Ask five people what a small business website costs and you will get five answers between two hundred pounds and fifteen thousand. Both ends of that range are real, and neither is a rip-off. They are simply different things being sold under the same word.
Here is what you are actually paying for, so you can tell which one you are being offered.
What the money actually buys
A website is three separate things, and quotes get confusing because different people include different parts.
The build. Someone designs the pages, writes or arranges your words, sorts the photographs, sets up whatever the site needs to do, and makes it work properly on a phone. This is where most of the cost sits, and it is almost entirely time.
The running. Hosting, the domain name, the security certificate, software updates, backups. Small individually, tedious to keep on top of, and genuinely bad news if neglected.
The changing. Your prices go up. You add a service. You want a new photograph on the home page. Someone has to do that, and how easy it is to get done varies enormously between suppliers.
The three honest brackets
Under £300. This is a template with your name on it, usually built fast and usually by someone with a lot of other jobs on that week. It can genuinely be the right answer if you need to exist online and nothing more. What you will not get is anything shaped around how your business actually wins work.
£500 to £5,000. This is where most small businesses should be. Real thought about what the site is for, proper structure, booking or payment if you need it, and search set up correctly from the start. The range within it is mostly about how many pages there are and how much the site has to do.
£8,000 and up. Custom design, custom functionality, usually a team. Worth it when the website is the business rather than a way of getting to the business. For a therapist, a plumber or a village hall, it is money that would work harder somewhere else.
The bit nobody explains: what free costs you
Wix, Squarespace and the rest are not scams and I will not pretend otherwise. Their free tiers cost you three things: their name in your web address, adverts you do not control, and a ceiling you will hit the moment you want the site to do something specific.
Their paid tiers are perfectly decent. If you are comfortable spending a weekend on it and your needs are simple, that is a legitimate answer and I have told people so.
The catch is the weekend. Most people I speak to have started one of these, got three quarters of the way, and left it there for a year. The half built site is doing more harm than no site.
Monthly fees, honestly
Almost everyone charges something monthly now, and it is worth knowing what is legitimate and what is not.
Legitimate: hosting, the domain, the security certificate, software updates, backups, and a person who will actually answer when something breaks. That is a real ongoing cost and it is fair to charge for it.
Worth questioning: a monthly fee that never includes any changes. If every small edit is billed on top, you will stop asking for edits, and a site nobody edits goes stale within a year.
Worth avoiding: any arrangement where you do not own your own domain name. If you cannot log in and see it in your own name, you are renting your own address, and moving supplier later becomes a fight.
The question that matters more than the price
Not what does it cost. What is it for.
A website that takes bookings while you are with a client pays for itself in weeks. A website that just sits there looking respectable is a business card that costs £59 a month.
Before you get quotes, decide what one thing you want the site to do. Take bookings. Get the phone to ring. Let people pay a deposit. Answer the six questions you are tired of answering. Then judge every quote on whether it actually does that thing, rather than on how it looks in the mock-up.
What I charge, and why I am telling you
I build in three brackets: £500, £2,000 and £5,000, with a monthly fee covering hosting, the domain, updates, backups and changes when you need them. The prices are on the web design page and they are fixed before I start, so the number I say is the number you pay.
I am telling you this because I would rather you understood the market than took my word for anything. If someone quotes you £400 and you understand what you are and are not getting, that is a good decision. If someone quotes you £8,000 for a five page site, you now know enough to ask what the other £3,000 is for.
And if you ring me and it turns out you do not need a new website at all, I will tell you that too. It happens more often than you would think.