You can price up your own website to within a couple of hundred pounds in about twenty minutes, before you ask anybody for anything. You need four numbers: how many pages, how many functions, who writes the words, and who keeps it running afterwards. Everything else is detail.
It is worth doing because a website quote is one of the few things a small business buys with no reference point at all. A quote for a van, you know roughly. A quote for a website could be four hundred pounds or fourteen thousand, and both will sound plausible when someone explains them. Doing the sums yourself first means you can tell which one is which.
Step one: count the pages you actually need
Not the pages you can imagine. The pages that have a job. Write them down as a list, one line each, with what that page is for next to it. Most small businesses land between three and ten.
A page earns its place if it answers a question someone asks you on the phone, or if it is a thing people search for on its own. "Bathroom installation" is a page because people search it. "Our values" is not a page, it is a paragraph on the about page.
Watch out for two things that quietly become pages later. Service areas, if you cover several towns and want a page for each, and staff or team profiles if there are more than three of you. Both are reasonable, both cost money, and both are much cheaper to decide on now than to bolt on in month four when the design is already signed off.
Rough market rates per page in the UK, once you are past the first one: a freelancer or small studio is usually charging the equivalent of £100 to £300 a page on a small brochure site, and an agency a good deal more. Added pages on a rented site are typically £10 to £25 a month each. Ours are £20 a month per extra page, excluding VAT like everything else.
Step two: count the functions, because each one is money
A function is anything the site does rather than says. This is where quotes separate, and it is the part people forget to mention when they ask for a price, which is why quotes come back higher than expected.
- A contact form. Should be included everywhere. If it is not, that tells you something.
- Online booking or appointments. Anything from a simple request form to a live diary that takes payment. The gap between those two is thousands on a one off build.
- Taking payments or selling products. The single biggest jump in any quote. A shop is a different animal from a brochure site.
- A blog or news section. Cheap to add, only worth it if you will write.
- A quote calculator that gives a visitor a figure.
- A gallery of work, a map of your area, a reviews feed, a job vacancies page.
- Logins or a members area. Another step up again, because someone has to manage accounts.
- Anything that talks to software you already use, your diary, your accounts package, your stock system. Always the most expensive line on the page, because it is bespoke every time.
Be ruthless here. Half the functions on the average small business wish list get used twice and then sit there. If you would not notice it missing in month three, leave it out and add it later.
Step three: decide who writes the words and takes the photographs
This one line moves a quote more than any other, and it is the one most people leave undecided until halfway through the job. There are only three honest answers.
- You write it. Free in money, and it is normally where the project stalls for six weeks. Budget an evening a page and start before the design is finished. There is a method in writing the words for your own website.
- They write it. UK copywriting for a small business site tends to run £75 to £250 a page, more for anything technical. Ours is £45 a month for copywriting across the site, excluding VAT, which is a different way of buying the same thing.
- Nobody writes it, and you end up with filler about being passionate about quality. This is the most expensive option of the three, because the site then does not work.
Whichever you choose, agree it in writing before the design starts, and agree who is responsible for the pages nobody enjoys writing: the privacy notice, the terms, the delivery page if you are selling. Those are the ones that sit half finished for a fortnight while everybody waits for somebody else.
Photography is the same decision in miniature. Your own photos, taken on a decent phone in daylight, beat a stock library for any local business. A half day with a photographer is typically £200 to £500 in most of the country and it is money well spent for anywhere people come to visit.
Step four: price the running, not just the building
A website is not a purchase, it is a small ongoing commitment, and a quote that only covers the build is only half a number. Add up the domain, the hosting, the certificate, the mailboxes, any plugin licences and a realistic figure for changes.
For most small business sites that is somewhere between £250 and £1,200 a year in the UK depending on who does the work, and the whole breakdown is in what website maintenance actually costs in the UK. Whatever you put in that box, multiply it by five and put the number next to the build cost. That is the real comparison.
Step five: check your number against the UK market
Now you have a shape. Here is roughly where it should land in 2026, from the quotes we see people bring in.
- A one page site, someone else's design, your words: a few hundred pounds one off, or around £49 a month rented.
- Three to five pages, no functions beyond a contact form: roughly £600 to £2,000 from a freelancer or small studio, or £79 to £99 a month rented.
- Ten pages with a gallery, a blog and a few service pages: roughly £1,500 to £4,000, or £149 a month rented.
- A small online shop: £2,000 to £8,000 built, or £99 a month rented for a shop of up to twenty five products.
- Anything with logins, integrations or a custom booking diary: £5,000 upwards, and get two quotes.
All of ours are per month and exclude VAT, and you pay the first three months up front to start with no setup fee. If your estimate and the quote you get are in the same bracket, you are dealing with someone reasonable. If the quote is double, that is not necessarily wrong, but it is a question worth asking out loud.
Why do two quotes for the same site differ so much?
Because you are not buying the same thing, even though the list of pages looks identical. Four things account for most of the gap.
How much design time is in it. A site built to a proven pattern takes hours. A site designed from a blank page takes days, and days of a designer's time is the price difference.
Who is doing the work. A one person studio, an agency with project managers, or an offshore team all have very different costs behind the same deliverable.
What happens after launch. Some quotes include a year of support and hosting. Some stop the day it goes live. Compare those two on price alone and you will pick wrong.
How much of it you are supplying. The cheapest quotes assume you turn up with finished words and pictures. The expensive ones assume they do everything.
What if the quote comes back much lower than your estimate?
A cheap quote is not automatically a bad one. Somebody working from home with low overheads and a set of proven templates genuinely can build a good five page site for less than an agency spends on the kick off meeting. But when a quote is half what you expected, something has usually been left out, and it is nearly always one of these five.
- The words. The price assumes you supply finished copy for every page.
- Hosting after the first year, or hosting at all.
- Changes after launch, which become hourly work at a rate you have not been told.
- The search basics, meaning page titles, descriptions and a sitemap, which take a couple of hours and are the difference between a site Google can read and one it cannot.
- Testing on phones, which is where most of your visitors will be.
Ask for the exclusions in writing rather than the inclusions. "What is not in this price" gets you a straighter answer than "what do I get", and it takes one line of email.
A worked example
A landscaping firm wants: home, services, gallery, areas covered, about, contact. Six pages. Functions: a contact form, a gallery, a map of the area covered. They will write their own words badly, then get them tidied up, and they have two hundred photographs on a phone.
Estimate: six pages at the middle of the freelance range is about £1,200, the gallery and map add a couple of hundred, tidying the words adds a couple of hundred, so call it £1,400 to £1,800 one off, plus £200 to £400 a year to run. Rented, that is a five page package at £99 a month plus one extra page, excluding VAT, with the running costs already inside it.
Both are defensible. The build is cheaper across five years if they keep the site and the site keeps working. The rental is cheaper in year one and nobody has to think about renewals. What would not be defensible is a £6,000 quote for that list, and now they know that before the meeting rather than after it.
Take the number with you
Do not lead with your estimate, but have it in your pocket. When the quote arrives, put the two side by side and ask about the gap, politely and specifically: what is in yours that is not in mine. A good designer will answer that in two minutes and you will both know where you stand. It helps enormously if you also turn up with a proper brief, which is the other half of this job and is covered in how to brief a web designer.
If you would rather have the rented number without doing any arithmetic at all, the builder prices it up as you go, and it does not ask for an email address to show you the figure. For the wider picture on what the market charges, there is a longer piece on how much a small business website should cost in the UK.
