By Surinder Ahitan · Independent SEO Consultant · United Kingdom A website in the UK costs anywhere from £30 a month to £30,000, and both ends are real prices for real things. The gap is not mostly about quality or effort. It is about where the work is done, whether anything is built from scratch, and how much of the price is a sales process you are paying for. This page explains that without naming anyone.
You should know up front that I sell websites for trade businesses, at the more expensive end of what is described below. I would rather tell you that than have you work it out halfway down.
01The answer The honest ranges, before the explanation.
Most pages like this make you scroll for the number. Here it is first.
- £30 to £60 a month. A template, filled in for you. Often genuinely fine.
- £150 to £400 a month. Custom-built and managed, usually with marketing attached.
- £1,500 to £5,000 once. A UK freelancer or small studio, built and handed over.
- £10,000 and up, once. An agency, a design process, and people in meetings.
All four of those are honest prices. What decides which is right for you is not your budget so much as whether the website is a business card or the thing that brings the work in.
02The cheap end Where a £45 a month price physically comes from.
It is not a trick, and it is not a loss leader. Four things make it arithmetically possible, and several companies at that end of the market publish them on their own websites, so you can check rather than believe me.
The work is done somewhere cheaper. Design and development handled by teams in countries where a salary is a fraction of a UK one. That is a legitimate cost base and it cannot be matched from here.
Hundreds of sites share one setup. Shared hosting and a shared template. Your site is a configuration of something that already existed, which is why it can be live in days.
There is no sales process. No calls, no demos, no discovery, no custom quoting. Every one of those costs a company money, and cutting them is a large part of how the price gets to £45.
Nothing is built from scratch. Which is the whole point, and is fine, as long as you know that is what you are buying.
03The trade-off What that buys, and what it does not.
A cheap website is a real website. It will look tidy, load reasonably, and be far better than the Facebook page a lot of trades are still running on. If what you need is somewhere to send people who already know your name, it is the right answer and you should buy it.
What it tends not to buy is any of the following, and none of these are moral failings. They are just things that cost money to provide:
- A page for each job you do in each town you cover, which is what actually ranks.
- Changes done today rather than in three weeks across a time zone.
- Anybody thinking about what happens to an enquiry after it arrives.
- A person who knows your business when you ring.
- The ability to take the site somewhere else.
Whether those matter depends entirely on what the website is for. For a trade whose phone is the business, they usually matter a lot. For plenty of other businesses they genuinely do not.
04The check Four things to check before you sign anything.
These work on me as well as on anybody cheaper. If a supplier is awkward about any of them, that is the answer.
- Open three sites from their portfolio Not one, three, picked at random rather than the ones featured first. Do they load? Is the domain connected? Is the business still trading? A portfolio is the easiest thing in this industry to fake and the easiest thing for you to verify, and it takes about ninety seconds.
- Ask who actually does the work Not who sells it. Whether the person on the call is the person building the site, and if not, where that person is and how you reach them. There is nothing wrong with either answer. There is something wrong with not being told.
- Ask what happens if you leave Does the site keep running? Do you get the code? Is there a notice period? Who owns the domain? Get it in writing before you pay anything, because this is the question that turns into an argument eighteen months later.
- Ask what is not included Hosting, the domain, changes after launch, extra pages, an SSL certificate, email. The gap between a headline price and a real one is almost always in this list, and a straight answer here tells you a lot about the rest of it.
The portfolio one catches more than you would expect. I have opened supplier portfolios at random and found sites that no longer resolve at all, listed under a claim about how many clients are being managed. It costs you ninety seconds to look.
05The price What mine costs, and why it is more.
£297 a month. It is on the pricing page rather than available on request, which I think is the minimum you should expect from anybody.
It is more than the cheap end for reasons that are the exact mirror of section two. The site is built for your trade rather than filled into a template, it is built in the UK by the person you spoke to, and there is a sales process, because I want to tell you honestly whether this suits you before you pay for it.
It also includes the part most website pricing ignores completely: what happens to an enquiry after it arrives. Missed-call text-back, follow-up, a review funnel and one inbox. A website that generates enquiries nobody answers is an expensive way to feel busy.
No build fee, no minimum term, and after three months you can buy the code outright for £1,000. I publish that number for the same reason I publish the monthly one.
06The awkward ones Questions people ask about website pricing.
01 Is a £45 a month website a scam?
Usually not, and I would not want you to go in thinking it is. It is a real service at a real price, built on a genuinely lower cost base. Plenty of businesses are well served by one. What it is not is the same product as something costing six times more, and the honest problem is that nobody explains the difference.
02 So how can anyone charge £45 and stay in business?
Volume and cost base, mostly. Production teams based in countries where salaries are a fraction of UK ones, hundreds of sites sharing one hosting setup, templates rather than custom builds, and no sales process at all. Several of them publish this on their own websites, so you can check rather than take my word for it.
03 What should a small business website actually cost?
One-off builds from a UK freelancer or small studio commonly run £1,500 to £5,000, and agencies go well beyond that. Monthly arrangements run from about £30 at the templated end to £300 to £800 for something custom-built and managed. Anything promising a bespoke site for £30 a month is describing a template, whatever word they use for it.
04 Why does a cheap site cost more later?
Not always, but the common pattern is that the price is fine and the changes are not. A template you cannot edit, changes that take three weeks because the request crosses time zones, and no way to move the site if you want to. The monthly figure stays low and the friction is where the cost lands.
05 Is paying monthly worse than paying once?
It is different, not worse. Paying once means you own the code and also own every problem after launch. Paying monthly means no lump sum to find and somebody responsible for it continuing to work, but you are renting. The question is not which is better, it is which one the arrangement in front of you actually is, and whether they have told you plainly.
06 What does yours cost, then?
£297 a month, published on the pricing page rather than quoted on request. No build fee, no minimum term. It runs on my hosting, which is how there is no build fee, and after three months you can buy the code outright for £1,000 and take it anywhere.
If you are a trade business specifically, the trade pages go into what changes by trade, and the SEO side is here.
If you've been quoted by somebody else and want a second opinion on whether it's fair, send it over. I'll tell you straight, including when the answer is that the cheaper quote is the right one for you. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.