How much should a small business website actually cost?

A small business website in the UK costs roughly £15-25/month to DIY (Wix or Squarespace plus your time), £600-£2,000 for a one-off freelancer build (then £80-300/year for hosting and changes), or £20-150/month for a fully-managed service that includes hosting, domain and edits. Whichever path you pick, the “real” cost is about 3-5x the sticker price once you factor in your time and the inevitable changes.

Someone asked me this at the pub last week. He runs a small kitchen-fitting business in West Yorkshire and he'd just been quoted £1,400 for a website by a local agency. He wanted to know if that was reasonable. The honest answer is: it depends on which of three paths you take.

Path one: do it yourself

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Shopify. The website you build on a Saturday morning while your kids watch cartoons.

Sticker price: £12 to £25 a month, plus £15 to £30 for a domain.

Real cost:a Saturday afternoon you won't get back, plus the hour next month when your prices change and you have to remember how to log in. Plus the bit where you give up on the design and ask a neighbour's teenager to fix it.

The platforms are fine. They work. The thing nobody mentions is that you're renting the site. The day you stop paying, it goes down. If Squarespace decides to put their prices up by 40%, you have no leverage. People who built businesses on Wix five years ago and then tried to migrate know what I mean. (Same dynamic with Facebook - we wrote about that in do I need a website if I have a Facebook page.)

Path two: hire a freelancer

A local designer, or someone you found on Upwork, or a friend of a friend. They build it, hand it over, and disappear.

Sticker price: £600 to £2,500 one-off, depending on who you ask.

Real cost:hugely variable. The good ones are worth every penny. The bad ones go quiet two weeks after launch. You email to fix a typo and don't hear back for six weeks.

You're also still paying for hosting and the domain on top, and every change after launch is a separate invoice. £1,400 turns into £1,800 by Christmas.

The thing that catches people out isn't the price. It's everything that comes after the launch.

Path three: a fully managed service

One monthly fee, one number to call, no setup invoice. Hosting, domain, design, edits, all in.

Sticker price: £20 to £50 a month, depending on the provider.

Real cost: just that. You email or text when something needs changing, someone changes it. No quote, no waiting three weeks for a freelancer to reply.

This is what we do at Seenely, so I'm biased. But the model isn't unique to us. It's how dentists pay for their appointment software, how accountants pay for their tax tools. Anyone who values their time more than learning yet another piece of software ends up here.

The numbers, side by side

The real question isn't how cheap

The real question is what your time is worth. If you charge £40 an hour for your work, a Saturday afternoon trying to get Wix to centre-align a heading costs you more than two years of a managed site. If you bill £120 an hour as a tradesman, it's worse.

The other real question is whether the website pays for itself. A site that brings you one extra customer a month from Google more than covers any of these prices. The cheapest site that doesn't bring you customers is still a waste of money.

What I told the kitchen fitter

I told him £1,400 wasn't outrageous for a freelancer build, but to ask what happens if he wants a change in three months. If the answer was “another invoice”, he should think about a managed service instead.

He went with the agency. He'll be back.