"How much does a website cost?" is one of those questions that gets a different answer from every agency you ask, and most of those answers are deliberately vague. Here's a straighter one.
The short version
In the UK in 2026, small business websites generally fall into four price bands:
- DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace and similar): roughly £10 to £50 a month, no build fee.
- Template or theme-based sites: £500 to £3,500 as a one-off, using a lightly customised existing design.
- Custom-built websites: £2,500 to £8,000+ as a one-off, for a bespoke design and a proper content management setup.
- E-commerce websites: £2,000 to £20,000+, depending on how complex the product catalogue and checkout need to be.
None of these numbers is "wrong". The question isn't which is cheapest, it's which one actually gets your business the outcome you need.
At a glance: what each band actually gets you
| Route | Typical cost | Ongoing cost | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | £10–£50/month | Bundled into the monthly fee | A single-person service business needing a basic online presence |
| Template site | £500–£3,500 one-off | Hosting/domain usually separate | A small business that needs to look tidy quickly, without deep SEO needs |
| Custom-built | £2,500–£8,000+ one-off | Often bundled, ask upfront | A business competing on local search and needing room to grow |
| E-commerce | £2,000–£20,000+ | Depends on platform and catalogue size | Any business actually selling products online |
Why the range is so wide
Three things move the price more than anything else: how much of the site is genuinely custom versus templated, how much technical work sits behind the pages (SEO structure, schema markup, performance, e-commerce logic), and how much ongoing support is bundled in versus billed separately later.
A £500 template site and a £3,000 custom build can look similar in a screenshot. The difference shows up in how the site performs in Google, how it holds up as the business grows, and how much you end up paying in "small fixes" over the following year that should have been handled properly the first time.
What a DIY builder actually gets you
Platforms like Wix and Squarespace are genuinely fine for a very small, simple presence: a single-person service business that just needs a phone number and an address online. Where they tend to struggle is speed, technical SEO flexibility, and looking distinctly different from the thousands of other businesses using the same templates.
What you're paying for in a custom build
A properly built site (hand-coded rather than assembled from a page builder) tends to load faster, hold up better against Google's technical checks, and give you room to add features later without starting again. That's the gap between £500 and £2,500 to £8,000: not more pages, necessarily, but a foundation that keeps working as the business does. If you're weighing this up for a specific town or area, the local web design pages walk through what that looks like for businesses nearby.
A note on "year one" cost
The build price is rarely the whole story. Hosting, a domain, and any ongoing maintenance or updates usually add a few hundred pounds a year on top, whichever route you take. A DIY builder often bundles this into the monthly fee; a custom build usually separates it out, which is worth asking about upfront rather than discovering later.
Where WebAscend sits
WebAscend starts with Essential, from £695, for a focused professional presence. Business, from £1,295, is for established businesses that want stronger enquiry journeys. Growth, from £2,495, is scoped around greater functionality, integrations and digital infrastructure. Every package is discussed and fixed-quoted before work starts, so the agreed price is the price for the agreed work. You can pay once or spread the agreed cost over 12 months, with a transparent premium for the monthly option. Managed hosting, SSL and technical support are included for standard websites, with no mandatory monthly hosting fee.
If you want the full breakdown, the pricing page lists exactly what's included at each level, with no bracketed asterisks to decode, and services covers what's involved in each type of project in more depth.
The real question to ask yourself
Not "what's the cheapest option?" but "what does this website actually need to do for my business?" A site that needs to win local search traffic and convert visitors into enquiries is a different job from a simple digital business card, and pricing it the same way as a template site usually means paying twice: once for the cheap version, and again to fix it later. If you're not sure which band you actually need, get in touch and I'll give you a straight answer, not a sales pitch.