How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK?

The three ways to get a website, and what each really costs

Almost every UK business ends up choosing between three routes: a DIY builder, a freelancer, or an agency. The gap between them isn't really about quality. It's about how much of the work you're doing yourself.

A DIY builder is the cheapest way in by a wide margin. GoDaddy's Website Builder starts at £16.99 a month outside of sale pricing, and a five-page site on it can run to £203.88 a year, according to GoDaddy's own pricing page, published 2026-05-01. Wix's Core plan is listed at £13 a month (£156 a year) and its Business plan at £22 a month (£264 a year), as reported by Duport; Wix's own pricing page renders its prices in JavaScript and couldn't be independently confirmed for this article, so treat that figure as a secondary report, not a primary one. Startups.co.uk separately reports builder pricing starting "from £1.99 per month" and lists third-party-observed ranges of £9 to £119 a month for Wix, £12 to £79 for Squarespace (billed annually), and £7.99 to £14.99 for GoDaddy (billed annually). If you're selling products rather than running a brochure site, Shopify's own pricing page lists Basic at £19 a month, Grow at £49, Advanced at £259, and Plus from £1,800 a month. Those Shopify figures are for the platform subscription only. Design, theme customisation, and app costs sit on top.

A freelancer or a "done-for-you" build sits above that. Duport puts a professional freelance or done-for-you design at £360 to £2,000 for most small businesses, without stating a page count or feature set attached to that range. Startups.co.uk quotes hiring a web designer at "£300 to £10,000+, depending on what you're asking for," which is honest about the variance but doesn't tell you what moves you up or down that scale.

An agency build sits highest, and the spread inside it is enormous. Duport's own range runs to £10,000 for a "full agency build." GoDaddy publishes a more detailed breakdown for what it calls "with a web designer," giving a minimum first-year cost of £5,315 and ongoing annual costs of £815 and up. That figure is worth pausing on, because of where it comes from.

What actually drives the price

Number of pages. Whether the design is custom or built from a template. Whether the site needs ecommerce, booking systems, or membership logins, or just needs to display information. Whether copywriting and photography are included or are your job. Whether the price includes any support after launch or stops the moment the site goes live. Those five variables explain most of the spread between a £360 freelance build and a £10,000 agency one, far more than the label "freelancer" or "agency" does on its own.

GoDaddy's own hourly-rate context for this comes from a single named source: Chameleon Studios, a UK web design agency, which quotes offshore developers at £10 to £25 an hour, freelance designers at £25 to £50, small agencies at £50 to £75, and large agencies at £75 to £150. That's useful as a rough scale of who charges what, though Chameleon's own post is titled "(2022)". A four-year-old single agency's hourly estimate is being served up on a major platform's page in 2026 as though it were current data. It isn't wrong to use it as a rough guide. It's wrong to treat it as fresh.

Content is the variable quoted least often and felt most. A template site with your own text dropped in and a bespoke site with commissioned photography, copywriting, and custom illustration can carry the same page count and a completely different price, for reasons that have nothing to do with code. The same logic shows up in brand identity pricing: a logo and a full identity system cost wildly different amounts for the same underlying reason, the design work scales with how much of it is actually bespoke.

Functionality is the other big lever. A contact form and a static gallery are cheap to build. A booking system, a membership area, or an integration with stock or payment software all add development time that a page count alone will never show you. Two quotes for "a ten-page website" can sit thousands of pounds apart because one of them is quietly pricing in software that the other one isn't.

The cost nobody quotes you

Launch day is not the finish line. A domain typically costs £8 to £20 a year, according to Startups.co.uk, a figure roughly consistent with GoDaddy's own estimate of £0 to £30 a year for a domain. Hosting and ongoing maintenance sit on top of that, and this is where the quotes you'll actually receive tend to go quiet. GoDaddy's own figures put ongoing annual costs at £218 a year (outside of sale pricing) for a DIY-builder site and £815 and up for a site built "with a web designer." Separately, GoDaddy states that "web design companies charge between £50 and £10,000 a month" for ongoing maintenance, though it doesn't cite a source or method for that range, so read it as a platform's own marketing claim rather than researched data.

That's the real gap in most quotes. A £2,000 build fee that comes with no ongoing cost attached is not the same purchase as a £2,000 build fee that's followed by £800 a year, forever, for hosting and updates. Ask which one you're being quoted, every time. It's a different question from what you'd ask about ongoing marketing spend, where the comparable article is our piece on what a marketing retainer should cost; a website's ongoing cost pays for the thing staying online and secure, not for new work being produced.

Why the numbers you find online vary so wildly

Two things are happening at once. First, scope: "a website" can mean a five-page brochure site on a template or a fifty-page bespoke ecommerce build, and any figure that doesn't say which one is being priced is close to meaningless. Second, and we've covered this in more depth in our SEO pricing article, most of the businesses ranking for this exact question sell websites themselves. That doesn't make their numbers wrong. It means read them knowing who published them. No genuine UK survey of website build pricing exists that this research could find. Every figure in this article is either a vendor's own published subscription price, which you can check yourself in a browser tab, or an individual company's estimate. Neither is a national average, and nobody should be quoting one to you as if it were.

Reading a quote line by line

A quote is only useful once you know what's actually inside it. Ask whether the price is a one-off build fee or an ongoing subscription, because both exist and they're not interchangeable. Ask whether hosting, security updates, and basic maintenance are included in that number or billed separately once the site is live; GoDaddy's own figures suggest that separate line can run from roughly £200 to over £800 a year depending on the build. Ask whether the design is a template with your branding applied or a custom build from scratch, since that single choice explains more of the price gap than any other factor in this article. Ask what happens to content: is copywriting and photography included, or is that your deliverable? And ask, plainly, what you get if something breaks after launch. None of these are trick questions, and a competent supplier answers all five without flinching. A quote that answers all five of those without prompting is a quote from someone who expects you to compare it against others. One that dodges them is worth a second look, the same way a packaging design engagement is worth interrogating before you commit budget to it: the question in both cases is whether the spend is buying something that earns its cost, not just something that looks finished.

Cheapest isn't automatically wrong, and priciest isn't automatically right: the route that fits is whichever one matches how much of the build you want to do yourself, with the ongoing cost named as clearly as the build fee. That's the decision, in full, whichever number you end up looking at.