How Much Does a Website Really Cost in 2026?

The short answer

A DIY website builder runs £150–£500 a year. A freelancer typically charges £900–£5,000 for a small business site. A traditional agency charges £2,500–£15,000 or more for the same scope. Whichever route you take, budget another £500–£2,000 a year for hosting, a domain, and basic maintenance — that cost exists regardless of who builds the site.

How much does a simple brochure website cost?

For a straightforward site — home, services, about, portfolio, contact, five pages or so — UK freelancers typically charge £900–£3,000, working at roughly £20–£40 an hour.

A small studio (a designer, a developer, someone handling copy and strategy) runs £3,000–£8,000 for the same scope. Agencies quote £2,500–£10,000 for a standard small-business site, with London agencies often charging more for an identical spec.

Freelancer vs agency — what the price gap actually buys

The build itself isn't wildly different between the two — the price gap mostly buys process, not code quality. Agencies bring a full team (designer, developer, project manager, sometimes a dedicated strategist), structured revision rounds, and support after launch.

A freelancer usually means one person doing all of it: faster decisions and lower overhead, but less redundancy if something goes wrong mid-project or they're unavailable for a stretch.

How much does an online shop cost?

E-commerce adds real scope on top of a brochure site — a product catalogue, payment integration, inventory logic — so budgets climb accordingly. The exact number depends heavily on catalogue size and checkout complexity: a shop with a handful of products and a standard checkout costs meaningfully less than one with custom pricing rules, variants, or inventory syncing.

What it actually costs after launch

Every option here — DIY builder, freelancer, agency — carries ongoing costs: hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, and someone available when something breaks. Budget £500–£2,000 a year on top of the build price, whichever route you took to get there. A site that was 'free' to build because you used a page builder still has this cost; it's just spread across a monthly subscription instead of a separate line item.

Where a fixed-price, Next.js-only studio fits into this

Most of the ranges above assume WordPress or a similar CMS, priced case by case after a scoping call. Webstars runs a fixed-price model instead: packages start from £399, quoted within 48 hours of the first call, delivered in 1–4 weeks. That's possible because the stack — Next.js and React only, no WordPress, no plugins — makes build time predictable enough to price upfront instead of estimating and adjusting as scope creeps.

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