Ask ten agencies what a website costs and you'll get ten different answers — anywhere from fifty pounds to fifty thousand. That's not evasiveness; it's because "a website" can mean wildly different things. Here's how the pricing actually works, so you can budget with your eyes open.
What you're really paying for
A website price is rarely just "the pages". It usually bundles design, build, copywriting, images, setup and sometimes ongoing hosting and support. The biggest cost driver is how bespoke it is. A templated site fills in a pre-made layout; a bespoke site is designed around your brand and your customers. The second is what it needs to do — a simple brochure site is a fraction of the cost of an online shop with payments, accounts and stock.
Typical UK price ranges
- Brochure sites (a handful of pages to explain what you do): roughly £400–£1,500.
- Small business sites with more pages, blog and lead forms: around £1,500–£4,000.
- E-commerce with product catalogues, checkout and payments: £3,000 and up, depending on scale.
- DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace): low monthly fees, but your time is the real cost, and they're harder to rank and scale.
At Design Dragon our websites start from £399, and every quote is itemised up front so you can see exactly what you're paying for.
Where people overspend
The classic mistake is paying for complexity you don't need — a huge custom build when a sharp five-page site would win more work. The other is paying too little for a cheap site that's slow, invisible on Google and needs replacing in a year. Fast, well-structured, SEO-ready pages almost always pay for themselves.
How to budget sensibly
Start from the job, not the price tag. What does the site need to do — book appointments, sell products, generate enquiries? Get an itemised quote so you can see design, build and extras separately, and check you'll own the site and domain at the end. A good web partner will happily explain every line.