What a website actually costs.

If you have tried to research this you will know the pattern by now. One page says a website costs £300. Another says £30,000. Both are telling the truth, in the way that “a vehicle costs between £400 and £400,000” is telling the truth.

The honest answer is that the number depends on a handful of decisions, most of which are made before any design happens. So rather than a single figure, here is the whole picture: the brackets, what pushes a project between them, and the costs that arrive later whichever bracket you choose.

The numbers

Website projects with us start at £4,960. That buys a small site done properly. Under £10,000 that often means a carefully chosen theme or template as the starting point, with the budget spent where it actually shows: the structure, the words, the speed, and making it unmistakably yours rather than recognisably the theme.

Most business websites we build land between £8,000 and £20,000. Towards the top of that range the work is fully bespoke: proper discovery, design that belongs to your brand alone, development, the technical SEO that decides whether anyone finds it, and the content structure that decides what they do when they arrive.

Above £20,000 you are paying for scale or complexity rather than better design. E-commerce with a big catalogue, content in several languages, integrations with booking or stock systems, or a site with hundreds of pages that all need migrating without losing the search traffic they have earned.

Below £4,960, be honest with yourself about what you are buying. A template filled in over a weekend can be the right call, and we say so further down. But nobody at that price can afford to think about your business before they start building, and the thinking is the part that makes a website an asset rather than an expense.

What actually moves the number

Four things, in rough order.

How much is designed from scratch. A good theme, chosen well and bent properly to your brand, is an honest way to keep a budget under £10,000, and we use them ourselves at that level. What you are paying for either way is the several hundred decisions someone makes on your behalf. Bespoke buys more of those decisions; a theme buys fewer, spent more carefully.

Who writes the words. The single most underestimated line in any website budget. Design can only present the argument; the copy has to make it. If the plan is “we’ll send you our content”, the project will stall for exactly as long as that sentence takes to become false, usually months. Budget for writing, or budget for delay.

What the site has to do. A site that presents a business is one project. A site that sells, books, calculates or integrates is another. Every system the site talks to adds build time and, more importantly, testing time, because a broken booking journey costs you real money in a way a typo does not. If it is e-commerce, we build on Shopify: a store's platform should be boring, proven and impossible to outgrow, and that is what you are paying Shopify's monthly fee for.

How much already exists. Photography, brand guidelines, existing content worth keeping, and rankings worth protecting all change the scope. A site with search traffic has to be rebuilt like moving a loaded shelf: everything stays up while the bracket changes.

What we build for first

Function before form, in that order. A website is a machine for being found, understood and acted on, and it earns the right to look good by working first. So the sequence is always speed, clarity and findability, then the design that makes it unmistakably yours. The two are not in tension; a site that loads instantly and reads clearly is already most of the way to feeling premium.

Every build ships against Google's own quality checks rather than our opinion of them: Core Web Vitals in the green, accessibility, structured data that tells search engines exactly what you do and where. These are acceptance criteria, not optimisations bolted on after launch, because Google treats them as ranking signals and so should your budget.

And increasingly the second audience is machines. A growing share of buying decisions now starts with an AI assistant rather than a search box, so we structure every site so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI features can crawl it, quote it and recommend you accurately. Your next client may never visit your homepage at all; the site still has to make your case to whatever read it on their behalf.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

The build is not the whole bill, whoever you use. Photography, if your business deserves better than stock, which it does. Hosting, though on a modern build this is nearly nothing; ours run on infrastructure that costs pounds a month, not hundreds. A domain. Email if it is tangled up with your old provider. And maintenance, which is where the industry hides its margin.

The traditional model charges a monthly retainer to keep a heavy content-management system patched against security holes. Sites built the way we build them do not have that attack surface, which is why we do not sell that retainer. Things worth paying for on an ongoing basis are new content, new photography and new thinking, not the digital equivalent of boiler insurance.

When cheap is right

If you are testing a business idea, a £300 template site or a page built in an afternoon is the correct spend. Truly. The mistake is not the cheap site; it is keeping it three years past the point the business stopped being a test.

The other honest case is when the website simply does not matter to how you win work. There are businesses like this, fewer than think they are, but they exist. If every job you will ever get comes through referral and repeat custom, spend the money on the work itself.

For everyone else, the arithmetic is worth doing slowly. If your average customer is worth four figures, a site that wins you two more of them a month has paid for itself before the year is out. That is the frame in which £12,000 is either expensive or obviously cheap, and only you know which.

How we structure it

The same way as everything we do: four stages, discover, define, design, deliver, with the cost split evenly across them and a fixed price in writing before we start. You are never more than a quarter of the budget from a decision point, and you see the design early rather than at a reveal.

Two minutes on our website check will tell you whether your current site needs any of this, including the verdict that it is fine and you should keep your money. And the full detail of what a build includes is on the website design and build page.

If you want a straight answer on your specific project, ask. We will tell you the number, what moves it, and whether we think you need us at all.