How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in the UK in 2025?

A website is a powerful marketing tool for any business, but knowing how much to budget can be a challenge for the uninitiated. While the average website for a small business can range typically from £500 to £10,000, we’ve seen websites for businesses that range into the hundreds of thousands! That’s because so many factors contribute to either the initial build costs or ongoing maintenance costs. . For example, do you need a simple website which just provides information about your services (often referred to as a “brochure website”), or do you need an eCommerce website? Do you plan to design, build and manage your website yourself or do you need help with it?

Here at Beyond Your Brand, we offer the 100 Club service, which provides small businesses with a custom built, bespoke pay-monthly website for just £100 per month. As part of this service we take care of all of the design and technical considerations for you, enabling you to simply focus on running your business.

That’s the perfect solution for many business owners. If that’s you - good news - you can stop reading now and just give us a call at 01993 835432 to get the ball rolling!

Alternatively for those who are keen on learning more, read on as we explore the different factors which influence new website costs in 2025.

Tables of Contents

• Why Is It Important to Have a Good Website for a Small Business?
• How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business?
• What Factors Can Influence the Cost of Your Website in 2025?
  • How Much Does a Website Cost Per Month? - Maintenance Costs
  • Upfront Costs of Building a Website
• Pros & Cons of Building Your Own Website
• Pros & Cons of Having a Website Built For You
• Pay Monthly Websites vs Upfront - What’s Best?
• Tips to Avoid Paying Too Much for Your New Website
• Build a Website Yourself, or Pay For a Website: What’s the Verdict?

Why Is It Important for a Small Business to Have a Good Website?

A good website can be absolutely crucial for your business, from helping attract new customers and interacting with your existing customers, to having a virtual shop window to showcase all your products or services.

Websites are no longer just for businesses that aim to sell their products or services online. More and more ‘brick-and-mortar’ businesses are investing in an online presence as over 80% of people use Google to find local businesses near them!

This has led to more business owners investing in a website for their business, with a study from Forbes Advisor showing that 78% of small business owners in the UK have a website and 83.% of those saying that their website plays a big role in their business operations!

However, for your online business goals to be successful, you need a well-managed website that functions effectively, provides a positive customer experience, and positively and accurately reflects your business and brand.

But how much should your business’s new website cost?

Top Questions to Consider Before You Start:

As touched on above, cost is influenced by a number of different factors. By thinking about the following questions in advance, it will greatly help you narrow down your options, thus helping you to focus your time and efforts in the right area:

1. Are you looking for a simple, brochure (information only) website, an eCommerce website, or a website with other levels of technical complexity?
2. Are you creative? (Would you be comfortable having to design a website, even if using a templated design?)
3. Are you tech savvy? (Would you feel confident being able to turn that visual design into an actual website?)
4. Do you have a lot of spare time? (If you don’t, having someone to do the work for you will save you a lot of stress, and enables you to focus on growing your business)
5. Do you have a significant amount of budget available? (If not, opting for a pay-monthly website solution would be better for helping you with cashflow management)
6. Do you have the time & knowledge to feel comfortable performing routine maintenance, security updates?
7. Are you anticipating receiving high volumes of concurrent traffic, or do you have high storage needs?
8. Are you interested in performing PPC advertising or SEO? (If you are, these are best performed by experts in the field)
9. Do you have time to create regular high quality content which adds value to your target audience?

How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business?

The cost of building a website can vary massively. A typical self-build simple website can be built using a basic theme from an all-in-one website builder for around £200 to £500 including purchasing your first domain and SSL certificate. The main saving here is that you’re not paying for someone else’s time, knowledge, experience or expertise.

Next up is a typical small business brochure website, built by a website design or development company. If you’re paying as a lump sum (rather than on a pay-monthly model), these will typically set you back around £2,000 to £10,000 depending on complexity, platform choice and number of pages.

At the far end of the scale, we’ve worked with clients who have spent in excess of £1.5 million on a new enterprise-level ecommerce website.

Here are some more examples:

Below we’ll discuss the different costs and factors that can influence the cost of your website.

What factors can influence website costs in 2025?

The cost of building and maintaining a website can vary widely based on its size, complexity, design, and other factors. Below, we'll explore the key elements that can influence your website's overall cost:

What are the Upfront Costs of Building a Website?

1. Domain Registration

One of the initial costs to consider is purchasing a domain name (your web address). Domain registration typically involves an annual fee which often ranges anywhere from £1 to £30 per year, depending on multiple factors. The two main ones are the top-level domains (TLDs) that refer to the domain extension, such as .com, .co.uk, .org, and .net. As well as the domain name itself, the length, availability and popularity of the domain name can affect pricing.

We have included a table of some example domain prices and the different costs associated with those TLDs.

