Ask ten agencies what a website costs and you will get ten variations of "it depends". Which is true, and completely useless when you are trying to set a budget. So here is the honest version: real bands, what sits inside each one, and what pushes a quote up or down.
At the bottom end, under about £1,000, you are buying a template. A theme, your logo dropped in, your copy pasted into someone else's layout. There is nothing wrong with that if you need a presence and nothing more — a trade business with a phone number and three services can be perfectly well served. What you are not buying is strategy, bespoke design, or anything built around how your particular customers decide.
Between roughly £3,000 and £8,000 sits the bracket most owner-managed businesses actually need. A bespoke website design rather than a theme, a proper structure built around your services, copy shaped around what prospects need to see and believe, and a content management system you can update without ringing anyone. This is where the site starts to earn its keep, because the layout is designed around your sales process rather than a stock demo.
From about £8,000 to £20,000 you are into sites with real functionality: multi-service structures, gated content, booking or quoting tools, integrations with a CRM, careful SEO groundwork, and design that is genuinely distinctive rather than tidy. Businesses in this bracket usually have a marketing function, or an owner treating the website as their main channel rather than a brochure.
Above £20,000, the cost is almost never the design. It is the systems behind it — e-commerce with complex rules, customer portals, integrations with warehouse or accounting software, multi-language builds, or a full brand programme running alongside.
So what actually moves the number? Four things, mostly.
Page count matters far less than people expect. A twelve page site is not twelve times the work of a one page site, because the design system is shared. What costs money is the number of distinct page types — a service page, a case study, an article, a landing page, a team profile all need designing separately.
Content is the sleeper cost. Most projects that overrun do so because the copy was not ready. Written properly, by someone who understands what the page needs to achieve, copy takes time and it is not free. Written badly, it undermines the entire investment. Decide early whether you are writing it, we are writing it, or you are supplying raw material for us to shape.
Integrations are the second sleeper. Pushing an enquiry into a CRM, syncing bookings, connecting a payment provider — each one is a small project with its own testing. Two integrations are fine. Seven need scoping properly.
And then there is the thing nobody quotes for: decisions. Projects stall when nobody on the client side is empowered to say yes. If one person can approve the design, the project runs smoothly and cheaply. If it goes to committee, expect both the timeline and the cost to stretch.
A word on ongoing cost, because the build price is only part of the picture. Hosting for a typical business site runs somewhere between £20 and £100 a month. A domain is £10 to £20 a year. Then there is maintenance — security updates, plugin updates, backups, the occasional fix. Budget something for it, whether that is a support retainer or a few hours a quarter. Sites that get neglected do not fail gracefully; they fail on a Friday afternoon.
And the platform question. A site built on a subscription website builder looks cheap monthly and expensive over five years, and moving away is deliberately awkward. A site you own outright costs more to build and less to keep, and you can take it anywhere. Neither is automatically right — but do the five year sum before you decide, not after.
One last thing, and it is the point of all of it. The right question is not "what does a website cost", it is "what does this website need to earn back". If a single new client is worth £5,000 to you, a £6,000 website that brings in three a year is not an expense you are trying to minimise. If your average job is £200, the maths is very different and you should be spending accordingly.
If you want a number for your specific situation rather than a band, that is a twenty minute conversation. Bring your service list, a rough idea of what a customer is worth to you, and any deadlines you are working to, and we will tell you straight what it takes.