Answer three questions and get a realistic UK price range for your website project, based on current published UK market rates across every provider tier. No email required, no catch.
1. What do you need?
2. Who will build it?
3. Must-haves (tick all that apply)
The calculator maps your answers against the price bands observed across the UK website market: DIY builder subscriptions at their published tiers, marketplace listings that are publicly browsable, UK freelance developer rates from published surveys, fixed-price studios like ours (our list prices are public: £499 for a custom WordPress site, £499 for e-commerce, £299 for a one-page site, £199 for a landing page), and agency bands from published industry rate guides. It weights the factors that genuinely move price: page count and complexity, whether you sell online, who writes the content, and how much ongoing support you want. It is an honest estimator, not a quote generator; the bands are the market’s, not just ours.
| Band | Typical price | What it buys | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | £0–£40/month | A template site you build and maintain yourself | Pre-revenue idea testing; you have time, not money |
| Marketplace freelancer | £150–£900 | A built-for-you site of highly variable quality | Tight budget and you can specify exactly what you want |
| Fixed-price studio | £299–£1,200 | Custom design, proper build, fixed price, ongoing support available | Most trading UK small businesses |
| UK freelancer | £500–£2,500 | Custom work at day rates; terms and support vary | You have found a portfolio and working style you trust |
| Agency | £2,000–£15,000+ | Strategy, workshops, larger team, account management | Larger organisations with complex requirements |
Full detail on every band, with the questions that expose weak providers at each level, lives in our complete guide to what a website costs in the UK and the ongoing-cost breakdown in what website maintenance costs.
If the calculator lands you in the DIY band, go in with a deadline: give yourself a month, and if the site is not live by then, the honest arithmetic says your hours were worth more than the £299 to £499 a built-for-you site costs. In the studio band, compare like for like: custom design versus template skinning, who writes the content, what hosting and updates cost after launch, and whether the price on the website is the price on the invoice. In the agency band, make sure it is strategy and scale you are paying for rather than overhead; a £5,000 brochure site and a £900 one can be pixel-identical. And if you already have a site that is slow, dated or invisible on Google, that is a different and often cheaper question: a redesign or a £99 speed fix beats rebuilding from scratch more often than the industry admits.
Because the deliverable is not the same thing. At the bottom of the market you are renting a template; through the middle you are buying custom design, a proper build, content migration and a handover you own; at the top you are buying research, strategy and a team. The practical difference shows up later: the builder site that cannot be moved when the subscription price rises, the marketplace build with no mobile testing, the beautiful agency site with no plan for who updates it. The calculator’s must-have questions (content, payments, maintenance) exist because those are the price drivers that predict whether a cheap band actually stays cheap. Our own position in the market is the fixed-price studio band: £499 flat for a custom WordPress build, or £79/month with nothing upfront, priced publicly so calculators like this one have something honest to anchor on.
Whatever band you buy in, the build price is not the whole price. A domain runs £10 to £30 a year. Hosting runs from a few pounds monthly on shared plans to £30+ for managed WordPress. Software and plugin updates, security monitoring and backups are either your job, a monthly plan (ours is £20/month), or the gamble most hacked small-business sites took. Email at your domain, if you want it done properly, adds a few pounds per user. None of these are large numbers, but sites budgeted to £0 ongoing are the ones that quietly rot: the five-year cost of a professional site is typically the build price plus £1,200 to £3,000 of running costs, and knowing that up front is precisely what separates businesses that keep their site alive from those that rebuild resentfully every three years.