How much does a website cost in 2026?

Ask a few agencies what a website costs and you’ll get a few different answers, most of them starting with “it depends.” True, but useless. Here’s what actually drives the price.

Two ways agencies charge

Upfront. Most agencies build your site for a one-off fee, then bill separately for hosting and changes. For a small business site that fee usually runs to thousands of pounds. It’s front-loaded work, so it’s a front-loaded bill — but it means paying out a significant sum before the site has brought you a single enquiry.

Monthly. The alternative is a subscription: no large upfront cost, with the build and hosting bundled into a monthly fee. It’s how we work — our web design service starts at £50 a month with no setup fee.

What pushes the cost up

Whichever model you’re looking at, the same things make a build bigger:

Size. Five pages is a different job from fifty. More pages means more design, more content, more testing.

E-commerce. Selling online adds real complexity — product pages, payments, stock, shipping, tax. A shop is a bigger build than a brochure site.

Custom functionality. Booking systems, logins, calculators, integrations with software you already use. Anything built around how your business actually works takes time to do properly.

Content. If your copy and photography are ready, the build moves fast. If they need creating, that’s extra work.

What shouldn’t cost extra

Some things are baseline, not upgrades. Your site should work properly on a phone, load quickly, and be built so search engines can read it. If an agency quotes those as add-ons, that’s worth questioning.

Five questions to ask before you commit

• What’s included in the price — hosting? Changes? Or are those separate?
• What happens when you need something changed?
• Who owns the site, and what happens if you leave?
• How long will it take, and what happens if it overruns?
• Is it bespoke, or a template with my logo on it?

Any agency worth hiring will answer all five without hedging.

So what should you budget?

For a professional small business site: thousands of pounds upfront with a traditional agency, or from around £50 a month on a subscription. Much cheaper than that usually means a template with your details typed in — fine if that’s all you need, as long as you know that’s what you’re buying.

If you’d rather not pay thousands before your site has earned you anything, that’s the gap we built our web design service to fill: bespoke sites from £50 a month, no setup fee, live in about a week. Tell us what you need and we’ll tell you honestly what it’d take.