Nobody enjoys this conversation, which is why so many agency websites do not have a price on them anywhere. We would rather have it up front, because the alternative is you spending three weeks in meetings to find out you were never in the same bracket.

The honest answer is that a website is not one thing. It is somewhere between four and eight jobs, and the quote depends entirely on which of them the person quoting has included.

What is actually in the number

Roughly in order of how much time they take:

  • Words. Somebody has to write the pages. If it is not in the quote, it is you, at eleven at night, and it is the single most common reason a build stalls for three months.
  • Design. Either a template with your logo dropped in, or something built around your brand. Both are legitimate. They cost very different amounts.
  • Build. Turning the design into a site that is fast, works on a phone, and does not fall over.
  • Structure. Deciding what pages exist and what each one is for. Cheap on the invoice, and the thing that decides whether the site ever ranks.
  • The plumbing. Hosting, domain, email, SSL, forms, backups, analytics.
  • Launch and aftercare. Redirects from the old site so you do not lose the rankings you had, and somebody to ring in week three.

The three brackets, honestly

Under about £1,000

This is a template, filled in, usually by you. It is a real option and for some businesses it is the right one: a sole trader who needs a presence, a phone number and proof of existence does not need a bespoke build.

What you are giving up is structure and speed. These sites tend to be heavy, they tend to be built on page builders that are hard to get out of, and they tend to be written in the platform's voice rather than yours. If the site is a business card, that is fine. If the site is meant to bring you work, it will hit a ceiling fast.

Roughly £2,000 to £8,000

This is where most small business sites that are actually meant to earn something land, and it is the bracket we work in. You are paying for somebody to decide what the pages should be, write them, design something that is yours, build it light, and set it up so it can be found.

Within that range, what moves the number is almost always the same two things: how many pages need writing, and how much has to be custom-built rather than assembled. A five-page site for one trade in one town sits at the bottom. Nine service-area pages, a booking flow and a product catalogue sit at the top.

£15,000 and up

Bespoke systems, e-commerce with real complexity, integrations with whatever software runs your operations, several people involved for months. Genuinely necessary for some businesses. If you are a plumber with four vans and somebody has quoted you this, ask them to itemise it.

The costs that are not in the quote

These are the ones that catch people, because they arrive after the invoice is paid.

  • Hosting and domain. Small, ongoing, and worth checking whose name they are in. Ours are always in the client's.
  • Your time. Photographs, sign-off, gathering the details only you have. Budget for it honestly; a build that waits on you costs you more than the rate card ever will.
  • Changes after launch. Ask what a small change costs and whether there is a minimum. This is where a cheap quote often stops being cheap.
  • Being found. A new site does not rank by itself, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling you something. A fast, well-structured site makes ranking possible rather than handing it to you.

Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes

Three reasons, and only one of them is greed.

The first is scope: one quote includes the words and one does not. The second is method: a template assembled in two days and a site built from scratch in five weeks are different products wearing the same name. The third is who does it: a freelancer with no overheads and a fifteen-person agency with an account management layer will price the same work differently, and both can be right.

The quote to be suspicious of is not the expensive one. It is the one that does not say what is in it.

What to ask before you agree to anything

  1. Is the copywriting included, and if not, what happens if I do not write it?
  2. Whose name are the domain, hosting and analytics registered in?
  3. What is the fixed price for the whole job, and what would make it change?
  4. What happens to the rankings of my current site when this one goes live?
  5. What does a small change cost me in month four?

Any decent supplier will answer all five in a paragraph each. If the answers arrive as another meeting, that tells you something too.

How we do it. We price the whole job in writing before any work starts, not by the hour and not with a number that moves once we have started. The domain, hosting, analytics and the site itself are registered to you from the first week, whatever happens afterwards.