— — A commercial guide

What should a business website actually cost?

The unhelpful answer is “it depends”. So we built a tool to show you what it depends on — and the UK price bands your scope tends to land in.

01 — The scope builder

Tick the scope. Watch the band move.

0 of 10 selected · Score 0
Bands
Simple.
Score 0–3
Moderate.
Score 4–8
Complex.
Score 9+
Where you land · Score 0
Simple.
From £1,200

A well-positioned entry-point site or focused landing page. 3–5 pages, sensible foundations, forms wired to your CRM. Fastest to ship, appropriate when the job of the site is well-defined.

Directional guidance only. Not an automated quote. Final scope + price follow a discovery conversation.
02 — Cost drivers

Where the budget actually goes.

  • 01
    Strategy + positioning

    The clearer the message going in, the less rework going out. Skipping this looks like saving money and usually isn’t.

  • 02
    Design complexity

    Bespoke visual identity, custom illustration, motion — real design costs more than picking a template. It should.

  • 03
    Content

    Copy is a bigger cost driver than most clients realise. Whether you write it or we write it changes the invoice materially.

  • 04
    Functionality

    Every “can we add a…” is a decision point. Booking systems, calculators, member areas — each one earns its budget or doesn’t get built.

  • 05
    Integrations

    Stripe, HubSpot, Google, WhatsApp, accounting — the more external systems the site talks to, the more surface area to build and maintain.

  • 06
    eCommerce

    Products, checkout, payments, order management, VAT, shipping rules. Not the same job as a marketing site — priced accordingly.

  • 07
    Custom software

    Custom CRMs, portals, calculators — where the site becomes the product. Scoped separately from marketing site work.

  • 08
    SEO + migration

    Rebuilding without a 301 map is how sites lose 40% of their organic traffic overnight. Migration is boring and worth the money.

  • 09
    Ongoing needs

    Retainers vs projects. Some sites need monthly attention; some can sit for six months and thrive. Set expectations up front.

03 — Two-way honesty

Cheap can become expensive. Expensive can be unnecessary.

The cheap trap

The £600 website that took “a week” usually costs more than a £3,000 build over 18 months — because it wasn’t positioned, wasn’t tracked, and needs replacing before it’s earned back the saving.

  • Broken tracking = paid campaigns run blind.
  • Confused message = paid clicks convert badly.
  • Poor foundations = SEO doesn’t compound.
  • No CRM wiring = leads sit in a form log nobody checks.
The over-spend trap

Not every business needs a £3,500+ website. If the site’s job is to confirm to visitors that you’re real and take an enquiry, a well-crafted entry-point site does that beautifully at £1,200–£1,975.

  • Custom illustration when a photograph would do.
  • Bespoke functionality where a CMS plugin does the job.
  • Premium hosting for a site with 500 visitors a month.
  • Twenty pages when eight would tell the whole story.
04 — Where we’d spend it first

If we had to pick four places.

Opinionated section. If you’re working to a tight budget, these are the four things we’d insist on before anything else. Everything else is upside.

  1. 01
    Positioning + copy

    The single most under-invested part of a website budget. Fixing this makes everything else work harder.

  2. 02
    Tracking + analytics

    Server-side conversion tracking, GA4, sensible dashboards. Cheap in the scope of a rebuild — priceless when paid campaigns run.

  3. 03
    The top 3 conversion pages

    Home, top service page, contact. If these three are excellent, an average design of the rest doesn’t hurt much.

  4. 04
    CRM + form wiring

    Nothing worse than a beautiful website that drops enquiries into a spam folder. Fix this before you buy premium hosting.

Related reading

Tell us what the website needs to achieve.

We’ll tell you what we’d actually build — and how much of the scope tool above is real for you and how much is optional. No pitch deck.