What should a small business website cost in Buckinghamshire?

Every first conversation reaches this question within about ten minutes, and most web designers dodge it. They say it depends. It does depend, but that answer is useless to somebody trying to work out whether they can afford a website at all, so this post has actual numbers in it, including ours.

Fair warning before we start. Prices vary enormously, and anyone who quotes you a figure without first asking what the site needs to do is guessing. But there are honest ranges, and you can tell a great deal about a quote from where it sits in them.

Read a dozen UK pricing guides published this year and they broadly agree with each other. A freelancer will build a five to ten page brochure site for somewhere between £900 and £3,000. A small studio sits a little above that. A traditional agency starts around £3,000 and runs to £8,000 and well beyond, because you are also paying for account managers, project managers and an office in a city.

Below all that sits the do it yourself tier, where Squarespace or Wix costs you a monthly subscription and a weekend. Above it sits anything with bookings, payments, logins or stock, which starts around £4,000 and has no real ceiling.

The running costs are more consistent than the build costs. A domain is £10 to £20 a year. Hosting runs from about £30 a year at the cheap end to well over £150. Maintenance plans usually land between £30 and £100 a month, depending entirely on what is in them.

Our introductory prices start at £650, and most full projects start from around £2,000. A monthly plan covers hosting, security, technical updates, content edits and ongoing local SEO for the areas you serve. The same figures are on our FAQs page, because I would rather you knew before you reach out.

We are deliberately not the cheapest and nowhere near the most expensive. The £650 end suits a business that needs one good page and a way to be found, built properly rather than dropped onto a template. Two thousand and up is a proper multi page site with an editor you can use and structured local SEO for your towns.

You get a written quote before any work starts, and the price we agree is the price you pay. I mention that because variable pricing is the single most common complaint I hear about previous developers, usually arriving as a bill for something the client was certain had been included.

Not the number of pages, which is what almost everyone asks about first. Ten pages of similar content is barely more work than five. These are the things that genuinely change a quote:

• Content. If your words and photos are ready, the project moves fast. If we are writing the copy and arranging a photographer, that is real time and it goes on the invoice.
• Functionality. A contact form is nothing. Online booking, card payments, customer logins or stock control are each a project in their own right.
• How many decisions you want to make. A client who says "you choose, here are three sites I like" costs less than one who wants to see five versions of a button.
• Integrations. Connecting to a booking system, an accounts package or a supplier feed is where budgets quietly disappear.
• How many towns you serve. Doing local SEO properly for Aylesbury, Thame and Princes Risborough is three times the content of doing it for one.

Design itself is rarely the expensive part. Deciding what the site should say usually is.

Worth taking seriously, and I say that as somebody who loses work to it. If you are starting out, have more time than money, and the business is simple, a Squarespace site you build yourself beats no site, and comfortably beats a bad site you paid for.

The catch is the one that catches everybody. One weekend becomes four, and the fourth is spent on something that is not your actual business. Work out what your own hours are worth before you decide it is free. Also remember the subscription never stops: five years at £20 a month is £1,200 for something you built yourself.

My rule of thumb is this. Build it yourself if the alternative is a very cheap agency build. Pay somebody if the website is going to be the main way customers find you.

I am not sniffy about cheap websites. A sole trader with £400 to spend should spend the £400 rather than wait two years to afford something better.

Just be clear about what you are buying. At the bottom of the market you generally get a purchased template with your logo dropped on it, no way to edit it yourself, hosting shared with several hundred other sites, and a developer whose margin depends on never speaking to you again. It works perfectly on launch day and then slowly stops being true.

The real bill lands about two years later, when you want a new page, nobody answers the email, and you discover the domain was registered in the developer's name rather than yours. Then you pay again, and the second build costs more than the first because somebody has to untangle the first one before they can start.

Most decent studios now sell a monthly plan alongside the build, and there is a good reason for it. A website is not something you buy once and put on a shelf. It needs hosting, security attention, occasional content changes and somebody watching how it performs.

What matters is what the plan contains. Ask specifically: is hosting in there, how many content edits do I get, does it cover my Google Business Profile, and what happens if I cancel. That last question is the important one. If cancelling means the site goes dark, you are renting rather than owning, and the price should reflect that.

None of these require you to understand any of the technology.

Does the quote say what happens after launch? A quote that stops at "website: £2,400" is quietly leaving out the part that costs you money later.

Does it name what is not included? Honest quotes have exclusions written down. Quotes with no exclusions turn into arguments in month three.

And ask what happens when you want to change your own phone number. If the answer involves emailing anybody, add up the cost of every small change for the next five years, because there will be dozens of them.

Worth knowing what you are buying, because "a website" sounds like one thing and is really about six.

On a typical two thousand pound build, the largest single block of time is not design and it is not code. It is the back and forth: working out what the business actually does, what each page should say, and which of the four things you sell people want to hear about first. That is usually about a third of the project, and it is the third clients least expect to pay for.

Then the build, which goes faster than people expect once the decisions are made. Then the content work: loading everything in, sizing photographs properly, writing page titles and descriptions that are not just the business name repeated. Then testing, which means checking it on real phones rather than by shrinking a browser window and hoping.

The part nobody itemises, and the part that separates a site that works from one that merely exists, is the last ten percent. Checking the contact form genuinely arrives in an inbox somebody reads. Making sure the phone number dials with one tap. Setting up redirects so every page of the old site lands somewhere sensible instead of turning into a dead end that Google remembers for years.

When people ask what a website costs, what they usually mean is: am I about to be ripped off, and will this bring me any actual work?

On the first, the ranges above are your defence. Anything well outside them deserves an explanation, in either direction. On the second, a website on its own rarely brings in work. A website plus a claimed Google Business Profile plus a handful of genuine reviews does, which is why the first month checklist puts the profile before the website. Any designer talking about the site in isolation is only doing part of the job.

If you want a straight answer for your own situation, get in touch. You will get a written quote, and if you would be better off spending the money somewhere else entirely, we will say so. That happens more often than you might expect.