How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK? (2026 Prices)

Website cost in the UK runs from about £12 a month for a site you build yourself to £5,000 or more for a professionally designed and built marketing website, and from £15,000 once the site has to behave like software, with logins, payments, bookings or links into your other systems. The £12 is Squarespace’s Basic plan on annual billing at the time of writing (October 2026). The £5,000 and £15,000 are our own starting prices, fixed and agreed before work starts.

If you need a five-page brochure site on a small budget, a website builder or a freelancer is the better answer, and we would tell you so. We are the right call when the website has to do real work. This article covers what each route costs, what you pay on top of the build (domain, hosting, email, maintenance, content), what a maintenance package should include, what pushes the price up, and the point where a website becomes a web application.

Key takeaways

• There are four routes: a website builder (a monthly subscription plus your time), a freelancer (a day rate multiplied by days), an agency-built marketing website (ours from £5,000) and a custom web application (ours from £15,000).
• For a simple brochure site on a small budget, a website builder or a freelancer is usually the better answer than an agency.
• The build is only part of the cost. Domain, hosting, email, maintenance and content updates recur, and our maintenance and support starts from £400 a month.
• Price follows scope, content, integrations, accessibility and cookie-consent work more than it follows page count.
• When visitors log in, pay, book or trigger work in other systems, you are buying a web application, and the budget should reflect that.

How much does a website cost in the UK?

A website costs whatever the route you choose costs, and the routes differ by orders of magnitude because they buy different things. The table puts them side by side. The builder prices are the vendors’ own published prices, and the freelancer row is an illustration built from a published day rate.

Route	What it costs	Best for
Website builder (Squarespace, Wix, Shopify)	Squarespace £12 to £79 a month on annual billing. Shopify Basic £19 a month on annual billing, £25 monthly, plus card fees	A brochure site or small online shop you build and update yourself
Freelance developer	A day rate multiplied by days. At the £488 median advertised contract rate, 10 days is £4,880 (illustrative)	A clearly defined small site where you can supply design direction and content
Agency-built marketing website	From £5,000 with us	A site that must win enquiries, with design, build and content structure planned together
Custom web application	From £15,000 with us	Logins, payments, bookings, dashboards, integrations

Each route has a catch. With a builder, you put in your own time, work within template limits and rent the platform. A freelancer’s quality varies, one person means no cover, and you need to agree who owns the code. An agency-built site is more than a small business needs if a brochure site would do. A web application is software, so it needs maintaining like software.

The two CodeLeap rows come from our web development page. The price is fixed and agreed before work starts, payment is in milestones as each stage is delivered, you can cancel within the first 21 days and get your money back in full, and all code and IP are yours once the work is delivered and paid for.

Website builders: what Squarespace, Wix and Shopify cost

Website builders are the cheapest way to get online, and for many small businesses they are the right one. Here is what three widely used ones publish.

Squarespace lists four website plans in pounds (Squarespace pricing). Basic is £12 a month billed annually or £16 billed monthly. Core is £17 or £24, Plus is £29 or £36, and Advanced is £79 or £89. Annual plans include one year of free domain registration on available domains, which then renews at Squarespace’s standard rate plus applicable taxes. The page does not say whether the monthly prices include VAT.

Shopify is built for selling online (Shopify UK pricing). Basic is £25 a month, or £19 on annual billing. Grow is £65 or £49, Advanced is £344 or £259, and Plus starts at £1,800 a month. Basic carries an online card rate of 2% + 25p, so the subscription is not the whole cost if you sell a lot. Its introductory offer is three days free, then £1 a month for three months. The page does not say whether prices include VAT.

Wix shows prices by the visitor’s location. When we checked, its plans page displayed US dollars, with Light at $17.77 a month on yearly billing, and said “USD prices displayed for reference only”. We have not converted that into pounds. Check the UK price on Wix’s own page.

Budget the one cost these figures leave out, which is your own time. Someone has to choose the template, write the copy, source the photography, set up search basics and keep it all current. A builder is the right answer when the site is a handful of pages, the layout can follow a template, and nothing needs to connect to your own systems.

It stops being the right answer when the site needs custom logic, accounts, or integrations a template cannot do. That is where the cost moves to the next rows of the table.

Freelancer, agency or custom build: what the price pays for

The cost to build a website this way is mostly developer time, plus whatever design, content, testing and project management sit around it. The day-rate arithmetic shows why quotes differ so widely.

ITJobsWatch reports a median Web Developer contract day rate of £488 in the six months leading up to 3 October 2026, with a 10th percentile of £347 and a 90th of £725 (ITJobsWatch). Treat that with care. It is based on 15 daily rates quoted across 38 contract job adverts, so the sample is small, and it records advertised rates, not invoices. It is also one person’s time, with no design, content, testing or project management.

As an illustration only, using that median: 5 days is £2,440, 10 days is £4,880 and 20 days is £9,760. A freelancer can be excellent value for a defined site where you bring the design direction and the copy. The risks are the ones the table lists. One person means no cover when they are away, and quality varies, so ask to see live sites they have built.

An agency-built marketing website costs more because more people are involved and more of the work is planned together. Our marketing websites start from £5,000. If you already have a site and are unsure what is wrong with it, our UX and UI design work includes a UX audit and wireframes at £3,500, which gives you a written brief before anyone starts building.

