I get asked this most weeks, usually by someone who has collected three quotes that are nothing like each other. One agency said £8,000. A bloke on Facebook said £400. Someone else suggested a DIY builder for £19 a month. All three were quoting for roughly the same thing, and all three were being honest.
The reason the numbers differ so wildly is that “a website” is not one product. Here is what actually moves the price.
What you are really paying for
Strip out the sales language and a website quote covers four things: the design work, the build, the content, and what happens afterwards. Cheap quotes are cheap because they leave out two or three of them.
Design. A template adapted to your colours is a couple of hours. An original design, drawn around your specific customers and what they need to see before they trust you, is days. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is worth paying for if you are a sole trader who mainly needs to be findable.
Build. Assembling a page builder is quick. Writing a custom theme that loads fast, works on a five-year-old Android and does not fall over when a plugin updates is not. Again, both are legitimate — the question is whether your business needs the difference.
Content. This is the one everybody underestimates. Writing the words is the slowest part of most projects, and it is almost never included in the cheap quote. If a quote does not mention copy, assume you are writing it.
Afterwards. Hosting, the SSL certificate, backups, software updates, and someone to ring when the contact form stops working. A £400 website with no aftercare is a £400 website that is broken in eighteen months and nobody will touch.
Rough bands, honestly
These are the ranges I actually see in the UK, not a pricing table designed to make one option look attractive.
£0 to £50 a month, managed. A professionally built site on a monthly fee, hosting and support included. Good for sole traders and small service businesses who need to look credible and be contactable. This is what my own £39 package is. The trade-off is that you are not getting bespoke art direction, and shops and booking systems cost extra.
£1,500 to £4,000, one-off. A well-adapted template build with your content properly structured. Reasonable if you have a designer already, or your sector has strong conventions worth following. Check carefully what happens after launch, because it usually is not included.
£4,000 to £15,000. Original design, custom build, proper content work, and a team that is thinking about conversion rather than just pages. Worth it when the website is genuinely how you win business, and a two percent improvement in enquiries pays for the difference.
£15,000 and up. Now you are into ecommerce, integrations, membership systems or something that is really an application wearing a website’s clothes. Priced by what it does, not by how many pages it has.
How to work out which one you are
Ask yourself one question: if the website were twice as good, how much more money would you make?
For a plumber who gets most work through word of mouth and needs the site so people can check he is real, the answer is “not much” — and the honest recommendation is the cheapest option that looks professional. For a wedding venue where every enquiry is worth four figures and the photography does the selling, the answer is “quite a lot”, and spending properly is obviously right.
Most people already know which of those they are. The quotes confuse them into thinking it is a harder question than it is.
The bit nobody tells you
A more expensive website is not automatically a better one. I have seen £12,000 sites that load in six seconds and bury the phone number, and £39-a-month sites that do exactly what the business needed. The money buys you more design attention and more custom engineering. It does not buy you clarity, and clarity is what converts.
If you are staring at three quotes and cannot tell them apart, send them to me. I will tell you what each one is actually offering, even if the answer is that you should take one of the other two.