What a small business website should actually cost in the UK
Quotes for the same brief range from £400 to £10,000. Here is what drives the number, and what you should expect at each level.
Ask three agencies to quote for the same small business website and you will get three wildly different numbers. That is not because one is dishonest. It is because "a website" describes anything from a one-page brochure to a booking platform.
Here is what actually moves the price.
What you are really paying for
The design and build is rarely the expensive part. The cost sits in three places:
- Discovery. Working out who the site is for and what it needs to make them do. Skip this and you get something attractive that does not sell.
- Content. Words, photography, product data. This is the single most common reason projects run late.
- Build quality. A hand-coded site and a page assembled from a template can look identical on launch day and behave very differently a year later.
Rough bands in the UK market
| Budget | What it typically buys |
|---|---|
| Under £500 | A template you configure yourself, or a very small brochure site |
| £500 – £2,000 | A custom small business site, a handful of pages, built to convert |
| £2,000 – £10,000 | Larger sites, ecommerce, integrations, original photography |
| £10,000+ | Platforms, complex commerce, ongoing product work |
Most small and medium businesses need the second band and are quoted the third.
The questions worth asking
Before you compare quotes, make sure they are quoting for the same thing.
- Who writes the content — you or them?
- Do you own the site and the code afterwards?
- What happens after launch, and what does that cost?
- Can you see something working before you commit?
That last one matters most. At Nacreatives we build a working draft within 48 hours and you only pay if you like it — because a quote is an opinion, and a working page is evidence.
If you want a straight answer for your own project, tell us what you are trying to achieve.