Why the quotes are so far apart
Ask three different people what a website costs and you can come back with a tenner a month, an invoice for £1,200 and a proposal that starts at £8,000. None of them is necessarily trying it on. They are quoting for different things: a tool you drive yourself, a finished site handed over as a one-off job, or an agency project with a team behind it. It helps to know what each route genuinely costs in the UK right now, so you can see where the quote in front of you sits.
The do-it-yourself builders are the cheapest line on the page. Startups.co.uk's price guide, updated in September 2025, puts Squarespace's UK plans at £12 to £79 a month billed annually, and UK cost breakdowns published in 2026 put Wix's mainstream plans at roughly £9 to £25 a month on the same basis. On top of that sits the domain after any first-year offer, business email, which is not included, and the part nobody bills you for: the evenings you spend building the thing. That last item is the real price of DIY, and it is why so many of these sites stall at nearly finished.
A site built for you is a wider market. Across the pricing guides UK web firms published in 2026, a straightforward small business site from a freelancer or small studio mostly lands between about £500 and £3,500 as a one-off, and packages aimed at trades are commonly advertised in the £500 to £1,500 bracket. Agency projects with custom design and integrations tend to start around £2,500 and run to £8,000 or more, before an online shop enters the conversation. The spread is that wide because the quotes are not really for the same product, and the difference is rarely the number of pages. It is who does the work, who writes the words, and who is still answering the phone a year later.
What the quote quietly leaves out
A one-off price is the cost of getting a website. It is not the cost of having one. Somebody has to pay for hosting every month, renew the domain every year, provide email that matches it, apply the software updates that close security holes, and keep backups that actually restore. On a quote, those lines are usually missing, vaguely worded, or parked in a separate care plan you only hear about at handover. None of them is expensive on its own. All of them together, unpriced, are how a £1,000 website turns out to cost rather more than £1,000.
The other quiet omission is ownership. Whose name is the domain registered in, who holds the hosting account, and what happens to the site itself if you and the builder part ways. None of that appears on a quote, and it decides whether you can ever leave. The small business website security checklist covers why domain ownership belongs on your list even when nothing is wrong, and who owns your domain name is how you actually run that check on your own domain.
One-off or monthly: the honest comparison
Neither model is a trick, whatever the other side's marketing says. Paying once makes sense when you want to own everything outright from day one, you know what the site needs to say, and you have a plan for the running costs above, whether that is a care plan or a capable person in the business. The mistake on this route is treating launch day as the end of the spending rather than the start of a small, permanent overhead.
Paying monthly makes sense when you would rather not find a lump sum, and you want the hosting, the updates and the fixing of things to be one person's job with one predictable bill. Two questions decide whether a monthly deal is good value: exactly what does the money include, and what does leaving cost. The trap on this route is a contract that quietly ties the site to the supplier, with minimum terms, exit fees, or a site you cannot take with you because you never owned it.
The arithmetic that cuts through it: multiply the monthly price by thirty six, and compare that with the one-off quote plus three years of hosting, email and maintenance. Done fairly, on like-for-like sites, the two routes usually land closer together than either side's advertising suggests. If one of them comes out wildly cheaper, something is missing from it, and it is worth finding out what before you sign.
Five questions that stop you overpaying
Whatever route you take, ask these before any money moves. Who owns the domain, and is it registered in my name? What exactly does the price include each month or each year, and what costs extra? If I leave, what do I take with me, and what does leaving cost? When the site breaks on a Saturday morning, who fixes it, and is that part of the price? And is the total, including VAT, written down anywhere I can hold you to?
The answers matter more than the headline number, because the expensive websites are rarely the ones with the biggest price tag. They are the cheap ones you did not own, paid for again when you had to move, or abandoned because nobody would fix them. A supplier who is vague about any of these questions has answered them.
It is also worth being clear about what the site is for before you spend anything at all. What a website actually does for a small business is the job description any price should be judged against: if a quote does not obviously serve that job, it is dear at any figure.
What I charge, so you can compare
For comparison rather than a sales pitch: my pricing is monthly. £49 a month, VAT included, covers a site of up to five pages written and built for you, with hosting, daily backups, SSL, your domain and its renewal, business email, and your email set up so it is hard to fake, because that last one is the corner most quotes cut. £79 a month adds an ongoing SEO campaign, blog posts written for you and automated enquiry replies. Pay for the year and two months are free. There is usually a one-off fee for the build itself, but I am not charging it at the moment, so you start on the monthly price. Anything bigger is quoted per project as a fixed total in writing, half on agreement and half on launch.
There is no minimum term and no exit fee. The domain, the content and the accounts are in your name throughout, and the copyright in the design and the code transfers to you at launch, so if you ever leave, you take the lot with you. That is my answer to the five questions above, in writing. If you have someone else's quote in front of you and want a straight second opinion on what it does and does not include, get in touch, even if the answer turns out to be that it is a fair price.