How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?

In the UK in 2026, published guides put a simple brochure website at roughly £500 to £3,500 from a freelancer and £3,000 to £12,000 from an agency outside London. A small online shop typically starts around £2,000 to £5,000 freelance and £5,000 to £15,000 through a regional agency, and portals or bespoke booking systems start in the tens of thousands. Then budget for running costs every year: hosting, licences and someone to keep it patched, which can add up to several thousand pounds a year on a busy shop.

Those ranges are wide because “a website” covers everything from five pages and a contact form to a trade portal that talks to your stock system. The rest of this guide explains where your project is likely to sit, and why.

Typical UK ranges by type of site

The figures below come from three recently published UK pricing guides, listed in the sources. They don’t agree exactly, which is honest: nobody has a definitive price list. Treat them as a sense-check, not a quote.

A few specifics from the same guides. Moneymagpie puts a basic four-to-six page brochure site from a freelancer or small agency at £1,500 to £3,500, a more professional WordPress site at £3,500 to £8,000, and a complex WooCommerce build with subscriptions and CRM integration at £15,000 to £20,000. Kwiboo puts London agency brochure sites at £8,000 to £25,000. ExpertSure puts regional agency projects at £3,000 to £8,000 against £8,000 to £30,000 or more in London.

My own judgement, from agency delivery on Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce and WordPress: the top of each band is where projects with integrations and migrations sit, and large multi-site eCommerce programmes run well beyond the top of this table.

What drives the cost

Two sites that look similar on screen can differ by a factor of three in price. The difference is almost always in things you can’t see from the homepage.

• Design approach. Adapting a good theme is far cheaper than designing every page from scratch. Each extra round of design changes adds time.
• Number of page types, not pages. Fifty pages built from four templates cost less than fifteen pages that each need their own layout.
• Content. Writing copy, sourcing photos and entering hundreds of products is real work. If the quote assumes you’ll do it, that’s your time, not a saving.
• Migration. Moving products, customers, orders and old URLs (with mapped redirects and launch checks to reduce search disruption) from an existing site.
• Integrations. Anything that moves data between the site and another system, such as stock, accounts, a CRM or a booking diary. This is where estimates are most often wrong.
• Business rules. Trade pricing, delivery zones, deposits, cancellations. Every “except when” is development and testing.
• Testing and accessibility. Proper testing across devices, and building to an accessibility standard, takes time. It costs more to fix afterwards.
• Clarity of the brief. Agencies price uncertainty. A vague brief gets a padded quote or a low one with lots of exclusions.

Freelancer, small agency or larger agency

Day rates explain much of the gap. ExpertSure puts UK freelance web developers at roughly £200 to £550 a day depending on experience. Kwiboo quotes a London median of around £513 a day against £325 elsewhere. Agencies charge more per day than freelancers because the rate carries project management, design, testing and cover when someone is off.

• A freelancer is usually the best value for a brochure site or a simple shop, if you’ve seen their work and they’re responsive. The risk is a single point of failure: holidays, illness, or moving on.
• A small agency (say, under 20 people) suits most shops and mid-sized sites. You get a team and some resilience without paying for a large overhead.
• A larger agency earns its rate on complex eCommerce, heavy integration or multi-site work, where process and specialist depth matter. On a small job you may get their most junior people.

Location affects price more than quality. The published ranges put London agencies well above regional ones, and most projects now run remotely, so you aren’t limited to your own town. I’m based in Kingsteignton, and plenty of capable agencies in Devon and the wider South West work for clients across the country at regional rates.

Running costs: the part most quotes leave out

The build is a one-off. These come round every month or year, and over three years they can exceed the build cost.

Moneymagpie’s estimate for the realistic total annual cost of owning a small business WordPress site is £2,000 to £4,000 a year. Ask every agency for a three-year running cost alongside the build price, so you’re comparing the whole commitment. Choosing a platform sets out running costs for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento side by side.

One-off extras that rarely appear in the headline

• Copywriting and photography. If nobody on your team has time to write fifty pages, someone has to be paid to, and product photography is its own line.
• Payment processing. Card fees are a percentage of every sale, charged by your payment provider. They’re small per order and significant per year, so model them on your own turnover.
• Legal pages and cookie consent. Terms, privacy notice and a consent tool are often assumed to be “provided by the client”.
• Training. An hour or two showing your team how to edit pages and process orders saves a lot of support tickets later.
• Launch week. Someone needs to be on hand when the site goes live to fix what only shows up with real customers. Check whether that’s included or billed by the hour.

A worked example (illustrative)

Assumptions, not a quote: a small WooCommerce shop built for £6,000, managed hosting at say £30 a month, four premium extensions at say £100 a year each, and a care plan at say £125 a month. Running costs come to £360 + £400 + £1,500 = £2,260 a year, or £6,780 over three years. The three-year cost of the “£6,000 shop” is £12,780.

Vision2’s prices, as one reference point

Here’s what I charge, so you can see where an independent sits against the ranges above. I’m not VAT registered, so there’s no VAT to add.

• A business website your team can update: from £3,500.
• An online shop: from £5,000.
• Rebuilds, migrations, portals and booking systems: scoped first (scoping from £1,500 for portals and systems), then a fixed price.
• Care plans: Shopify £65, WordPress Essentials £95, or WooCommerce/booking Commerce £135 a month. Changes and fixes are extra at £85 an hour or under an agreed retainer. The care plan chooser tells you which fits, or whether you need one.

Hosting and licences are paid by you, directly to the provider, so nothing is marked up. Full details are on the pricing page, and what’s included in a build is on practical builds and integrations. If your project needs a larger agency, I’ll say so.

Where to start

Work out which row of the first table you’re in, and be honest about integrations and content, because that’s where budgets go. Set a budget range that includes three years of running costs, not just the build. Then get two or three quotes against the same written brief, so the numbers can be compared.

If you’re getting quotes that are thousands apart for what seems like the same job, that’s normal, and it’s usually down to what each one leaves out. A fixed-price scoping brief, from £750, gives every agency the same thing to price: see project scoping and agency selection.