How Much Does a Website Cost? Real Numbers, 2026

Most agencies won't publish prices. The reason given is that every project is different, which is true, and the reason underneath is that a number scares people off before there's a chance to explain it.

We'd rather you self-select. Here's what things actually cost, drawn from projects we've delivered, in pounds, with the parts that move the figure.

The ranges

These assume design and build, responsive across devices, basic on-page SEO, and analytics. Not content writing, not photography, not ad spend.

Project	Range	Typical timeline
Single landing page	$117–$287	1–2 weeks
Small business site, 5–8 pages	$118–$231	3–5 weeks
Business site with CMS, 15–30 pages	$231–$437	6–10 weeks
The same, custom-built in Next.js	$437–$875	8–12 weeks
Ecommerce, up to ~200 products	$306–$750	8–12 weeks
Ecommerce, large catalogue or complex logic	$750–$1,562	10–16 weeks
Web application or custom platform	$875 upwards	3 months upwards

Two of those rows deserve a note. The CMS site appears twice because platform choice genuinely changes the number by a factor of two — the same brief on WordPress or Webflow versus built custom. We wrote up that trade-off properly in the platform comparison, and the short version is that custom costs more to build and least to run.

And "$875 upwards" is not a dodge. Application scope has no ceiling. What we can tell you is the shape of the first phase.

What actually moves the number

Page count matters far less than people expect. Ten pages built from six repeating section types costs barely more than eight. What moves a quote:

• Number of distinct page layouts. This is the real driver. Every unique layout is design plus build plus responsive work plus testing. Twelve pages, four layouts: straightforward. Twelve pages, eleven layouts: nearly triple the design time.
• Integrations. Each system the site must talk to is a few days minimum, more if the API is poorly documented or the data needs mapping. Booking systems, CRMs, ERPs, payment providers, practice-management software. One clinic project spent two weeks on the booking integration alone because their provider's availability endpoint returned slots in a bespoke format with no timezone.
• Content migration. Forty pages of clean content, fine. Four hundred pages of nine-year-old CMS content with inconsistent structure and broken internal links, that's weeks. It's also the item most often underestimated by everyone involved.
• Data structure work. On a retail project, four of ten weeks went into building a specification schema for 3,400 products because the data existed only as prose in description fields. Nothing about that is visible in the design, and without it the filters couldn't exist.
• Whether the brand is decided. If positioning, voice, and visual direction are settled, design moves fast. If three founders answer "what do you do" three different ways, that gets resolved during the project, and resolution takes meetings.
• Approval structure. One decision-maker: quick. A committee of six with no named lead: add a third to the timeline, honestly. We now ask who signs off before quoting.

The ongoing costs nobody puts in the proposal

A site is not a one-off purchase, and quotes that imply otherwise are setting up a nasty year two.

Item	Cost	Notes
Hosting	$0–$30/mo	Static and edge hosting is often free at small scale; WordPress needs real hosting
Domain	$10–$40/yr	Own it yourself, in your own account
Maintenance	$2–$9/mo	Updates, backups, monitoring, small fixes
Plugin or app licences	$0–$60/mo	Adds up quietly, especially on ecommerce
CMS licence	$0–$60/mo	Free self-hosted options exist; hosted ones scale with editors
Email sending	$0–$10/mo	Transactional email for forms and orders
SEO retainer	$18–$78/mo	Optional, and the one most likely to pay for itself

For a small business site, budget $18–$50 a month all in. Skipping maintenance entirely is the most common false economy we see — a WordPress site left unpatched for eighteen months is a security incident with a date on it, and cleaning one up costs more than three years of maintenance.

Where cheap gets expensive

Cheap is sometimes exactly right. A new business testing whether anyone wants the thing should spend $47, not $469. We've told people that and lost the work, which is fine.

Three situations where the cheap option reliably costs more:

When you'll outgrow it inside a year. A site built to be replaced at $63, replaced twelve months later at $281, cost $344. Building the $281 version once costs $281. If growth is genuinely predictable, build for it.

When speed is commercially material. On a store doing $10,000 a month, a two-second improvement in mobile load time is worth more per year than the entire build. One store we worked on went from 5.4 seconds to 1.9 on mobile and checkout completion rose 31%. A cheap build that ships at five seconds is expensive every single month.

When nobody owns the accounts. The most expensive rescues we do aren't technical. They're the ones where the previous developer registered the domain in their own account, holds the DNS, and has stopped answering email. Own your domain, your hosting, your analytics, and your repository. Always. Whoever builds the site gets access, not ownership.

How we quote

Fixed price for defined scope, day rate for open-ended work. We won't quote a fixed price on a brief that isn't specific enough to price, because that ends in one of two bad places: we pad it heavily, or we absorb the overrun and cut quality.

What we need before quoting:

1. What the site is for, stated as an outcome — enquiries, bookings, orders, applications
2. Roughly how many pages, and how many of them look different from each other
3. Every system it has to connect to
4. Who owns content, and whether it exists yet
5. Who signs off
6. Your budget range

That last one gets resistance, and here's the honest reason we ask. With a range we design the best possible thing for it. Without one we guess, and a guess is either over your budget or under-ambitious. Nobody wins that.

Payment is usually a third to start, a third at design sign-off, a third at launch. Larger builds run monthly against milestones.

Signals worth reading

Whoever you end up hiring, including if it isn't us:

• A quote with no questions asked is a quote for a template. Anyone who prices your project without asking about integrations and content is pricing a guess.
• Ask what happens after launch. Who fixes a bug in month four, and what does it cost. A vague answer here predicts an expensive year two.
• Ask to see three sites they built, live, and run them through PageSpeed Insights yourself. Takes five minutes and tells you more than a portfolio page.
• Be wary of a build that's much cheaper than everyone else's. The difference is coming out of somewhere — usually testing, accessibility, or the parts you can't see until they matter.
• Get the ownership question in writing. Domain, hosting, code, analytics, in your name.

If you want a real number for a real brief, tell us what you're trying to do and we'll give you a range on the first call rather than after three meetings. Our pricing page has the same figures laid out by package.