"How much is a website?" is the question every studio gets and almost none answer in public. The honest reply is a range so wide it looks like a dodge: £500 from a template shop, £100,000 from an agency, and everything in between described with the same three words. So here is the UK market as we see it in 2026, in bands, with what you actually get at each.
These are not quotes. They are the numbers that come up when clients tell us what they have been offered elsewhere, and what we have seen work and fail.
The five bands
The five bands, on one axis
Under £1,000 — a template. Squarespace, Wix, Framer, or a freelancer filling one in for you. You get a live site fast and you own the running of it. What you do not get is anyone thinking about what the site is for. For a one-page presence, a side project, or a business that needs an address on the internet and nothing more, this is the correct amount of money. Spending more here is vanity.
£1,000 – £5,000 — a built template. A freelancer or a very small studio takes a theme and bends it to your brand: your fonts, your colours, a proper structure, images that are not stock. The site will look like you. It will also look, underneath, like a thousand other sites, and it usually starts fighting you the moment you want something the theme did not anticipate. Fine for a first serious site. A false economy for a second one.
£5,000 – £20,000 — a designed site. This is where the site is drawn before it is built. Someone works out what a visitor needs to understand in the first ten seconds, writes the words, and then designs pages around them rather than pouring your copy into boxes. Expect a custom design, a performance budget, real content strategy, and a build you can grow. Most businesses that are past the first year and losing sales calls to a site that undersells them belong here.
£20,000 – £60,000 — a site with a system. Multiple templates, a content model, integrations, a CMS someone in your team can actually use, motion that has been thought about, and a launch that includes the analytics, the redirects and the handover. The cost is in the number of distinct things that have to be designed and the number of people who will touch it after you.
£60,000+ — an agency programme. Discovery, research, workshops, a team of specialists and a delivery schedule measured in quarters. Right for organisations with many stakeholders, many markets, or a platform rather than a site. Wrong for almost everyone else, who pay for a process they do not need.
What actually moves the price
Within any band, four things change the number more than anything else.
Pages, not features. A site is priced by how many different kinds of page it needs, not how many pages. Ten case studies on one template is one design. Ten different landing pages is ten.
Words. A site with the copy written before design starts costs less and lands better than one where the words arrive last. If nobody on your side is going to write it, say so, and budget for it.
Motion and custom build. Scroll animation, bespoke interactions and anything that does not come off a shelf is designer-and-developer time. It is worth paying for when it carries an idea. It is expensive decoration when it does not.
Who is in the room. Senior people cost more per hour and usually less per project, because they make fewer wrong turns. Ask who is actually doing the work, and whether design and build are the same people.
The costs after launch
Hosting, a domain, a CMS licence and someone to keep the plugins from rotting. Budget £20 to £200 a month depending on the stack, and be suspicious of anyone who does not mention it. A site that costs nothing to run is usually a site nobody is looking after.
What you should get back
Whatever you spend, you should own it: the domain, the hosting account, the source files, the CMS login. You should be able to change a headline without calling anyone. And the site should still make sense when your brand is handed to the next person, which is the difference between a website and a Photoshop file that happens to be online.
Where we sit
Our web projects start at £5,000 and most land between £8,000 and £30,000, which puts us in the designed-site and system bands. Design and build are the same small team, so nothing is lost between a mockup and the live page. If you need a template, we will say so and point you to one. If you need an agency programme, we will say that too.
