How much should a small-business website cost?

The honest answer is “it depends”, which is useless on its own. So here is what it actually depends on, and roughly what each part adds.

Most quotes you get will be a single number with no working shown. That is the problem. Two builds at the same price can be wildly different jobs, and you can’t tell which one you’re buying.

Three things move the price

How much there is. A five-page site is not a thirty-page site. Every page needs writing, laying out, making work on a phone, and checking. Page count is the least interesting driver but it is the most obvious one.

Whether it has to do anything. This is the big one. A site that shows your phone number is a leaflet. A site that takes a booking, holds a slot, takes a deposit and files the record is software. The visible design might look near-identical; the work behind it is not comparable.

What it has to talk to. If enquiries need to land in your CRM, bookings in your calendar, and payments in your accounts, each of those is a connection that has to be built and tested. Three integrations is not three times the work of one, but it is not free either.

Ready-made versus built from scratch

There are really two routes.

A ready-made site is one that already exists and gets customised into yours. We sell these at £1,200, with monthly instalments available. You pick a finished build, we put your words, colours and photos through it, and it goes live in about a week. It is the right answer when your business works much like others in your trade and you need to look credible quickly.

A custom build starts from your business rather than a template. It costs more and takes longer, typically two to four weeks for a site, longer once bookings, payments and integrations are in it. It is the right answer when the way you win work is specific, or when the admin around the job is the thing actually costing you money.

Neither is better. They answer different questions.

Where the money is worth spending

The path from visitor to enquiry. If someone lands on your site ready to buy, how many steps until you know about it? Every step you remove is worth more than anything you could spend on decoration.

Speed. A slow site loses people before they have seen anything you paid for. This is not a nice-to-have and it is not expensive to get right if it is considered from the start. It is very expensive to retrofit.

Being able to change it yourself. If you have to pay someone every time a price or a phone number changes, you will stop changing them, and the site will slowly stop being true.

Where it usually isn’t

Custom illustration and animation before you have traffic. Lovely, and invisible if nobody is arriving. Spend it on being found and on the enquiry path first.

A full content system for a five-page site. If the content barely changes, you are paying for machinery you will never use.

Pages nobody asked for. A page per service sounds thorough. If four of them get no visitors, they were four pages of writing you paid for and nobody read.

What a quote should tell you

A quote worth trusting says what is included, what it costs, and when it will be finished, before anything starts. If the scope changes, you should be told what that means for the price before the work happens, not after.

If a quote is one number and no detail, ask what happens when something takes longer than expected. The answer tells you most of what you need to know.

The short version

Ask what the site has to do, not how many pages it has. Spend on the route to an enquiry and on speed. Get the number and the date in writing. And be suspicious of any price quoted before anyone has asked how your business actually gets work.