How much does a small business website cost in 2026?

It’s the first thing almost everyone asks me, usually a bit apologetically, as if it’s rude to bring money up before we’ve talked about the site. It isn’t. It’s the most sensible question you can ask, and most of the answers online are some version of “it depends”, which is true and no use to you at all.

So here are actual numbers, including mine.

The short answer

For a typical small business (a trades firm, a salon, an accountant, a local shop) a proper five-page website built by a freelancer will usually cost somewhere around £1,000 to £2,500. Agencies tend to charge more for the same scope, mostly because they have an office, account managers and a sales team to pay for. Fair enough, that’s just where the money goes.

Below £1,000 you can still get something, but you need to know what you’re giving up. Above £2,500 you should be getting things a brochure site doesn’t have, like bookings, payments, customer accounts or a shop.

What the cheap end actually gets you

There are two cheap routes and they’re quite different.

Build it yourself on Wix, Squarespace or similar. You pay a monthly subscription and put your own time in. For a lot of small businesses this is a perfectly reasonable choice, and I’ll happily tell someone that on a discovery call. The catch is that the cost is mostly your time, and the result looks like everyone else’s template unless you’re handy with design. You’re also renting: stop paying and the site goes.

Pay someone a few hundred quid off a marketplace. Sometimes that works out fine. More often what turns up is a theme with your logo on it, a contact form nobody has actually tested, and a domain registered in the builder’s name rather than yours. That last one is the expensive one. If the person who registered your domain stops answering emails, getting it back is slow, awkward and entirely out of your hands.

If you go cheap, go cheap with your eyes open. Make sure the domain is registered to you, make sure you have the logins, and send yourself a test enquiry through the contact form before you tell anyone the site exists.

What I charge

My prices are on the pricing page and I’m not VAT registered, so what you see is what you pay. As of now:

• Landing page, from £499. One focused page, about a week. Good for sole traders or anyone who mostly needs to be findable and contactable.
• Starter website, from £999. Up to five pages, one to two weeks, with a month of support after launch.
• Business website, from £1,999. Up to fifteen pages with a custom design, plus the things a growing business tends to need: a blog, bookings or payments, email automation. Three to four weeks.
• E-commerce store, from £3,499. Products, payments, stock and orders. Four to six weeks.
• Custom web apps, from £4,000. Booking systems, dashboards, internal tools. These get priced properly after a call because no two are alike.

“From” is doing some work in those lines, so to be clear about it: you get a fixed quote after a free discovery call, and that number doesn’t change unless the scope does. I wrote a whole post on what a fixed price actually buys you if you want the longer version.

What pushes the price up

Mostly it’s not the number of pages. An extra page is £75. The things that actually move a quote are these:

Content you haven’t got yet. If there’s no copy and no photos, someone has to produce them, and if that’s me, it’s work. Copywriting starts at £60 a page. Waiting on content is also the single most common reason a launch date slips.

Anything that talks to another system. Booking calendars, payment providers, stock feeds, your CRM. A booking integration starts at £300. Each one of these is a new place for things to go wrong, so they need proper testing.

Selling online. A shop is a different kind of project from a brochure site, because it has to deal with payments, stock, delivery, refunds and the legal pages that go with all of that.

Unclear scope. A vague brief makes for a vague quote, and a vague quote gets padded. The discovery call is there so I don’t have to guess.

The costs after launch

This is the part people don’t budget for, and it’s where “we got a cheap website” turns into “we’ve now paid for it twice”.

A website isn’t finished when it goes live. Frameworks and plugins get security updates. SSL certificates renew, or they don’t, and then browsers start warning your visitors off. Contact forms break quietly when an email setting changes somewhere, and you only find out when someone mentions they messaged you three weeks ago.

Your domain renewal is the one unavoidable cost, and it’s small. Past that, you either look after the site yourself, pay someone as and when (I do a quick fix from £99, or half and full days at £200 and £350), or go on a care plan. Mine run £39, £99 or £199 a month depending on how much you want doing, and the care plans page spells out exactly what’s in each.

You don’t need a care plan. But if nobody is looking after the site, you do need to be honest with yourself about who’s going to notice when something breaks.

How to tell whether a quote is fair

Whoever you end up going with, ask these before you sign anything:

1. Is the price fixed, or is it an estimate?
2. Does it include VAT?
3. Whose name is the domain registered in, and do I get the logins?
4. How many rounds of changes are included, and what does another one cost?
5. What happens after launch, and what does support cost once the included bit runs out?
6. Can I see a site you’ve built that’s still live, and can I talk to that client?

A decent supplier will answer all six without flinching. If you get waffle on number three in particular, walk away.

If you’re local

I’m based in Walsall and work with businesses across Cannock, Staffordshire and the rest of the West Midlands. If you’ve got a rough idea of what you need and want a real number rather than a range, get in touch. The discovery call is free, you’ll get a fixed quote afterwards, and there’s no obligation to do anything with it.