The cost of a website in the UK is highly dependent on your needs and specifications, varying between £2,000 to £10,000. It can be challenging to figure out how much a website will cost you to build and maintain as a small business. This article breaks down all of the costs you need to know to work out exactly how much your UK website will cost!

‍Website Costs

There are three main costs that play a role in website pricing.

1. Website Building
2. Website Hosting
3. Domain Cost

‍Website Building Cost

There are many options for having your website designed or developed, and the method you choose will be a significant factor when it comes to price.

‍Option One: Hiring a UK freelancer

 If you need a basic website that you believe can be efficiently completed by a singular person, you can hire a freelancer. The cost of hiring a freelancer to build a website depends on the project's complexity. Here’s our cost estimate for hiring a local UK freelancer:

If you decide that hiring a freelancer is the best option for your web design/development project there are a lot of websites that make it easier to find talent. Here are a few freelancer websites to get you started where you can hire local or global talent:

• Upwork
• Toptal
• Freelancer.com
• Guru
• DesignHill

‍Option Two: Hiring a UK agency‍

Hiring an agency in the UK will come with a higher price tag than hiring freelancers on your own. Usually, you will get charged an additional management fee ranging between 10-30%. A management fee might seem counterintuitive if you are on a lower budget, but there are several benefits to hiring an agency instead of a freelancer.

1. Faster Turnaround Time: With an agency, you will have a whole team behind your project, meaning that project completion will be much faster than if you were to hire a single freelancer. If you think about it, every minute that your website isn’t ready for use is potential lost revenue. Having your website designed/developed faster by an agency, despite the additional fee.
2. Easier management: Website projects need a lot of work, and with a lot of work comes a lot of time reviewing and approving progress. With a freelancer, you’ll have to spend hours reviewing work throughout the various development and design stages, from copywriting to UI. On top of this, if you are not well-versed in website design, you might make mistakes that a qualified management team wouldn’t make.
3. A larger talent Pool: With a professional website design agency, you’ll have a large pool of qualified and skilled experts in various fields. When you hire a freelancer to create your website for you, they might be talented in some areas but not so gifted in other fields. For example, they might be excellent for landing page designs but not so good at writing sales copies. You could hire multiple freelancers, but this takes a lot more work and time; it’s often easier and more cost-effective to hire an agency.  

If you are interested in hiring a UK agency for your web development or design project, we’d be happy to give you a customised price; simply reach out to us by clicking here.

Option Three: Doing it yourself.

Creating your website by yourself might be your only option if you are a business with a tiny budget. Thankfully there are plenty of website builders online focused on making web design easier.

Although using a Website Builder might seem like a cost-effective option, you also need to take into consideration the cost of your time. For someone who knows how to build websites, it could take them anywhere from forty hours(for a very basic website) to hundreds of hours(for a complex website). It will take you a lot longer! Be sure to add the cost of your time into the equation. Ask yourself if you could be adding more value to your business by focusing your attention elsewhere. If you are unsure what’s best for your business, click here to learn more about outsourcing. 

Hosting Costs

Web hosting is another regular payment that every online business has to pay! You’ll want to consider several things when choosing a hosting provider.

1. Location: If your business is based in the UK, you might want to choose a UK host or, at the very least, a web host with UK server options. If most of your website visitors are going to be British, then using a UK server will mean better speed and website performance. If you’d prefer to use an international host, you could also use a CDN that ranges in price from 10 GBP to 100GBP annually.

     Here are some of the most popular web hosts in the UK:  

• SiteGround
• HostPapa
• Hostinger
• Ionos

2. Security: Cyber attacks are a growing problem for online businesses, and the first step in protecting your website is using a secure host. You should ensure that your hosting provider has good firewalls, regular backup compatibility, and SSL support. Sometimes security features are an additional cost.
3. Customer Support: If you are a small business, you are probably looking for a cheap hosting option. When looking for a cheap web host, it can be easy to base your search on factors like bandwidth, storage and speed but don’t forget customer support! Some hosts offer excellent tech specs for cheap, but they have terrible customer support. As a small business, you won’t have an internal tech support team, so if you run into any technical difficulties, you’ll need to have a helpful hosting provider to avoid website downtime and any headaches that come with it!

How much you will have to pay depends greatly on the number of visitors you’ll have monthly. As a small business, you’ll likely need to be on a hosting package that can handle between ten and a hundred thousand visitors a month.

Hosting costs for Ten Thousand Visitors

Hosting costs for Twenty Five Thousand Visitors

Hosting costs for One Hundred Thousand Visitors

Domain Costs

Standard domain names typically cost between 8 and 20 pounds annually. Some domain registries offer discounts when you pay for longer terms, such as two or three years. Prices for premium domains are much higher, ranging from hundreds of pounds to even thousands. 

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Additional domain options will cost you more money, such as domain security to prevent your domain from being stolen(Usually 10GBP a month) and domain privacy to keep your personal information private(Usually 10GBP a month).

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