How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business in the UK?
You can get a website for nothing. You can also spend £50,000 on one. For most small businesses in the UK, the question is not what is technically possible — it is what is actually worth paying.
Here is how the market breaks down.
The options, honestly
DIY website builders (£0 to £30/month)
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Website Builder. You can be live in a day, and for a very small number of use cases, that is genuinely fine.
The problems:
- They load slowly, which hurts you on Google
- You cannot customise them beyond a point — they all look like Wix sites
- Your SEO ceiling is limited by the platform
- You do not own the underlying code
- Some charge transaction fees on sales
If you are testing an idea and have no budget, start here. If you want to grow, you will outgrow it.
Freelancer or small agency, custom build (£800 to £5,000 upfront)
A one-off payment for a custom site, usually on WordPress. Quality varies hugely. The lower end of this range tends to produce WordPress themes with your content dropped in — not really custom at all.
The problem with one-off builds is that nobody is responsible for what happens after launch. Hosting goes wrong, plugins break, the site gets hacked through an outdated WordPress installation. You are on your own.
Pay monthly custom website (£49 to £149/month)
This is where the market has moved. You pay a setup fee and a monthly subscription. The studio builds your site properly, hosts it, keeps it running, and makes changes when you need them.
Done well, this is the best deal available for most small businesses. Done badly, it is a subscription to a Wix site with extra steps.
The key questions are: is the code custom, do you own it, and can you leave?
Agency, full custom project (£5,000 to £30,000+)
Makes sense for e-commerce, complex integrations, large content sites. Not the right tool for a 5-page business website.
What most small businesses should pay
A small business website — say 5 to 10 pages, no e-commerce, primary goal of converting local search traffic — should cost somewhere between:
£800 to £1,500 as a one-off build, or £49 to £99/month on a managed plan with a setup fee.
If you are being quoted significantly more than this for a basic business site, ask what the extra is for. If you are being offered something much cheaper, ask what is being left out.
The questions to ask any provider
- Is this custom-coded or a template/website builder?
- Do I own the website if I leave?
- What is hosted where, and who pays for it?
- Who handles it when something breaks?
- What does a monthly edit actually mean?
What NexaDesign charges
Our website packages start at £49/month after a £99 setup fee. That is a fully custom-coded site on Next.js — not a template, not WordPress — with hosting, SSL, SEO setup, and monthly content edits included.
We work with sole traders, tradespeople, local service businesses, and small companies across the UK. Most of our clients come to us after an experience with a Wix site that was not doing anything, or a freelancer who disappeared after the build.