Whoever you ask, make the quote list what is in it:

• Design and build. Is design included, or are you supplying it?
• Content management. Can your team edit pages without a developer?
• Content. Who writes and sources the copy and images, and who moves existing pages across?
• Search and analytics basics. Page titles, sitemap, redirects, tracking.
• Accessibility and cookie consent. See the section on what pushes cost up below.
• Ownership. Who owns the code and the design files once you have paid?
• Price basis. Fixed, or time and materials with no ceiling?

Ongoing website costs: domain, hosting, email and updates

The build is a one-off. These recur, and they are where a cheap quote often becomes an expensive year.

• Domain name. Registered annually through a registrar. Prices vary by registrar and extension, and introductory offers matter. Squarespace, for example, includes a year of free domain registration on annual plans, then renews it at its standard rate plus applicable taxes. Note the renewal price before you sign up.
• Hosting. A builder includes it in the subscription. A custom site needs a host, and the cost depends on the build: a mostly static brochure site and a web application with a database have very different needs. Ask your supplier to state hosting as its own line.
• HTTPS certificate. This need not cost anything. Let’s Encrypt says that “Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost” (Let’s Encrypt). Treat a large separate SSL line item with suspicion.
• Business email. Priced per user. Google Workspace Business Starter lists at £5.90 per user per month on a one-year commitment, or £7 on the flexible plan, and the page says the price does not include tax (Google Workspace). Illustratively, five people on the one-year commitment is £29.50 a month before tax, and Google also shows introductory discounts for new customers.
• Content updates. Someone has to publish new pages, change prices and add case studies. Either your team does it in a content management system, or you pay for time. Decide which before launch.
• Maintenance and support. The next section.

Website maintenance packages: what they cost and include

Our maintenance and support starts from £400 a month. Charges for website maintenance vary widely because packages bundle different things, so compare what is written in the package, not the monthly fee.

A package worth paying for should list, in plain words:

• Security and software updates, applied on a schedule.
• Backups, and confirmation that a restore actually works.
• Uptime monitoring, with someone responsible for responding.
• Fixes when something breaks, with a stated response time.
• A set amount of content or small design changes each month.
• Periodic checks on speed, accessibility and broken links.
• A named person you can reach.

On a website builder you do not need a package at all, because the platform handles updates and the cost is your time. A package earns its fee on a custom-built site or web application, where nobody else is keeping the code up to date. If your site or application runs on cloud infrastructure that you want looked after, that sits under our managed cloud service.

What pushes the cost of a website up, and what a redesign costs

Price follows scope, and scope is more than page count. These are the drivers we would ask about on any quote, including a website redesign.

Features and custom components. A page built from a template costs less than one with custom interaction, filtering, calculators or animation.

Content. Writing, photography and migrating an existing site are real work. For a redesign, old addresses need redirecting so you keep the search visibility the site already earns.

Integrations. A form that emails you is cheap. A form that creates a record in your CRM, books into a calendar or takes payment is an integration, and each one adds build and testing time. Our guide to API integration covers the options and costs.

Cookies and consent. If your site uses cookies or similar technologies, UK rules on consent apply. The ICO’s guidance on storage and access technologies, which covers cookies, includes a section on exceptions to the consent requirement, among them one for collecting statistics on how a service is used. That exception has conditions, including clear information about the purpose and a simple, free way to object. Setting up consent and analytics properly is build work, so it belongs in the quote. This is general information, not legal advice.

Accessibility. WCAG 2.2 is a W3C Recommendation with three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA (W3C). Ask which level a quote builds to and how it will be tested.

Design depth. Choosing a template and adapting it costs less than designing flows and components for your audience. Design is often where a marketing website earns its keep, because the paths visitors take decide whether they enquire.

A redesign is priced on the same drivers as a new build, plus migration. Ask whoever quotes to list what changes and what stays. If the site works but looks dated, refreshing a builder template may cost far less than a rebuild. If the problem is that visitors do not enquire, a UX audit before a redesign is cheaper than redesigning on a guess.

When a website becomes a web application

A site becomes a web application when visitors do things in it rather than only read it. Logins, accounts with personal data, payments, bookings, dashboards, admin tools and data passing between your site and other systems are the signs. At that point you are buying software, and our web applications start from £15,000.

Gemdarr, an online will platform we built, shows the difference. It is a website in the sense that it runs in a browser. It also has a guided questionnaire that turns legal requirements into plain questions, a DocuSign-integrated signing and witnessing flow that tracks each signature, executor access controls and an admin backend.

If you are not sure which side of the line you are on, web app vs website vs native app explains the definitions and trade-offs. For wider context on what bespoke software costs, see software development cost in the UK, and if you are considering a mobile app, how much an app costs in the UK. Where an off-the-shelf tool or a builder covers the need, that is usually the cheaper answer, and where it does not, bespoke software starts from £15,000.

Choosing your route

Pick the route by what the site must do. A builder fits a brochure site you will maintain yourself. A freelancer fits a small, well-defined build where you can brief the work. A professionally built marketing website fits a site whose job is to win enquiries. A web application fits anything with accounts, payments or integrations.

If you are in the last two groups, the most useful next step is to send us what you have: the current site if there is one, the pages and features you want, and anything it must connect to. We will tell you which route fits, and say so plainly if that is a builder. Start with our web development page for the two starting prices and how a fixed-price project runs.