How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026? A freelancer's honest breakdown

Every web designer's site has a page that says "get in touch for a quote". I understand why. Every project is different, and nobody wants to be held to a number they typed in 2023. But if you're sitting at the kitchen table at ten o'clock at night wondering whether you can afford a proper website, "get in touch" isn't an answer. So here are mine.

My prices

Websites start from £750. Hosting, with email, starts from £150 a year. Brand identities start from £900. Those are the real starting points, not a teaser, and I'll tell you where your project sits before anything begins.

Here's the thing: "from" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so let me explain what moves the number.

What £750 gets you

A small, well made site for a local business. Four or five pages: home, about, services, contact, maybe a gallery. Designed for you, not picked from a theme library. Built properly so it's fast, works on phones, and can be found on Google. You can edit the words and swap the pictures yourself afterwards.

That's a plumber, a dog groomer, a one person consultancy. Most of the businesses in Woking, in other words.

What pushes it up

A shop. The moment you're taking payments, the job changes. Products, variations, postage rules, VAT, payment providers, the compliance that comes with cards. A WooCommerce shop done properly starts well above the base price, and the size of the catalogue matters more than people expect.

Bookings or anything with logic. Appointment systems, membership areas, a roster that changes weekly. These need building, not configuring. A talent agency I work with needed a system to manage over ninety clients and their events without touching code. That's a custom plugin, and it's priced like one.

Content. If you have the words and the photographs, we move fast. If you don't, somebody has to write and shoot them, and it's usually better if that's planned rather than squeezed in at the end.

The number of people involved. One decision maker and a clear brief can be live in a fortnight. A committee can take a season. I don't charge for meetings, but time is where projects get expensive.

What a quote from me looks like

A fixed price, in writing, before anything starts. A realistic timeline. A list of what's included and, just as important, what isn't. If something changes along the way, you hear about it before it costs anything.

I'd rather lose a job by being clear than win one by being vague.

The cost nobody puts on the page

The website is the cheap bit. The expensive bit is the five years afterwards: the plugin that breaks, the hosting that gets slow, the designer who's stopped answering emails. That's why I host and look after the sites I build, on servers I run myself, with a direct line to me for as long as you have the site. It's not an upsell. It's the part I think matters most.

If you'd like a number for your project, tell me what it needs to do and I'll give you one. Properly, in writing, within a day or two.