How much does a business website cost in 2026? Somewhere between £500 and £100,000, which is the kind of answer that makes people close the tab. So here are the actual price bands from the UK market, what each one buys, where Germany differs, and the number almost nobody quotes: what the site costs to run for three years after launch. Read that last part before you accept the cheap quote.
The 2026 price bands
Across the UK pricing guides we reviewed this year, the market splits cleanly into five tiers. Most serious small business sites land in the £5,000–£10,000 band; most first quotes come in below it, which is where the trouble starts.
£0–£1,000: DIY template
Wix, Squarespace, a WordPress theme. Fine for testing an idea or a one-person business that gets work by referral. Not fine for anything that depends on enquiries, because you're the designer, the copywriter and the developer, and none of those is your job. The real cost is your weekends.
£2,000–£6,000: freelancer brochure site
Five to ten pages, a theme customised to your brand, contact forms, basic SEO. Perfectly good for a simple service business with a clear offer. The risk isn't the freelancer — good ones are excellent — it's what happens in month nine when they've moved on and nobody knows how the site was built. We wrote about why cheap sites get expensive; this tier is where most of those stories begin.
£5,000–£10,000: agency-built small business site
This is the band where a site starts working as a sales asset rather than a business card. What it should include: a discovery session (who buys, why, and what stops them), custom design rather than a skinned theme, copy written for conversion, proper performance work so it passes Core Web Vitals on a phone, analytics with conversions set up, and a CMS you can actually use without calling anyone. If a £7,000 quote doesn't include discovery and copy, it's a £4,000 site with a mark-up.
£10,000–£25,000: e-commerce or feature-rich
Online stores, booking systems, member areas, multi-language, CRM and payment integrations. The cost is driven by the number of things that can break — every integration is a contract between two systems that someone has to design, build and test. This is also where "we'll just use a plugin for that" quietly becomes a maintenance liability.
£25,000–£100,000+: custom platform
When the website is the business: a marketplace, a client portal, a custom learning platform, a SaaS front end. You're not buying pages; you're buying software with a design layer. Priced by scope, not page count, and it should come with a written specification before a number.
Germany: same bands, in euros, slightly lower
German pricing tracks the UK structure closely. In our experience quoting in both markets, a Berlin agency SME site lands at €5,000–€12,000 and a custom platform from €30,000, with hourly rates of €90–€150 against London's £100–£180. The gap is smaller than people expect, because senior developers cost roughly the same in both cities — the difference is rent, not talent. One thing that's genuinely different: German sites need a compliant Impressum, a Datenschutzerklärung and a cookie consent set-up that actually meets the TTDSG, and skipping them is a legal exposure, not a style choice.
The number nobody quotes: three years of running it
A website's price is the build plus what it costs to keep alive. Budget, per year:
- Hosting: £100–£1,200 depending on traffic and whether anyone manages the server.
- Maintenance and updates: £500–£3,000 for plugin updates, security patches, backups and small fixes — more if the site runs on a plugin stack that breaks every update.
- Licences and tools: £200–£1,500 for premium plugins, forms, CRM connectors, analytics.
- Content: whatever it costs to keep the site from looking abandoned. A blog with a post a month is £3,000–£8,000 a year done properly.
Run that for three years and a £3,000 template site with £2,500 a year of patching, plus the leads it lost to a four-second load time, has cost more than the £8,000 site that needed £800 a year. The cheap option is rarely cheap; it's deferred.
What actually moves the price
- Discovery. Whether anyone asks who the site is for before designing it. This is the line item most likely to be missing from cheap quotes, and the one that decides whether the site converts.
- Custom vs template design. Not about looking pretty; about the layout following your sales argument instead of a theme author's guess.
- Content. "Client to supply copy" is the four-word phrase that delays more websites than any technical issue. If you don't have a writer, the quote should include one.
- Integrations. Each system the site talks to adds design, build and testing. CRM, payments, bookings, email, ERP — count them.
- Who builds it. A freelancer, a small agency and a large agency will quote the same brief at £4,000, £9,000 and £25,000. The middle number usually buys the most site per pound; the top number buys process and account management you may not need.
Three questions before you sign
- What's included in the price that isn't design and code — discovery, copy, SEO set-up, analytics, training?
- Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting account the day it launches? (If the answer isn't "you", walk.)
- What does it cost to keep running, and who do I call in year two? Our 12 questions for choosing an agency cover the rest.
The short version
Budget £5,000–£10,000 (€5,000–€12,000 in Germany) for a small business site that generates enquiries, £10,000–£25,000 if it sells or books, £25,000+ if it's a platform, and 10–20% of the build cost per year to run it. Below £2,000 you're buying a placeholder. And whatever the tier, the site is part of a marketing budget, not a substitute for one — here's what the rest costs.
Want a straight quote instead of a range? Contact us or email info@bsadoes.it with what the site needs to do — enquiries, sales, bookings, a platform — and roughly how many pages and integrations. We'll come back with a number and what it includes, in writing. We work with clients in Berlin, London, and remotely worldwide.