How much does a website cost in the UK? From free to fully custom

Short answer: a website in the UK can cost anything from nothing to tens of thousands of pounds. A free builder costs nothing but your time. A paid builder with your own domain costs roughly £10 to £30 a month. A freelancer typically charges £300 to £3,000 for a small business site, and an agency £2,000 to £7,000, according to Bark. On top come the domain, hosting, maintenance and, above all, the time it takes to write and update the content.

Four ways to get a website, and what they cost

Freelancer and agency ranges come from Bark's 2026 UK price guide, which puts the average website design cost at £500 to £5,000 and says designers charge from around £35 an hour for newcomers to more than £150 for experienced professionals (Bark). On freelancer platform YunoJuno, the average day rate for a front-end developer is around £466 (YunoJuno). Bark is a marketplace for finding suppliers, so treat the figures as a guide.

For a comparison of builders, read Best website builder 2026. For help choosing someone to build it, read How to choose a web design agency.

Can you build a website for free?

Yes. The most common routes are:

• A builder with a free plan, such as Wix. Its free plan includes 500MB of storage and an address in the form yourname.wixsite.com. Removing Wix ads or connecting your own domain needs a paid plan (Wix).
• WordPress.com's free plan, which shows WordPress.com ads to visitors until you upgrade (WordPress.com).
• Google Sites, which is free and simple, but built more for internal pages and simple projects than for a business that needs to sell (Google).

What the free options share is an address on the provider's domain instead of your own. If you want yourcompany.co.uk, you need a paid plan or hosting in practice. And if you are thinking of starting from a ready-made design, read Website templates or build from scratch?

What you pay every year

Prices change often, and introductory offers are common, so always check the renewal price. Prices are usually shown excluding VAT.

What drives the price

• Number of page types. A five-page site costs far less than one with service pages, location pages, a blog and case studies.
• Who writes the content. Copywriting and photography add cost, but often matter most for results.
• Custom design or template. A design from scratch takes longer than adapting a template.
• Functions and integrations. E-commerce, booking, a CRM or accounting software such as Xero.
• SEO and strategy. Keyword research, page structure and redirects from an old site.

How long does it take to build a website?

It depends mostly on the scope and how quickly the content is ready:

• A simple site on a builder can be live in a few days if you have your text and images ready.
• A small business site from a freelancer or agency usually takes four to eight weeks from kick-off to launch in our experience.
• An online shop or a site with integrations often takes two to four months.

The most common delay is not the build but the content. Start writing texts and gathering images before the project begins.

When is a cheap website enough?

A free or low-cost site is fine when you want to test a business idea, run a club or a hobby project, or need a page for a one-off event. It stops being enough when you want customers from Google, when trust matters, when you want to sell or take payments, when the site needs to connect to other systems, or when you want to be able to move it later. Read What makes a good website?

A free site can be indexed by Google like any other, but it is harder to rank for competitive searches when you have little control over the technology and the address. Read What is SEO?

An option many forget

Do you have local customers and want to be found quickly? Start with a free Google Business Profile. It appears in the map and in search results and can bring calls and directions before you even have a website. For many tradespeople and local service businesses, it is the best first investment of time. Read more about local SEO.