What should a website actually cost in 2026?

Ask five providers what a website costs and you’ll get five numbers spanning a 50x range, and no explanation of the difference. Here’s the honest breakdown nobody in my industry likes writing down.

Why the quotes vary so wildly

A website quote is really three costs stacked on top of each other:

1. The build: design, development and getting it live.
2. The thinking: strategy, message, copywriting, structure. The bit that makes it sell.
3. The business model (and this is the one to watch): some providers price low upfront and earn on hosting fees, maintenance plans and being paid £80 every time you change a phone number.

Cheap quotes usually skip #2 entirely and make it back on #3. Expensive quotes sometimes include brilliant #2, and sometimes just include a fancier office.

The honest tiers

£0 to £500: DIY builders and the Facebook bloke. Wix, Squarespace, a nephew, a stranger in a Facebook group. Fine for a hobby or a placeholder. The real cost is invisible: templates that read as templates, no thinking about conversion, and rebuilding it properly in 18 months anyway. You’re not buying a website; you’re renting the appearance of one.

£500 to £1,500: The template trade. A local freelancer drops your logo and text into a WordPress theme. It exists, it’s yours-ish, and if all you need is a business card that Google can find, it can be enough. What it won’t do is win you work: nobody in this bracket has time to think about your customer journey at these margins. Watch for the ongoing costs: hosting, plugins, maintenance plans.

£1,500 to £5,000: The sweet spot for most service businesses. This is where proper thinking becomes affordable: real copywriting, conversion structure, speed, SEO foundations, and a build that doesn’t need feeding. Done right, a site in this bracket should earn its cost back. (Mine usually land between £1,995 and £4,995 + VAT, and the reason that’s possible while including the thinking is modern static builds: I spend the time on your message, not on wrestling WordPress plugins. No, I’m not neutral. Yes, the maths still checks out. Keep reading.)

£5,000 to £15,000: Justified when complexity is real. Booking systems, client portals, e-commerce, multi-location businesses, serious content volume. If someone quotes this for a five-page brochure site, ask precisely what the other £10k buys.

£15,000+: Agencies with account managers. Sometimes worth it for big organisations with committees, compliance and politics. A 20-person service business paying this is usually funding someone’s office plants.

The questions that expose a quote

Whoever you’re talking to (including me), ask these:

• “What are the monthly costs, forever?” The £800 site with £60/month of hosting-plugins-maintenance costs more over three years than the £2,500 one with none.
• “Who writes the words?” If the answer is “you send us the text”, the thinking isn’t included, and the thinking is what converts.
• “What happens if we part ways?” If you can’t take the site, the domain and the content with you, the price isn’t the price, it’s the first instalment of a hostage payment.
• “How will we know it’s working?” If there’s no answer involving enquiries or calls, you’re buying decoration.

The actual answer

For most owner-run service businesses: £1,500 to £5,000, one-off, owning everything, with zero mandatory monthly costs. Less than that and the thinking’s missing; more than that and you should be able to point at exactly which complexity you’re paying for.

And before you spend anything, get a free web review. Sometimes the site you’ve got needs £0 and three fixes, and I’d rather tell you that than sell you a rebuild you don’t need.