How much does a website actually cost in 2026?

Search this question and you'll mostly find sales pitches dressed up as guides. Agencies will tell you a proper site costs £5,000 because that's what they charge. Site-builder platforms will tell you anyone can do it for £20 a month because that's what they sell. Both are telling you about their business model, not your website.

Here's the version with the incentives laid on the table. (Yes, we build websites too. Our prices are at the bottom, so judge for yourself whether the rest of this is fair.)

Why websites used to cost £3,000–£6,000

For a long time, that range was genuinely reasonable for a small-business site from an agency. Not because the result was complicated, but because the process was: a discovery meeting, a proposal, a designer, a developer, a project manager relaying messages between you and both of them, and a few weeks of back-and-forth. Most of the bill was labour, and most of the labour was coordination.

That maths held because there was no faster way to get a professional result. There is now.

What changed

Modern AI-assisted development tools let one experienced engineer do in days what used to take a small team weeks. The repetitive parts of building a site (laying out pages, wiring up forms, making everything behave on phones) have collapsed in cost. What's left is the part that was always the real value: knowing what to build, writing words that sound like you, making it fast, making it secure, and not making a mess.

Some builders pass that saving on. Some keep charging 2019 prices for 2026 effort. It's worth knowing which one you're talking to.

The honest price bands

£15–30/month: DIY site builders (Wix, Squarespace, and friends). Genuinely the right answer more often than people like us admit. If you need one page with your hours, prices and a phone number, and you're happy to spend a weekend fiddling with templates, do this. The trade-offs: it's your weekend, the result usually looks like a template, and the monthly fee never ends.

£400–£2,000: a professionally built site, priced post-AI. This is the new middle that barely existed three years ago: a senior person building your site with modern tooling and charging for days, not weeks. You should expect proper copy, fast load times, search-engine basics done correctly, and full ownership of the result. This is where we sit. More below.

£3,000–£6,000+: a traditional agency build. Still sometimes the right call: you're a larger organisation, you need workshops and stakeholder sign-off, original brand design, user research, or a design system that ten other people will build on. If that's not you, a chunk of this price is process you don't need.

What you're actually paying for

Whoever builds it, the typing is now the cheap part. The things worth paying for:

Judgement. What pages you need (usually fewer than you think), what goes above the fold, what the site is for.
Words. Most small-business sites fail on copy, not design.
Speed and search basics. Done at build time, not bolted on later.
Security and hosting choices. Boring decisions that determine whether you get hacked in year two.
The looking-after. Someone who picks up the phone when something breaks.

Questions that expose a bad deal

"Who owns the domain?" If the answer isn't "you, in your own account", walk away.
"What happens if I leave?" You should be able to take the site, the content and the domain with you.
"What's the monthly fee for?" Hosting and updates are a real service; "platform fees" on a brochure site usually aren't.
"What does a change cost later?" Per-tweak invoices add up faster than the build price.

Our numbers, for comparison

We publish ours: starter sites from £450, business sites from £950, shops and bookings from £1,950. One-off, fixed before we start, and you own everything. If a £20-a-month builder would serve you better, we'll say so in the first conversation. It costs us some sales and saves everyone a lot of time.