Source: Hostinger

2. Web Hosting

Web hosting provides your site with a secure place to store online content. Web hosting can vary in pricing:

• Shared hosting is typically the most affordable option, starting at around £2 – £10 per month.
• Meanwhile, VPS hosting offers more resources and data storage and is suitable for websites with moderate traffic. VPS hosting starts at around £10 – £50 per month.
• Cloud hosting is one of the most scalable and flexible hosting options, with costs depending on usage, starting at around £5 – £200+ per month.
• Dedicated hosting provides a server solely for one website. This starts at around £60 and can go up to several hundred pounds per month.

3. Platform or Content Management System (CMS)

DIY website builders such as Wix, Squarespace and Wordpress.com take care of hosting, design, and maintenance, but at a fixed monthly or annual rate.

Additionally, you could have a self-hosted CMS like WordPress.org. Unlike wordpress.com which is a hosted solution, wordpress.org allows you to download WordPress and install it on your own shared or dedicated server.

While WordPress.org is free to download and use and gives you much more creative freedom in building your website, you’ll incur costs for web hosting, using themes, and plugins.

4. Design and Development of Your Website

Website build costs vary widely depending on whether you design and build the website yourself, use a pre-made template, or hire a professional developer and/or designer—and each approach has its own set of considerations.

1. Building it yourself is typically the cheapest option, but relies on you either already having the necessary design, technical & legal knowledge and expertise required; or having the ability to commit to learning those skills before you start. Either way, it requires a significant investment of time so you need to weigh up if that is time you would be better off spending on growing your business.
2. Using a pre-made template is another affordable option, though you’ll be limited by the range of options available. In addition, other websites may end up using exactly the same template which can not only weaken your branding, but can cause people to question the legitimacy of the website. This is because scammers will often use the same template over-and-over again on different sites.
3. Finally, hiring a professional website developer or agency to do the job for you is the most expensive option, but you’re paying for their knowledge, time and expertise. Tapping into this expertise obviously is only as good as the design agency you’re working with. Therefore, it’s vitally important to do your due diligence - speak with friends, ask for recommendations on social media, check out examples of their previous work and so on. Don’t just rely on the size of the company to be an indication of results. To provide an example - Yell.com (who were much loved as the Yellow Pages) sadly has an awful reputation within the industry and we have had multiple clients come to us following a poor experience with them.

5. Content Creation

Providing high-quality, helpful content is essential for users of your website. This could be written content, images, videos, logos, or any other media you need for your website. However, it can be time-consuming to create yourself. Some typical items to consider include:

• Copywriting services
• Professional photography or stock imagery
• Video creation
• A graphic designer for logos, icon-sets, and website design

6. Size of Website and Site Architecture

How your site is built can also play a significant role in the overall costs. For example, it’s possible to build a very simple website without using a database. Using this approach might be ideal if you only want up to around 10 pages and rarely need to update the content. This approach used to be fairly common 20 or so years ago before we had the wealth of content management systems which we have today.

Next up is a CMS system which does have a database, but where each page has its own page template. Timewise, these can take similar time to build as what time savings you achieve in one area are often offset via another.

Finally, you have templated sites. These can scale indefinitely and don't necessarily need to cost significantly more. A great example is an eCommerce website. It’s not uncommon for these to list hundreds, thousands, or even millions of products (Amazon, eBay) but in reality, they will typically have a far smaller number of templated pages. A typical eCom system will have a different template for:

• The homepage
• Category level page
• Product level page
• Search results page
• Non-product content page
• Admin page layouts (various)

Granted that’s an overly simplified list, but using the above you could easily have a site with an infinite number of pages.

7. Functionality & Features

Website functionality also affects the price. A basic website with a few pages with a simple contact form would be suitable for most small businesses, and much cheaper than a complicated e-commerce website.

Some examples of the different functionalities that your website may need which will influence cost include:

• Site search
• Contact forms
• Booking systems
• Delivery and stock tracking for e-commerce systems
• Multiple language support
• Integration with third-party software or CRM systems
• User account logins and storage systems

An e-commerce delivery and tracking system can cost anywhere from £100 per month for a simple system for a small business, to over £1,000 for a large business that handles much higher volumes of orders.

Even relatively simple features which we now take for granted, such as a postcode lookup feature (e.g. those where you enter your postcode, and it automatically finds your address), can cost between £0.02 to £0.05 per request.

Additionally integrating third-party services like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems into your website can cost anywhere from £200 to several thousands of pounds as a one-off payment, or hundreds to thousands a month!

What are the Recurring, Monthly Costs of Building a Website?

Having your website designed and built is only the initial cost. There are also ongoing costs to consider:

8. Hosting Costs

Website hosting costs can vary depending on the type of hosting you choose. These generally range from a few pounds per month for basic shared hosting, to £100 per month for dedicated sharing plans. Most small business websites, however, spend around £5 - £20 per month on hosting.

