Pricing guide
How much does a website cost in the UK in 2026?
Real price ranges for UK business websites, booking sites, portals and custom software, what moves the price, and the costs people forget after launch.
"It depends" is true, and it is no help when you are trying to set a budget. So this article uses real numbers: the ranges our own estimator gives for each kind of project, what makes a price go up or down, and the costs that arrive after launch.
These are our prices, worked out the same way for every quote: a day rate of £450 and a set number of days for each part of the job. Other studios will price differently, but the parts of the job are the same everywhere, so this should help you read any quote.
The short answer
For a small project, meaning up to about six pages or a handful of screens:
- A business website: £2,000 to £3,650
- A booking or ordering website: £4,300 to £6,600
- A client portal: £5,700 to £9,700
- Custom business software: £7,650 to £14,850
- Automating a manual process: £1,550 to £3,400
The gap between a website and a booking site is not the design. It is everything behind the page: the calendar or menu, the rules about what can be booked when, the emails that confirm it, and the screen where you manage it all.
What a price is made of
Every project on our estimator is broken into the same kinds of work, each with a set number of days:
- Discovery and a written scope. What it must do, agreed in writing before anything is built.
- Wireframes and visual design. The layout of each page, then how it looks.
- The build. Mobile-first pages, plus any system behind them.
- Search engine setup, so Google can read and list the pages properly.
- Testing on phones, tablets and desktops.
- Launch and handover.
If a quote does not break down roughly like this, ask for it to. A single number with no parts behind it is hard to compare and easy to change later.
What moves the price
Four things change the number, and it is worth knowing which ones you control.
- Size. Seven to fifteen pages, or several kinds of user, adds about half again to the design and build time. Beyond fifteen pages it is a little over double.
- Features. Each one is its own piece of work: card payments add one and a half to three days, customer logins two to four, an admin dashboard two to four, connecting to your accounting software, CRM or calendar two to five.
- Content. If the words and pictures still need writing or making, that is one to four more days.
- Speed. Going live in under four weeks costs 15% more, because other work has to move.
A worked example
A café wants customers to order for collection and pay by card online.
On our estimator that is a small booking or ordering website with online card payments: £5,000 to £7,950. Add customer accounts, so regulars can reorder, and automatic confirmation emails, and it becomes £6,350 to £10,650.
Here is the estimator working through a similar example, a medium-sized booking site with card payments:
The costs after launch
These are the ones people forget until the first renewal email:
- Your domain name, renewed every year.
- Hosting, monthly or yearly.
- Email on your own domain, if you want addresses like hello@yourbusiness.co.uk.
- Card fees if you take payments. Stripe's standard fee for UK cards, for example, is 1.5% plus 20p per payment.
- Support and updates. Ours start from £99 a month. Some businesses need none; anything that takes bookings or payments usually should have some.
None of these is large on its own. Together they are worth knowing before you compare a studio's quote with a website builder's monthly price.
Why prices vary so much
A website builder subscription is the cheapest way to get online, and for some businesses it is the right one. You are paying with your own time instead.
A freelancer or studio costs more up front. The difference should show up in three places: a scope agreed in writing, testing you do not have to do yourself, and something you own at the end.
Whoever you talk to, ask three questions:
- Is the price fixed, and what exactly does it include?
- Who owns the code, the content and the domain when it is finished?
- What happens, and what does it cost, when something breaks after launch?
Get your own number
Our estimator gives you a range in about two minutes, broken down the same way as this article. If your project does not fit its options, tell us about it and you will get a fixed, itemised price before any work starts.