What a website actually costs in the UK

What does a website cost in Merseyside?

Roughly the same as anywhere else in the UK, with one difference that costs local businesses real money. Liverpool and Manchester agency rates are set by the size of the client they usually serve. A sole trader in Prescot walking into that quote gets told £5,000 for something that never needed to be, because the quote was built for a company with a marketing department.

Here is the honest spread across the area, from quotes I see and from what is published locally.

The gap between the top row and the bottom is not quality. It is overheads, account management and how big the last client was. A five page site for a joiner in Whiston is the same job whoever builds it.

I work across Prescot, Whiston, Huyton and Kirkby (Knowsley), St Helens, Warrington, Widnes and Liverpool, and I take one or two clients at a time. That is the whole reason the prices below are fixed and published. I am not running a sales operation that needs room to negotiate.

Why won't anyone give you a straight number?

I have published my prices since the day I started, which is unusual in this trade and is the reason this page exists. Almost every guide you will find on this question gives you a range of £500 to £50,000 and then asks you to get in touch for a quote. That is not an answer.

There are three reasons nobody commits to a figure, and only one of them is legitimate.

The legitimate one is that websites genuinely vary. A five page site for a joiner and a booking platform for a clinic are different jobs, and quoting one price for both would be dishonest.

The second is that a lot of studios price on what they think you can pay. If you arrive by referral from a solicitor you get one number, and if you arrive from a Facebook group you get another. Publishing a price makes that impossible.

The third is that a vague number keeps you on the phone. Every hour you spend in a discovery call is an hour of sunk cost that makes it harder to walk away.

None of that helps you plan. So here are the actual figures.

What are the real options, and what does each one cost?

There are five routes, and five very different bills. My own prices are in the same table, since it would be odd to write this page and leave myself out.

The rented monthly model deserves a closer look, because it is the one most local businesses end up in and the maths is rarely spelled out. At the local end it runs £40 to £60 a month, often with a few hundred pounds up front as well. Pay monthly agency deals go well past £100.

Take £45 a month. That is £540 in year one, £1,620 by year three and £2,700 by year five. At the end of that you own nothing. Stop paying and the site comes down. Move to someone else and you start again from scratch, usually without the domain.

Signature is £1,450 once, with twelve months of hosting included, then £96 a year. That is £1,642 over three years, against £1,620 rented, so at three years it is close to a dead heat. With the hosting counted on both sides, the rented site overtakes owning in month thirty nine and keeps climbing, while mine effectively stops. Essentials works out at £942 over the same three years. Both leave you owning the site, the code, the content and the domain.

If your own monthly figure is not £45, the cost calculator does the same sum with whatever you are actually paying, or whatever you have been quoted.

To be fair to the comparison, a care plan is optional and adds £65 a month if you take one, so the gap is not always this wide. And none of this makes rented sites a scam. For a business testing whether an idea works at all, the low entry cost is genuinely the right call. It is an argument that you should know which one you are buying.

What do I charge, and what is in each tier?

Essentials, £750, or £69 a month over twelve months. Up to five pages, properly built. Right for a business that needs somewhere credible to land people from Google and Facebook, with your services, the area you cover and a way to get in touch. Most sole traders start here, and small business website design explains what that actually covers.

Signature, £1,450, or £129 a month over twelve months. Up to ten pages: a service page for each thing you actually sell, location pages for the towns you work in, and a gallery of real work. This is the most common choice and the one I would point most established local businesses towards.

Bespoke, from £2,250, or from £199 a month. For anything with moving parts. Booking, a members area, a large catalogue, or a site that needs to carry several distinct audiences without any of them getting lost.

Every build includes twelve months of managed hosting. After that, hosting is £96 a year and stays at £96 for as long as you are with me. Your domain renewal is separate, typically £10 to £15 a year.

Care plans are £65, £95 or £150 a month, and optional. Content changes, hosting, backups, monitoring and a report on how the site is doing. Cancel with 30 days notice and the site stays live, you just go back to £96 a year for hosting.

There is no hourly billing. Extra pages are £95 each on any package, and anything new gets quoted and agreed before I start it. No scope creep, no surprise invoice at the end. Every figure here is on the pricing page too.

What actually moves the price?

Not the things people expect. Nobody has ever charged more because a site is blue.

Number of pages. The single biggest factor, and the reason my own tiers are drawn at five pages and ten. A one page site and a fifteen page site are not the same job.

Content. If you have your text, your prices and decent photographs ready, the build is faster. If I am writing the copy and arranging photography, that is real work and it goes on the quote. Most local businesses underestimate this one.

Functionality. A contact form is standard. Online booking, payments, logins, a searchable directory or a stock system are each a different order of work.

Photography. Real photographs of your own work make more difference to enquiries than almost any design decision, and stock photography of a smiling person with a clipboard actively hurts you. If you have nothing usable, budget for a photographer.

Whether you already have a brand. A logo, colours and fonts you are happy with saves a stage. Building those from nothing adds one.

What are the ongoing costs?

These are separate from the build, and you will pay them wherever you go.

If someone is charging you separately for an SSL certificate in 2026, ask why. They have been free for years, and mine is inside the £96.

Hosting is the one that varies most. A modern statically built site runs on infrastructure that costs very little at small scale, which is why mine is £96 a year rather than a monthly fee that grows with you. A WordPress site with a stack of plugins needs a server that costs real money to keep fast and patched, and that cost lands on you one way or another.

The question that exposes all of it: what do I own, and what happens if I stop paying? Some providers keep the domain in their name, some keep the site on their platform, and either way you cannot leave without starting again. I have written a whole guide on that one because it is the most expensive surprise in this industry.

Is a cheap website worth it?

Sometimes, honestly.

If you are testing whether a business idea works at all, a £15 a month Squarespace site is a sensible decision and I would tell you so. If your work comes entirely from word of mouth and you need somewhere for people to check you are real, the same applies.

Where cheap becomes expensive is when the site is your main route to new work. A template site that loads slowly, says the same thing as every competitor and does not rank for the town you work in is not saving you money. It is costing you the jobs you never heard about.

The way to decide is arithmetic, not taste. Work out what one job is worth to you. If a builder's average job is £4,000, one extra job pays for a Signature build twice over, which is roughly how it went for Marlborough Builders, whose first enquiry arrived within a week of launch. If you sell £30 haircuts the sums are different, and the honest answer might be Essentials, or a booking platform instead of a website.

Common questions