A guide to website pricing in 2026
One of the most common questions business owners ask is “How much does a website cost?” The answer is rarely a single number: price shifts with design depth, page count, development complexity, integrations, and what happens after launch. Here is a practical breakdown so you can plan and compare quotes with confidence.
Factors that affect website costs
1. Type of website
Different site types carry different build effort and risk.
Basic brochure website (£500 – £3,000+) Ideal when you need a credible presence, clear services, and enquiries via forms or phone. Limited custom functionality keeps costs lower.
E-commerce website (£2,000 – £10,000+) Needs cart/checkout, payments, product data, and often stock or shipping logic. Large catalogues and migrations increase ecommerce build time and testing.
Custom-built website (£5,000 – £50,000+) Bespoke UX and features, often outside a standard CMS, or deeply customised on top of one. The upside is flexibility when the project is scoped well; the cost reflects design, engineering, and QA.
2. Website design and development
DIY website builders (e.g. Wix, Squarespace) (£10 – £50/month) We are not fans of generic cookie-cutter sites for every brand, but builders can be a legitimate way to start if you accept the limits of templates and plugins.
Pre-designed templates (£100 – £500) Budget-friendly; originality and performance vary. Often sold through Wix, Shopify, or WordPress marketplaces.
Custom web design (£2,000 – £20,000+) Unique layouts, component systems, and brand polish. Range is driven by page count, art direction rounds, and content design.
3. Domain name and hosting
Domain name (£10 – £50/year) Your address on the web. Providers are broadly similar on headline prices; compare renewal rates and whether privacy protection is included. For a structured comparison, see our top five domain name providers article.
Web hosting (£5 – £500/month) Where files and databases live. Options span shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated, see website hosting for how we think about fit and performance.
From the author:
We strongly discourage cut-price shared hosting for serious businesses. Providers often pack hundreds of sites on one server, which raises security and noisy-neighbour risk and commonly .