How much does a website cost, and what do you pay every year?

In the UK, a web designer charges about £300 to £1,000 for a basic website, and a custom or bespoke site starts at about £10,000. Most business sites sit in between, because they are priced on the hours they take. Every year after launch you also pay for hosting, the domain and maintenance.

Every figure below links to the page it comes from. I read them all on 5 November 2026.

How much does a website cost in 2026?

It depends on what the site has to do and on who builds it. Startups.co.uk, a UK business publication, last updated its cost guide in March 2026. These are its figures:

• A basic website from a web designer: £300 to £1,000.
• A custom or bespoke website: £10,000 and more.
• Hourly rates: £25 to £50 for a freelance web designer, £50 to £150 for a small web agency, £75 to £200 and more for a large agency.
• A website builder such as Wix or Squarespace: £1.99 to £259 a month, depending on the plan.

The guide doesn’t say whether VAT is included. When you get a quote, ask.

Between the basic site and the bespoke one sits most of what small businesses buy: a site with its own design, the copy written for your clients, and pages that turn visitors into enquiries.

Why are two quotes for the same website so different?

Because they describe different work, done by people with different costs.

• The page types. Every type of page has its own fields and has to be designed on its own. Thirty product pages built on one layout count as one type. A company site with a catalogue might have five: home, about, product, news and quote request.
• What’s included. One quote has the copy written for you, the other asks you for it. One includes a second language or a link to your stock system, the other doesn’t.
• Who builds it. Someone just starting out, a freelancer working alone, or an agency with staff and an office. Each one’s price carries its fixed costs, which is why the hourly rates above go from £25 to £200.

Say you have two quotes for ten pages with product pages, one at £1,200 and one at £6,800. At £50 an hour, the first buys 24 hours of work and the second 136. The cheaper one can still be right, as long as you know what it leaves out. Compare them line by line with the checklist at the end of this guide.

What do you get for £3,000 to £5,000?

Hours, mostly. At the rates above, £3,000 to £5,000 pays a freelancer for 60 to 200 hours, or a small agency for 20 to 100. That’s enough for a small business site with its own design, on WordPress or a similar system you can edit yourself.

What else that money covers varies from quote to quote, so ask about each of these:

• Who writes the copy and who supplies the photos.
• How many languages.
• Page titles, descriptions and redirects from your old site.
• How long maintenance is included after launch, if at all.
• A short session on changing text and photos yourself.

How much does it cost to run a website each year?

For a small business site, hosting and a domain cost £28 to over £300 a year, by Startups.co.uk’s ranges: £20 to £300 and more for hosting, £8 to £20 and more for the domain. Maintenance comes on top. There are four lines, and the first one is where renewal prices catch people out.

• Hosting, the server your site runs on. SiteGround’s StartUp plan costs £1.99 a month for the first twelve months, an introductory offer, and £13.99 a month after that, before VAT (SiteGround). That’s £23.88 in year one and £167.88 a year from then on. Krystal, a UK host, lists its smallest plan at £7 a month including VAT, with email included (Krystal).
• Domain. A .co.uk at Krystal costs £7.99 a year, and the same at renewal, before VAT (Krystal). Some hosting plans include it.
• Maintenance: updates tested before they go live, backups and security checks. It’s the line that varies most from one offer to another, so ask for it as a yearly figure, with what it covers.
• Privacy and cookies: a service that writes your privacy and cookie policies and runs the consent banner. iubenda’s first paid plan costs €4.99 a month on a yearly plan, for up to 25,000 page views a month. It also has a free plan.

If you’d rather have one person looking after the site, the videos and the marketing every month, I also work on a subscription: €4,500 a month for the first three months, then €4,000.

What does a website cost over three years?

For a site that costs £4,000 to build, £4,383.61 before VAT, plus maintenance. The sums use SiteGround’s StartUp hosting and a .co.uk at Krystal.

• Year one: £4,000 for the site, £23.88 for hosting and £7.99 for the domain. £4,031.87 in all.
• Year two: £167.88 for hosting and £7.99 for the domain. £175.87 in all.
• Year three: the same as year two, £175.87.

Add the yearly maintenance fee three times, or twice if the first year is included in the build price. Add about €60 a year if you use a paid cookie service.

Compare two offers the same way: on the three-year total, at renewal prices.

Can I build a website for free?

You can start one. Wix has a free plan, but the site sits on a wixsite.com address with Wix ads on every page. To connect your own domain and remove the ads you need a paid plan (Wix Help Center), and builder plans run from £1.99 to £259 a month (Startups.co.uk).

The plan is the smaller cost. The larger one is your own time: the copy, the photos, the layout of each page, the testing on phones. Then check one more thing before you choose. Wix sites run only on Wix’s servers, so you can’t move yours to another host later (Wix Help Center). If you outgrow the builder, you start again.

A builder makes sense for a first test. When the site has to bring in clients, a site made for your buyers, which you own and can move, pays back the difference.

Do you pay to appear on Google?

No. You pay for advertising, and for the work of whoever helps your pages climb.

• Search results. Google doesn’t accept payment to rank a site higher (Google Search Central).
• Your Business Profile, the listing on Google Maps, is free (Google).
• Ads. With Google Ads cost-per-click bidding you pay for each click on your ads (Google Ads Help), and you set the budget.
• SEO, the work on your pages to help them rank. Startups.co.uk lists it at £150 to £1,200 and more a month. Keep it separate from the price of the site, so you compare like with like.

How do you read a website quote?

A quote that says “website, £1,500” can’t be compared with anything. Ask for the lines. These are the ones I check when I write one:

• Pages and page types. How many pages, and how many different layouts to design.
• Copy and photos. Who writes and who shoots them, and whether they’re included.
• Languages. Every extra language is another site to translate and keep in step.
• Connections. Forms, bookings, payments or your stock system.
• Google. Page titles and descriptions, and redirects from the old site: without them, the links Google knew lead to an error page (website redesign guide).
• Privacy and cookies. Who writes the policies and sets up the banner, and what the service that keeps them current costs each year.
• Hosting and email. Whether they’re included, what they cost at renewal, and whose name they’re in.
• Maintenance. What it covers and what it costs in a year.
• Training. Who shows you how to change a line of text or a photo yourself.
• What stays yours. The files, the logins and the domain.

On that last point, the domain should be registered to your company even when someone else built the site. The same goes for the copyright in the design, as the guide to bespoke website design explains.

Can you see the site before you pay for all of it?

I don’t have a price list. After a free call I write you a quote with these lines, one by one, in euros. On a tight budget it makes sense to start with the pages that bring in enquiries and add the others later.

If you want to see a piece of the site before you decide, you can start with a fixed-price prototype: €450, no VAT added. It’s a part of the site that already works, such as the home page with the real copy, to open on your phone, or the hardest piece, like a quote form running on sample data.

With the prototype I tell you what I’d keep and what I’d drop, and what the rest really costs. If we go ahead within sixty days, the €450 comes off the quote in full. If you stop there, the prototype and its files are yours.