Deciding to get a website built is usually the easy part, and everything that comes after that decision is where small business owners get stuck. Who should do it? What is a fair price? What happens when your phone number changes six months later and nobody answers your emails? The answers are not complicated, but very few people explain them in plain English.
This guide walks through the whole thing from a standing start. No jargon, no pressure, and honest about the situations where the option we happen to sell is the wrong one for you.
By the end you should know exactly what you are buying when you get a website built, roughly what it is worth paying, and which questions separate a decent supplier from an expensive mistake.
What Actually Happens When You Get A Website Built
Most people assume they are buying a design. In reality, when you get a website built you are paying for five separate things that happen to arrive together.
- A domain name. Your address, for example yourbusiness.co.uk. A .co.uk typically costs around £10 to £15 a year. Whoever registers it, make sure it is registered in your name, not the designer’s.
- Hosting. The computer that keeps your site online day and night, plus the security certificate that puts the padlock in the browser bar.
- The build. The layout, colours, fonts, mobile version and the way pages link together.
- The content. Your words and your photos. This is the part that decides whether a visitor calls you, and it is the part most often left half finished.
- The aftercare. Updates, backups, fixing things that break, and changing text when your prices or opening hours change.
That last item is the one buyers forget and the one that causes the most regret. A website is not a leaflet you print once. Software updates arrive constantly, browsers change, and your business changes faster than either. Any quote you receive should make it obvious who handles that work and what it costs.
The Four Ways To Get A Website Built
There are really only four routes, and each suits a different kind of business. None of them is universally right.
Do It Yourself With A Website Builder
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and the rest let you drag blocks around a screen. On paper this is the cheapest way to get a website built, at roughly £12 to £25 a month once you are on a plan that removes their branding and lets you use your own domain.
The real cost is your time. A first website usually takes a complete beginner somewhere between 20 and 60 hours, spread over evenings and weekends, and the result often looks like a template because it is one. If you enjoy tinkering and you have the hours spare, this is a perfectly respectable option. If you are a plasterer with three quotes to write tonight, it tends to sit at 70 per cent finished for a year.
Hire A Freelancer
A good freelance designer will typically charge between £500 and £2,500 for a small business site. You get a person who listens, and you often get a better result than a template.
The risk is what happens afterwards. Freelancers take full time jobs, go on holiday, change direction or simply stop replying. If your site sits on their hosting account and you do not hold the logins, a quiet disappearance turns into a genuine problem. Ask for the domain, hosting and admin details in writing at handover, and check that you can actually log in before the final invoice is paid.
Use An Agency
Agencies charge from around £3,000 upwards, and considerably more for anything with a shop or a members area. You are buying strategy, project management, copywriting and often proper photography.
For a business turning over several hundred thousand pounds, that can be money well spent. For a mobile dog groomer or a solo accountant, it is usually a mismatch between the price and the job the website has to do.
Pay Monthly And Managed
The fourth route spreads the cost. A monthly fee covers the build, the hosting, the security and the ongoing changes, so you never receive a four figure invoice and you never have to learn the software. Prices commonly run from around £25 to £80 a month.
The trade off is straightforward: over three or four years you may pay more in total than a one off build, and you are in an ongoing arrangement rather than owning a finished asset outright. We have written a fuller comparison in our piece on pay monthly websites versus doing it yourself, including the sums.
What It Should Cost, Honestly
The price to get a website built in the UK ranges from nothing to tens of thousands, which is unhelpful, so here are realistic bands for a genuine small business site of five to eight pages.
- DIY builder: £150 to £300 a year, plus 20 to 60 hours of your own time.
- Freelancer: £500 to £2,500 up front, plus roughly £100 to £300 a year for hosting and domain, plus hourly rates for changes.
- Agency: £3,000 and up, with a maintenance retainer on top.
- Pay monthly managed: roughly £25 to £80 a month with everything included, no deposit in most cases.
