It's the first thing nearly everyone asks us. It's also the question we're most reluctant to answer with a single number, because whatever number we gave you would be next to useless.
"How much does a website cost" is a bit like "how much does a vehicle cost". A ten-year-old runaround and a new transit van are both vehicles, but they do completely different jobs, for different people, at wildly different prices. Websites are no different. So before anyone can talk sensibly about money, you have to talk about what the thing is actually for.
That said, "it depends" is a maddening answer when you're trying to put a figure in a budget. So here's the honest version, with real numbers and what sits behind them.
The do-it-yourself end
Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy and the rest will sell you a website for somewhere between £10 and £30 a month. Templates, drag-and-drop, live by the weekend if you fancy a go.
For a sole trader who needs a tidy online business card and nothing more, that can honestly be the right solution, and if it is, then we'll tell you so rather than talk you out of it. But the cost isn't really the monthly fee. It's your time - and the ceiling you hit the moment you want it to do something the template doesn't allow for. Plenty of people start here, spend three frustrated evenings fighting the builder, and decide their time is worth more than they'd realised.
Freelancers
A capable freelance designer will build you a decent small business site for somewhere in the region of £500 to £2,500, depending on how many pages you need and how much of the content and imagery they're producing versus you handing it over.
Good freelancers are good value. The catch is capacity - it's one person, so if they're ill, on holiday, or simply busier than expected, you wait. And when they move on to their next project, ongoing support can get thin. Fine for some jobs. Less fine when the site is all-important for your business.
Agencies
This is where we sit, and where most established businesses end up. A brochure-style website from a small agency in this part of the world typically runs from around £3,000 to £8,000. Something larger, with more pages, more bespoke design or more moving parts, climbs from there.
What you're paying for isn't just the pixels. It's strategy before a single page is designed, proper responsive build, the technical groundwork that lets the thing rank, testing across devices, and - crucially - someone still answering the phone in eighteen months. The price feels higher because more is included. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on what the site is expected to earn you.
Bespoke and e-commerce
Once you're selling online, or you need the site to actually do things - member logins, bookings, integrations with your other systems - you're into custom territory. Realistically that starts around £8,000 and goes up depending on complexity. A proper e-commerce build with the trimmings can be considerably more.
That sounds like a lot until you work out what a shop that takes orders around the clock is worth over its lifetime. Then it starts to look like one of the cheaper members of staff you'll ever hire.
The bit almost everyone forgets
None of these numbers stop at launch - a website is not a thing you buy once and forget.
There's hosting, which for a small business is usually modest but ongoing. There's the domain, a tenner or so a year. And there's the maintenance nobody mentions in the sales pitch - security updates, backups, the odd fix, the changes you'll inevitably want three months in. Ignore all that and a site that cost you good money quietly rots: slow, insecure, out of date, and costing you customers you never knew you'd lost. We wrote about that particular false economy in the hidden costs of a cheap website, and it's worth a read before you go bargain-hunting.
So what should you actually spend?
Here's the reframe we'd gently push you towards. The question isn't "what's the cheapest I can get away with". It's "what does this site need to earn, and what's a sensible investment to make that happen".
A window cleaner who needs to look legitimate and take the occasional enquiry has a very different answer to a manufacturer chasing national contracts, or a shop that wants to sell while it sleeps. Spend too little and you've bought a liability. Spend without a clear idea of the return and you're just decorating. Somewhere between those two is a figure that makes sense for your business specifically - and any decent agency should be able to talk you to it honestly, not just quote the biggest number you'll swallow.
The York bit
We're based in North Yorkshire and we build for businesses all over York and the surrounding area, so we'll say the quiet part out loud: you do not need to pay London prices to get London-standard work up here. The local market is competitive and the talent is real. What matters far more than postcode is finding someone who'll be straight with you about what you need - and, just as importantly, what you don't.
If you want a proper figure rather than a range, that's a ten-minute conversation, not a guessing game. Tell us what you're after and we'll give you a clear, fixed quote - no surprises, and no trying to sell you an artic when a van would do.