A plain-English look at where the money actually goes, and what separates a £750 site from a £7,500 one.
Ask five studios what a website costs and you will get five numbers between £500 and £50,000. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because "a website" describes anything from a single page with your phone number on it to a system that takes bookings, handles payments and runs your business.
So the useful question is not what a website costs. It is what you are actually buying, and whether you need it.
Most of a build is not the code. On a typical project the split looks something like this.
Working out what the site needs to do. Who is coming to it, what you want them to do, and what has to happen when they do it. Skip this and you get a nice-looking site that generates nothing, which is the single most common failure we see.
Design. Not decoration. Deciding what goes on the page, in what order, and what the visitor sees first. A page that reads well converts better than a page that looks impressive, and the two are not the same thing.
Build. The actual code. This is where a custom build costs more than a template up front, and where it costs less later.
Content. Words and images. This is the part clients almost always underestimate, and the part that most often holds a project up. If nobody has written the words, nobody can build the pages.
Testing and launch. Every page on every screen size, forms actually sending, redirects in place, search engines told where everything is.
Here is roughly what separates the bands, using our own pricing as the example.
Around £750 buys a single strong page. One long scroll covering who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch, with a working enquiry form. For a trade, a consultant or anyone whose customers just need to find them and call them, this is often genuinely enough. Spending more would not get more enquiries.
From £2,250 buys a small site with real structure. Several pages, each earning its place, plus the groundwork that helps you get found. This is the level most small businesses actually need.
From £3,500 adds depth: more pages, a blog system so you can publish without calling anyone, and more serious work on performance and search.
From £7,500 is for sites that do something rather than say something. Booking, member areas, integrations with tools you already use, or scale that needs proper planning.
The gap between the top and bottom is not polish. It is scope.
A build price is not a total price, and a quote that does not mention these is not being straight with you.
Hosting. Small, but permanent. Somewhere between a few pounds and a few tens of pounds a month depending on what the site does.
The domain. Ten to fifteen pounds a year, and it should be registered in your name, not your agency's. This matters enormously the day you want to move.
Keeping it alive. Software needs updating, forms break silently, contact details go stale. Whether that is a monthly plan or an afternoon here and there, it is not zero.
Changes. Every site needs them. Agree up front what counts as a fix and what counts as new work, because the disagreement always happens later otherwise.
A very low price usually means one of three things. The scope is smaller than you think and the difference will be billed later. Corners are being cut somewhere you will not see for six months. Or the person is inexperienced and will take three times as long, which is fine for them and expensive in your time.
The honest version is that a website is mostly labour, and labour has a floor. If a price looks impossible, the thing to ask is not "why so cheap" but "what exactly is included, and what happens when I want to change something".
If your customers just need to find you and call you, buy the smallest thing that does that properly. If your website is genuinely part of how you win work, the cheapest option is usually a false economy, because a site that produces no enquiries costs you far more than the difference in build price.
And if a template does the job, use a template. We say more about when that is true in custom-coded vs template.
Our own pricing is on the pricing page in full, including a quote builder that gives you a number without asking for your email address. If you would rather just describe what you are after, tell us about it.