Two warning signs on price. First, anyone quoting a four figure sum without asking what your business does and who your customers are is guessing. Second, a very low one off price with no mention of hosting or updates usually means those costs arrive later, or the site quietly rots.
Questions To Ask Before You Pay Anyone
You do not need technical knowledge to ask good questions. Before you get a website built, put these to whoever is quoting and pay attention to how directly they answer.
- Who owns the domain name, and will it be registered in my business name?
- Will I have my own logins, and can I take the site elsewhere if I want to?
- What exactly happens when I need text or a photo changed? How fast, and how much?
- Is hosting included, and for how long?
- Will the site load properly on a phone? Most local searches happen on one.
- Who writes the words? If it is me, when do you need them by?
- Is there a contract length, and what is the notice period?
Vague answers to the ownership questions are the biggest red flag. A supplier who will not put domain ownership in writing is not one to hand your money to.
What You Need To Prepare
Projects stall because of missing content, not missing code. Whichever route you take to get a website built, having this ready will cut weeks off the timeline.
- A short description of what you do and the areas you cover.
- Your list of services, with prices if you are comfortable publishing them.
- Ten to twenty photos of real work, real premises or real people. Phone photos in daylight beat stock images almost every time.
- Any reviews or testimonials you already have, with permission to use them.
- Your phone number, email, opening hours and business address if you have one.
- Your logo, if you have one. If you do not, plain type set well looks better than a cheap logo.
If you are not sure which pages you actually need, keep it small. Home, services, about, contact and one page of proof will out perform a sprawling twenty page site that nobody finishes.
The Legal Bits Nobody Mentions
A website is advertising, and advertising rules apply to it. Claims you make on your own site fall within the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority, so phrases such as “the best in Manchester” or “fully guaranteed” need to be something you can stand behind if challenged. Plain, specific claims are safer and, in our experience, more persuasive anyway.
If you trade as a limited company, your registered company name, company number and registered office address should appear on the site, usually in the footer or on a legal page. If you collect enquiries through a form, you need a privacy notice explaining what you do with the details and how long you keep them. Neither of these is difficult, but both get skipped when people build in a hurry.
When Pay Monthly Is The Wrong Way To Get A Website Built
We sell monthly websites, so treat this section as the honest counterweight.
If you already run a website confidently, enjoy the software and have time on your hands, paying someone monthly to do a job you like doing is money out of the door for no gain. If you need a genuinely complex build, a full online shop with hundreds of products, a bespoke booking engine or an integration with your back office system, a specialist developer is a better fit. We embed booking tools happily, but we do not custom build them.
And if your business is genuinely seasonal or short lived, a single cheap builder plan may serve you better than an ongoing arrangement. A website only pays for itself if it brings in work, and the sums have to work for your actual trading pattern.
How A Managed Pay Monthly Site Works
For everyone else, the appeal of a managed monthly site is simple. There is no large bill at the start, no software to learn and no separate hosting account to remember. Our packages start at £24.99 plus VAT a month, and that covers the design, the hosting, the security certificate, backups and the changes you ask for as your business moves on.
Worth being clear on one detail: the Starter package does not include a contact form, so if you want enquiries arriving by email rather than by phone you will need the tier above. We would rather say that now than after you have signed. If you want the full detail on timescales, ownership and what happens if you leave, it is set out on our page explaining how pay monthly websites work.
So What Is The Best Way To Get A Website Built?
There is no single answer, but there is a reliable rule of thumb. If time is your spare resource, build it yourself. If money is your spare resource and the site is central to your revenue, hire a freelancer or an agency and buy their attention properly. If neither time nor a lump sum is easy to find, and you mainly need a credible, fast, findable site that someone else keeps running, pay monthly is the option that fits.
Whichever route you pick, insist on owning your domain, insist on knowing what changes cost, and get something live rather than perfect. A five page site that exists beats a twenty page site you are still planning. If you would like a straight answer on which route suits your situation, including being told that you do not need us, get in touch and ask.