Send the same brief to five UK web designers and you can get quotes of £600, £1,800, £4,000, £9,000 and "let us book a discovery call". Nobody is necessarily trying it on. They are describing genuinely different pieces of work using the same word.
The useful thing to understand is not the average price, because there is not one. It is what you are actually buying in each band, and which questions move a quote up a band. Once you can see that, a quote stops being a number you either accept or flinch at and becomes something you can compare.
Band one: a few hundred pounds
What it buys: a small site built to an existing template by one person, usually working alone, often part time. You supply the words and the photographs. It goes live in days rather than weeks. Support afterwards is informal and depends on that person still answering emails.
Who it is right for: a sole trader who needs an address on the internet, a business testing an idea, anyone whose enquiries genuinely come from elsewhere and who just needs something that looks credible when a name gets searched.
What to watch: hosting is often not included, changes are hourly, and the bus factor is one. Ask what happens if they take a full time job. Renting a one page site at £49 a month excluding VAT is the same sort of decision made a different way, with the maintenance included rather than left to you.
Band two: roughly £600 to £2,500
What it buys: the commonest band for a small business in the UK. Three to eight pages, a designer who will actually look at your business, a layout adapted to you rather than dropped on, proper page titles and descriptions, testing on phones, and usually a short period of support after launch.
Who it is right for: most trades, shops, practices, consultancies and small service businesses. If you are reading this and you are not selling online, this is almost certainly your band.
What to watch: whether the words are included, and what happens after launch. Those two lines account for most of the spread within this band. A £900 quote where you write everything and a £2,200 quote where they interview you and write it are not the same purchase.
Band three: roughly £2,500 to £8,000
What it buys: a small agency or a very experienced freelancer. Discovery, a proper content plan, custom design rather than adapted template, a small shop or a booking system, a content management system set up so your staff can use it, and someone accountable in writing.
Who it is right for: businesses where the website is a real sales channel rather than a credential. Shops, multi branch operations, anyone who needs the site to integrate with something else, anyone whose competitors are spending here too.
What to watch: scope creep in both directions. At this level you should get a written specification. If you cannot see one, you are paying agency money for band two work.
Band four: £8,000 and up
What it buys: a team. Project management, user research, custom functionality, integrations with your existing systems, accessibility testing, staged sign offs, a support contract with response times in it.
Who it is right for: organisations where the website failing costs real money by the hour, or where the thing being built is closer to software than to a brochure. Membership systems, booking platforms, anything handling significant transaction volume.
What to watch: whether you actually need it. A good agency will tell you when you do not, and the fact that a proposal is impressive does not mean the job requires it.
What actually moves a quote between bands?
Six things, in rough order of how much they move it.
- Functionality. Selling, logins, bookings, calculators, anything that talks to another system. A brochure site becomes software and software is priced differently.
- Who writes the content. The largest swing in bands one and two, and the thing most often left unagreed until it delays everything.
- How much design is from scratch. Hours of design time are the raw material of a web quote. Adapting a proven layout is hours. Starting from nothing is days.
- Who the supplier is. A sole trader at home, a three person studio, and an agency with a project manager and an office have very different costs behind the same deliverable. None of those is wrong, but you are paying for the structure as well as the site.
- What happens after launch. Some quotes stop at go live. Some include a year of hosting, support and changes. Compare those on the headline number and you will pick badly.
- How many people have to approve it. Every extra decision maker adds revisions, and revisions are hours. This is why the same site costs more for a committee than for an owner.
Why does the same designer quote two businesses differently?
Usually because of risk, and it is worth knowing that this is happening. A designer who has been through a project where the client could not supply photographs for five months prices that in the next time they see the signs. Turning up organised, with your words drafted, your pictures on a memory stick and one named decision maker, genuinely gets you a better price. Nobody advertises it, but it is real.
The other reason is complexity you can see and they can see but the brief does not mention. Twelve services that all need explaining, an existing site full of content that has to be moved across, a brand with no logo file anywhere. Say those out loud when you ask, because a quote built on a wrong assumption gets corrected later, and later is always more expensive.
What does a designer's time actually cost?
Almost every web quote in the country is a day rate with a number of days behind it, even when it is presented as a fixed price. Knowing the day rates makes the rest of it readable.
In the UK, a competent freelancer is typically £250 to £450 a day, a small studio £400 to £700, and an agency with project management and an office £600 to £1,200. Those are the raw materials. A quote of £2,000 from a freelancer is therefore about a week of somebody's life, which is a reasonable amount of time to build and populate a five page site and not much more than that.
Run the arithmetic on any quote that surprises you. If a £700 quote implies a day and a half for a ten page site with all the words written, something has been left out or somebody has misunderstood the brief. If a £12,000 quote implies three weeks of agency time for a six page brochure site, ask what the other two weeks are for. Both conversations are perfectly polite to have.
Does a dearer website make more money?
Up to a point, and then no. This is the part nobody selling websites likes to say plainly.
Moving from a bad site to a decent one usually makes a real difference, because bad sites fail at basic things: they are slow, the phone number is hidden, they do not say where you work, and Google cannot make sense of them. Fixing those is worth money to almost any small business.
Moving from a decent site to a beautiful one usually does not, unless taste is what you sell. A photographer, an interior designer, a wedding venue, a high end restaurant. For a plumber, a decent site that loads in two seconds and a Google Business Profile with fifty reviews will beat a gorgeous site with neither, every time and by a distance.
So spend to the point where the site works properly, then spend the next pound on being findable rather than on being handsome. That order round is the single most expensive mistake we see.
What about builders like Wix and Squarespace?
They sit underneath band one on cash and on top of band two on your own time. The subscription is modest and the tools are genuinely good now. What you are paying with is evenings, and the honest question is whether you have them.
Most people we speak to who tried it got a decent homepage and then stalled. That is not a criticism of the platform, it is that writing and assembling seven pages is a job, and it is a job that competes with running your business. If you enjoy it and you have the time, it is a perfectly sensible answer. If it has been on your list since February, it is not.
Where does renting sit against all this?
Renting takes the build cost out of the decision and turns the whole thing into a running cost. Ours is £49 a month for one page, £79 for three, £99 for five and £149 for ten, all excluding VAT, with hosting, SSL, business email, a free .co.uk domain and a yearly redesign included, the first three months paid up front and no setup fee.
Against band one, renting usually wins on maintenance and loses on absolute cheapness. Against band two, it is close, and the answer depends almost entirely on how long you keep the site: a one off build plus modest hosting is normally cheaper over five or six years, and a rental is cheaper in the first two or three. Against bands three and four it is not a comparison at all, because those are buying things a package does not do.
If that is the decision you are weighing up, it is set out properly in should you own your website or rent it.
How to use all this when a quote lands
Work out your band first, from your own list of pages and functions, using the method in work out what your website should cost before you ask. Then, when the quote arrives, you are only asking two questions: is this the band I expected, and if not, what is in it that I did not account for.
One habit worth having: get every quote to state the same three things, so they are comparable at all. The number of pages, who writes the words, and what happens for twelve months after launch. Quotes that answer those three can be laid next to each other. Quotes that do not are just prices.
A good supplier will answer that plainly and you will often find the answer is reasonable. A supplier who cannot explain their own number is telling you something useful too. And whichever band you end up in, take the ten checks before you pay a web designer with you, because the questions about domain ownership and what happens after launch matter just as much at £600 as at £16,000.
If you want the rented figure for your own size of site, the builder will price it up without asking for an email address.
