Quick answer
A pub website in the UK costs between £299 and £2,000 in 2026. A professional one-page site with your menu, opening hours and phone number costs around £299. A custom multi-page pub website with separate pages for food, functions and events typically runs £499 to £1,200. Add online table or function-room booking and you are looking at £1,200 to £2,000. DIY builders advertise from free, but once you add a domain, remove the adverts and pay the monthly plan, they cost £150 to £300 every year and rarely rank for anything beyond your pub’s own name.
Pub website price bands in 2026
| Option | Typical price | What you get | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £150-£300 per year | Template site you build and maintain yourself | Testing whether you need a site at all |
| One-page professional site | £299 one-off | Menu, hours, photos, map, click-to-call, built for you | Wet-led locals with a simple offer |
| Custom pub website | £499-£1,200 | Separate food, drinks, functions and events pages, designed around your pub | Food-led pubs and gastropubs |
| Custom site + booking | £1,200-£2,000 | All of the above plus table and function-room booking | Pubs where Friday and Sunday sell out |
Every figure we quote for our own work comes from our public price list: one-page sites are £299 and custom WordPress builds start at £499. Agency quotes elsewhere run higher, and the bands above reflect the wider market, not just us.
Wet-led or food-led: why your pub type changes the price
This is the single biggest fork in the budget. A wet-led local needs surprisingly little from a website: opening hours that are actually correct, what is on the pumps, photos that make the room look like somewhere you would want to sit, sport fixtures if you show them, and a phone number. One well-built page does that job, which is why £299 is a sensible spend rather than a compromise.
A food-led pub is a different business online. People check the menu before they commit, they search for “Sunday roast near me” and “dog friendly pub with food”, and they book. That demands separate pages for the main menu, Sunday lunch, and functions, each one able to rank on its own. It is the same pattern we describe for restaurant websites, and it is why food-led pub sites sit in the £499 to £1,200 band.
The pages that actually take money
Most pub websites bury their highest-margin product. Function-room hire, wakes, birthday parties, Christmas bookings and private dining are the jobs that fill a Tuesday and pay like a Saturday, yet they usually get one line on a contact page. A proper functions page with room photos, capacity, buffet price bands and an enquiry form routinely becomes the most valuable page on a pub site because “function room hire near me” searches carry real intent and very little local competition.
The events page matters for a different reason: it gives Google and your regulars evidence the pub is alive. Quiz night, live music, open mic, meat raffle. A site whose last update was three Christmases ago tells searchers the kitchen might be closed too.
Menus and tap lists: text on the page, not PDFs
The most common technical mistake pubs make is uploading the menu as a PDF or, worse, a photo of the printed menu. Google struggles to read either, phones render them badly, and the dishes never rank. Your menu should be HTML text on the page so that “steak and ale pie” and “cask ales” become searchable content. Keep the designed print menu for tables; we cover what that costs in our menu design price guide. The same rule applies to tap lists: a short text list you can edit in two minutes beats a photographed chalkboard every week of the year.
If you serve food, link your allergen information as text too. The Food Standards Agency’s allergen guidance expects allergen information to be accessible before ordering, and a clear page on your own site answers the question before the phone rings.
How much should your pub pay: three worked examples
The wet-led local. The Crown does cask ale, sport and no food. It needs a £299 one-page site: hours, pumps, photos, map, phone. Total first-year spend with hosting: around £539. Anything more is decoration.
The food-led village pub. The Plough does 120 covers a weekend and a Sunday roast that sells out. It needs a custom site around £799: menu pages as text, a Sunday lunch page targeting the search that fills it, a functions page and a gallery. The Sunday page alone can pay for the site in a month of extra tables.
The gastropub with rooms or functions. The Fox takes deposits for a 60-seat function room and turns tables Friday to Sunday. It justifies £1,200 to £2,000 with integrated booking, because every table booked online is a phone call the bar team did not have to answer mid-service. Our booking system cost guide breaks down that layer separately.
What a booking system adds to the budget
Table booking ranges from a free “reserve” button on your Google profile, through commission-based platforms, to a booking engine built into the site. The trap is per-cover commission: 50 covers a week at £1 a head is £2,600 a year, every year, which makes a £500 one-off integration look cheap. For function rooms, a simple enquiry form with date, party size and a deposit link usually beats full automation, because function bookings are conversations, not transactions.
Google Business Profile: the other half of pub search
Most “pub near me” discovery happens on the map before anyone reaches a website. Your Business Profile needs correct hours (including bank holidays), the dog-friendly and garden attributes, photos of food and the room, and a menu link pointing at your text menu page. Google’s own menu guidance for Business Profiles explains what it will display. The website and the profile feed each other; setting the profile up properly is a £199 job we detail in our Business Profile setup guide.
Ongoing fees: what a pub site costs to run
Budget £20 a month for managed hosting, which should include SSL, backups, software updates and small content changes such as menu prices and seasonal hours. The pubs that get value from a website are the ones where updating the menu is someone’s two-minute job, not a £75 developer request. Ask any provider what a menu price change costs before you sign; if the answer is an hourly rate, keep looking.
Where cheap pub websites go wrong
The failure pattern is consistent: hours that drifted out of date after the first refurb, a PDF menu from two chefs ago, no functions page at all, stock photos of beer nobody pours, and a domain registered by a designer who has since vanished. That last one matters more than pubs realise, because when the site needs to change hands the domain is the deed to the pub’s online identity. Make sure the domain is registered in the pub’s name from day one.
DIY builder or professional build for a pub?
If you enjoy tinkering and the pub is wet-led, a DIY builder can hold the line for £150 to £300 a year, and honestly done is better than nothing. The case for a professional build is time and search: a landlord’s evenings are better spent running the bar than fighting a template, and DIY sites almost never win “pub with function room” or “Sunday lunch” searches because the pages are not structured to. Licensing pages, by the way, are not a website job at all; premises licensing runs through your council under the process on gov.uk.
What we charge for pub websites
Our custom WordPress builds start at £499 with the one-page option at £299, hosting and management at £20 a month, and menu design from £49 if the print side needs the same refresh. Cafés weighing similar numbers should read the café website cost guide, which walks the same bands with counter-service economics.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does a pub website cost in the UK? +
Between £299 and £2,000 in 2026. A professional one-page site costs around £299, a custom multi-page pub website runs £499 to £1,200, and adding table or function-room booking takes it to £1,200 to £2,000. DIY builders cost £150 to £300 a year ongoing.
Does a wet-led pub really need a website? +
It needs a small one. Correct hours, what is on the pumps, good photos of the room and a phone number on a single fast page answer the searches a local pub actually gets. A £299 one-pager covers it; a ten-page build would be wasted money.
Should my pub menu be a PDF on the website? +
No. PDFs and menu photos render badly on phones and are largely invisible to search, so your dishes never rank. Put the menu on the page as text you can edit in minutes, and keep the designed PDF for print.
Is online table booking worth the cost for a pub? +
If you regularly sell out sittings, yes. Watch the pricing model: per-cover commission at £1 a head on 50 covers a week is £2,600 a year, which makes a £500 one-off integration far cheaper over time. For function rooms, an enquiry form usually beats full automation.
What ongoing costs does a pub website have? +
Around £20 a month for managed hosting including SSL, backups, updates and small edits, plus £10 to £15 a year for the domain. Make sure menu and hours changes are included, and that the domain is registered in the pub's name, not a designer's.
