How much does a website cost in the UK?

Website pricing in the UK is opaque because most of the industry benefits from it being opaque. Hourly billing, vague scopes and mid-project extras all rely on you not knowing what things should cost. So here are the real ranges, and what sits behind them.

The realistic UK ranges in 2026

• DIY builders (£0 to £30 a month). Squarespace, Wix and friends. Genuinely fine for a hobby, a menu page or testing an idea. You do the work, and the ceiling is the template's ceiling.
• Template customisation (£300 to £1,500). A freelancer skins a theme with your logo and copy. Quick and cheap. The catch: you usually inherit the theme's speed problems, its sameness, and a stack you cannot easily change later.
• Bespoke design and build (£2,500 to £10,000). A site designed around your business and built by hand. This is where most established small businesses should be looking, and it is the bracket Meko's fixed-price builds sit in: bespoke marketing sites from £2,500, conversion-focused builds from £5,000.
• Agency builds (£10,000 to £50,000+). Teams, account managers, discovery workshops. Sometimes the scope justifies it. Often you are paying for the building the agency sits in.
• Platforms, portals and web apps (scoped individually). Logins, dashboards, payments, integrations. No honest person can price these without understanding them first, which is why anyone who quotes a web app without a discovery conversation is guessing with your money.

What actually drives the price

Four things move the number more than anything else:

1. Number of distinct page designs. Ten pages that share three layouts cost far less than ten unique layouts.
2. Copywriting. If nobody has written the words, someone has to. Good copy is a real cost and worth every penny of it.
3. Custom functionality. Anything with a login, a payment or an integration steps the project up a category.
4. Who carries the risk. Hourly billing puts the risk of overruns on you. A fixed price puts it on the builder. That difference is worth real money, and it is the reason a fixed quote can look slightly higher than an hourly estimate that later doubles.

The questions that protect you

Price alone tells you very little. These questions tell you a lot:

• Is the price fixed, in writing, before work starts? If the answer is fuzzy, the final invoice will be too.
• What exactly is included? Copy? Mobile? Technical SEO? Post-launch fixes? "A website" is not a scope.
• Who owns the code and the domain? You should. Walking away should always be possible.
• What happens after launch? Hosting, updates, small changes. Ask now, not in month two.
• Can I watch progress? A builder confident in their process will happily show work in progress. At Meko you watch the whole build live in your own client portal.

So what should you spend?

Match the spend to the job the site does. If your website is a business card, keep it cheap. If it is how clients find you, judge you and decide to contact you, it is a revenue asset, and a bespoke build in the £2,500 to £10,000 range is usually the right tool.

If you want a number instead of a range, two shortcuts. The website cost calculator tells you in about a minute which tier your project sits in and where its pricing starts. And the pricing page sets out exactly what each tier includes. A thirty-minute call gets you a fixed quote that never moves once agreed.