HowMuchDoesaWebsiteCostin2026?ARealPricingBreakdown

Ask five agencies about website cost 2026 and you'll get five different non-answers. That's not because pricing is a mystery, it's because most agencies don't want to commit to a number before they've found out how much you'll pay. We'd rather just tell you. A basic small business site runs somewhere between £800 and £2,500. A proper custom build with real design and development work sits between £4,000 and £15,000. E-commerce and custom web apps go higher still. What actually drives the number, within each tier, is what this article breaks down.

Website cost 2026: the four real pricing tiers

There isn't one market rate for "a website." There are four distinct categories of project, and they don't overlap as much as agencies like to pretend. Knowing which one you actually need is the first step to not overpaying, or underbuying and having to redo it in a year.

Simple landing page or single-page site: £800–£2,500

This covers a one-to-five page site built on a template or a lightly customised page builder, usually for a single service, product launch, or campaign. You're paying for layout, copy placement, basic SEO setup, and a contact form that actually routes somewhere. At the low end of this range you're getting a templated build with minimal customisation. At the top end you're getting genuinely good design applied to a simple structure, which is where a project like our work on inbox-setup landed. That build used WordPress and Elementor and hit a 91 PageSpeed score with a 4.2x lift in lead generation, proof that a small page done properly outperforms a bloated one every time.

Small business site: £2,500–£6,000

This is the most common project type we quote. Think 6-15 pages: home, about, services, team, case studies or portfolio, contact, maybe a blog. You're paying for custom design (not a stock theme with your logo dropped in), content structuring, on-page SEO, and enough backend flexibility that you can update copy and images yourself without calling us every time. The spread within this tier comes down almost entirely to design depth and how much content strategy is involved versus just slotting in what the client already has written.

E-commerce store: £4,000–£20,000+

E-commerce is where "it depends" becomes genuinely true, because the range is enormous. A straightforward Shopify or WooCommerce store with under 50 products, standard checkout, and no custom logic can land at the lower end. Add custom product configurators, subscription billing, multi-currency, inventory syncing with a warehouse system, or a bespoke checkout flow, and you're well past £15,000. The platform choice matters here too. If you're weighing options, our comparison of shopify-vs-woocommerce-2026 goes into which one actually fits which business model.

Custom web application: £10,000–£50,000+

This is no longer "a website," it's software with a website wrapped around it: user accounts, dashboards, permissions, data that needs to persist and sync, maybe a mobile companion app down the line. We built mymaid, a maid-booking platform, on Next.js, React, Node, and MySQL specifically because it needed to handle real-time booking logic and scale with demand from day one. Projects like that are priced on scope and engineering complexity, not page count, which is why the range is so wide.

What actually moves the price within a tier

Two businesses can both want a "small business site" and get quotes £3,000 apart. Here's what's actually causing that gap.

• ◆Number of unique page templates, not total pages. Ten pages that all reuse the same layout cost far less than five pages that each need bespoke design.
• ◆Custom design versus template. A theme with your brand colours applied is cheap. A design system built around your brand, your users, and your conversion goals is not, and it's the difference between a site that looks fine and one that actually converts.
• ◆Content creation. If you're handing over final copy and professional photography, that's baked into the lower end of the range. If we need to write copy, source or shoot imagery, and build out a content strategy from scratch, that's a separate and substantial line item.
• ◆Integrations. Booking systems, CRMs, payment gateways, email marketing platforms, and custom APIs each add development time, testing, and ongoing maintenance risk.
• ◆E-commerce complexity specifically. Product count matters less than variant complexity, shipping logic, tax rules across regions, and whether inventory needs to sync with something outside the website.
• ◆Ongoing maintenance and hosting. A one-off build fee is not the full cost of ownership. Budget separately for hosting, security updates, and a maintenance retainer if you don't have in-house capacity to manage it.

Platform choice changes the number too

The platform you build on shifts both the upfront cost and the long-term cost. WordPress builds are often cheaper to start because of the plugin ecosystem, but they can rack up hidden costs in plugin licensing and security maintenance over time. A custom Next.js build costs more upfront because there's no plugin shortcut, everything is engineered, but it typically costs less to maintain and performs better under load. We break down that trade-off properly in Next.js vs WordPress, including how it affects who on your team can actually edit the site day to day.

If you're currently deciding between a DIY builder and paying for a custom build at all, that's a separate decision with its own cost logic, covered in our custom website vs website builder breakdown. The short version: builders are cheaper until they aren't, and the crossover point is earlier than most people expect.

When the cost of doing nothing is higher

Every cost conversation should include the cost of not redesigning. A site that's slow, dated, or hard to update quietly bleeds leads every month it stays that way. If you're not sure whether you're at that point yet, we've laid out the actual warning signs rather than the vague "it just feels old" reasoning most businesses go on.

And if a website isn't the only digital product on your roadmap this year, the same tiered logic applies to mobile: our app cost breakdown for 2026 covers native versus cross-platform pricing using the same real-project approach as this article.

The quote that looks cheap but isn't

The most common way businesses overpay isn't picking the wrong tier, it's picking a quote that excludes things they'll need within the first year and then paying for them piecemeal, badly, under time pressure. Ask any agency quoting under £1,500 for a small business site exactly what's included: how many rounds of revisions, whether copywriting is included or you're supplying it, whether the CMS setup lets you add pages later or locks you into what's built at launch, and who owns the domain and hosting account. A £2,000 quote with clear scope beats a £900 quote that turns into £2,400 once you've asked for the things you assumed were standard.

The same logic applies at the top end. A £15,000 custom web app quote should come with a clear breakdown of discovery, design, development, QA, and post-launch support as separate phases, not one lump sum. If an agency can't tell you roughly how many hours are going into design versus engineering, they likely haven't scoped it properly themselves, which means the number is a guess dressed up as a quote.

Ongoing costs after launch

Budget for these separately from the build cost, because they don't stop once the site goes live. Domain registration runs roughly £10-15 a year. Hosting ranges from £5 a month for basic shared hosting up to £80-200+ a month for a properly provisioned server running a custom application with real traffic. WordPress sites need a maintenance plan covering core, theme, and plugin updates, typically £50-150 a month if you're paying an agency to handle it, versus doing it yourself if you have the time and risk tolerance.

Custom-coded sites generally cost less to maintain month to month because there's no plugin ecosystem to keep patched, but they cost more when you do need a change, since every feature addition is development work rather than a settings toggle. Neither is objectively cheaper over three years, it depends on how often the site changes after launch.

Whatever tier you're in, the fastest way to get an accurate number is to skip the generic form and talk to someone who'll ask the right questions. Get in touch and we'll scope it properly, no inflated "starting from" figure designed to get you on a call.