9. Maintenance and Updates

Regular website maintenance and updates are crucial for ensuring the optimal performance and security of your website and allowing it to grow and change as your business does. However, this typically comes at an hourly rate for developers, which can cost up to £100 an hour.

If you build your own website, then it will fall to you to ensure the performance of your website and implement new pages or changes, blogs, or technical updates to the website.

If you built your website in WordPress, this will mean updating your website with the latest editions of WordPress, the plugins your website uses, and making sure the plugins work with each new update.

However, if you choose Beyond Your Brand to build your website via our 100 Club, we take care of all maintenance and security updates and can even apply several content updates to your website a month, all included in the flat fee of £100 a month.

10. Time Spent On Maintenance

While not a financial cost, the time you spend on maintaining your website is a cost to your business that you must consider.

If you’re working with a web developer or agency, this should save you a significant amount of time. All you will need to do is request any changes you want and review any work done. They should also handle the general website maintenance for you.

However, if you build your own website, then you will be the one implementing updates and maintaining the performance of the website. This can become a significant drain on your time, which can affect other areas of your business.

11. Business Growth

As your business grows, so will your website. And adding more pages will require more storage. If you’re using a web-building service such as Squarespace, you may need to pay more to expand your site and spend more time managing it.

For example, the annual cost of a ‘Business’ plan for Squarespace is £17 a month. However, the most advanced package, the ‘Commerce Advanced’ package costs £35 a month but offers a 0% transaction fee for online store transactions and allows you to sell subscription services.

Additionally, as a website gets larger and more complex, the more technical issues you are likely to encounter. When website maintenance becomes an issue, is when it may be useful to have an agency or developer monitoring your website for you, to ensure it remains healthy and is performing optimally.

The Pros and Cons of Building Your Own Website

Pros & Cons of Having Your Website Built For You

Pay Monthly Websites vs Upfront - What’s Best?

If you decide to work with a professional to have your new website built for you, then you can still choose between a pay-monthly website or paying upfront.

Paying Upfront For Your New Website

Paying upfront for a website means paying the entire cost of designing and developing a website in one single payment at the beginning, giving you full ownership of the site without any recurring monthly fees. Key things to consider include:

• Ownership: You will have complete control over the website and can transfer it to another hosting provider if needed.
• Long-term savings: While the initial cost is higher, there may be fewer ongoing monthly fees, which can save money over time. You will still likely have to pay regular maintenance costs
• No lock-in contracts: Unlike some subscription-based services, you are not tied to a specific provider with an upfront payment.

However, having to pay thousands of pounds up-front can be a significant hit on your business’s cash flow.

Pay Monthly Websites

Pay monthly websites are a newer payment model than the traditional upfront payment of websites. This model aims to provide small businesses or individuals with a custom-built website, who perhaps can’t afford, or don’t want to pay for the potentially substantial upfront costs of a new website. Key things to consider include:

• Ownership: Confirm who ultimately owns the website.
• Updates: Understand how website updates and maintenance are managed.
• Costs: Check for any hidden fees or additional costs.
• Cancellation: Clarify the terms and conditions of cancelling the contract. Essentially, what happens to your website and data when you cancel?

Here at Beyond Your Brand, we offer a pay-monthly website service to small businesses from just £100 a month. You can make multiple changes to your website a month with no cost, and you are only locked into an initial 1 year contract which helps to cover the cost of designing and building the website. This then becomes a 1-month rolling contract, which you can stop at any time.

However, not every agency or business works in the same way, and some have hidden costs for updating your website or locking you into unfavourable contracts. So it's important to check the key points we’ve included above.

Tips To Avoid Paying Too Much

We hear too many stories from business owners paying too much for websites for added functionalities they don’t need, or exorbitant costs for making any changes or updates to their own website! Here are some practical tips for keeping the cost of your new website down:

• Shop around for affordable service providers for hosting, domain registration, and building services. Just because someone is the top result on Google, doesn’t mean they're the best business to buy from.
• Know your must-have features and functionalities, to avoid paying extra for features you don’t need.
• Plan for the future. It can be very costly to migrate a website. Look for a provider with scalable plans and a clear path to upgrade, or an agency that doesn’t charge huge amounts of money for upgrades to the website.

Build a Website Yourself, or Pay For a Website: What’s the Verdict?

So, which is better, building a website yourself or paying a professional to build a website for you?

Build a Website Yourself

We would only recommend building a website for your business yourself if your business largely operates offline. For example, if you’re a restaurant or a cafe that doesn’t rely on people finding you through your website, it’s an easy, low-cost way to let people find your business and check out your menu or opening times.

Having a Website Built For You

If your business is based primarily online or you’re hoping to attract lots of new customers we recommend working with a professional who can build and manage your website for you. This will allow you to focus your time and energy on income-generating activities and maximise potential profits with a professional website.

If you’re looking for a custom-built website for your business without a huge upfront cost, then check out our web design services here.