The honest answer is that it depends on how many pages you need and how competitive your market is — but that's not much use to somebody trying to budget. So here's the useful version.
The bands, roughly
- Free to £50 — a DIY template you build yourself. Real cost: your weekends, and a site that looks like thousands of others.
- £100–£300 — the low end of custom work. Fine for a straightforward site if the person building it knows local search. Ours start at £250.
- £1,000–£3,000 — a larger custom build, more pages, more structure. Where most agency work for small businesses sits.
- £5,000+ — you should be getting genuine strategy, not just pages. If you're not, you're overpaying.
Where the money actually goes
Not the design, mostly. The expensive part of a good site is the structure underneath it: working out which searches matter, building a page for each one that deserves it, marking it all up so search engines and AI assistants can read it, and making it load fast enough that people stay.
That's the difference between a site that exists and a site that earns. A beautiful site nobody finds is an expensive business card.
The ongoing cost, stated plainly
Any live site has a running cost — hosting, monitoring, updates, and someone to make changes. Ours is the Blueprint Care Package, from £25/month, rolling monthly with 30 days' notice to cancel. Anyone quoting a build price with no ongoing cost attached has either hidden it or isn't planning to maintain the thing.
The maths that actually matters
Take your average job value and divide the build cost by it. If a £250 site pays for itself with one extra job, the question isn't really whether you can afford it — it's whether it will bring in that one job. Which is a much better question to be asking, and one a free audit of your current site will get you closer to answering.
Want to know where you stand?
Get a free, zero-obligation audit of your current website — or book a demo and we'll map out your blueprint.