run a business.
Should you buy the package outright or pay monthly?
This is the fork in the road and it is worth thinking about properly. A one off build is a capital purchase: you pay a larger sum once, you own the files, and you carry the running costs and the cost of future changes yourself. A monthly package spreads the cost, includes the running costs, and you keep paying while you use it.
Monthly suits businesses with lumpy cash flow, businesses that are new, and businesses that do not want to think about renewals. Outright suits people with the cash to hand who want the asset on the balance sheet and are comfortable arranging hosting and maintenance. We have laid out both sides in should you own your website or rent it.
With us you can start monthly and buy the site outright later for twelve times the monthly price. That is a separate one off payment and it is not reduced by rent already paid, so it costs the same in month three as it does in year three. Worth knowing up front rather than discovering it later.
What if you are selling products?
Shop packages are usually priced by product count rather than page count, because the work sits in the catalogue rather than the pages. Ours run at £99 a month for up to 25 products, £139 for up to 100 and £179 for up to 250, all excluding VAT, with a custom quote above that.
The number to plan around is not what you sell today but what you will list in a year. Moving up a tier later is easy enough. What is annoying is picking a tier that fits exactly and hitting the ceiling three months in.
Also be realistic about the work involved. Product photos, descriptions and prices are your job and they take longer than people expect. Twenty five products written properly beats two hundred with one line each.
What happens if you pick the wrong size?
Usually nothing dramatic. The common mistake is buying too big, then having three pages sitting there with a paragraph of filler on each. That is easy to fix by folding the content back into fewer pages and dropping down a package.
Buying too small is the mistake people worry about more, and it is the less serious of the two. If you outgrow three pages you move to five. With a monthly package that is a change of price rather than a new project. With a one off build it means going back to the designer and paying for extra pages, which is fine but slower.
Either way, the fix is cheaper than the delay. Do not spend two months deciding between three pages and five. Start with the size that fits what you can actually write this month, and grow it when there is something real to add. If writing the pages is the bit you are dreading, writing the words for your own website takes you through it.
A quick sanity check before you commit
Run through these before you pay anyone, for any kind of package.
- Can you name the job each page does in one sentence? If not, you have too many pages.
- Is the domain registered in your business name?
- Do you know what a content change costs?
- Do you know what happens if you stop paying?
- Is the price quoted excluding or including VAT?
- Have you seen work the seller has done for a business roughly your size?
The last one matters more than most people think. A designer who mainly builds for national brands may not be the right fit for a two van plumbing firm, and vice versa. If you are in the trades specifically, getting found on Google when you only work locally covers the part of the job that a package alone will not do for you.
Picking the size that fits
Start from the jobs, not the page count. Write down what a customer needs to do on your site, group those jobs onto as few pages as will hold them, then check what else the package includes beyond the pages. That order of thinking will get you to the right size faster than comparing price lists.
RentAWeb rents small business websites for a monthly fee, from £49 a month for a single page up to £149 for ten pages, all excluding VAT and all including hosting, SSL, business email, a free .co.uk domain and a redesign every year. You pay the first three months up front, there is no setup fee, and you can cancel any month with a month's notice. If you want to see the numbers for your own situation, you can price up your website in a couple of minutes.
