How much does a website cost is the first thing most people want to know, and the hardest thing to get a straight answer to. Ask five designers and you will get five ranges, all of them wide, most of them ending in "it depends".

It does depend. But that is not an excuse to be vague, so here is the honest version: what the numbers actually look like in the UK, what moves them, and what you are really paying for.

Why nobody gives you a straight price

A website is not one thing. It is a design, a build, some words, a set of decisions about what the site needs to do, and a plan for keeping it alive afterwards. Asking what a website costs is a bit like asking what a building costs. A shed and a surgery are both buildings.

The other reason is less flattering. A vague price protects the person quoting it. If they are not sure how long the job will take, a wide range keeps them safe. Fair enough. You still need a number to plan around.

How much does a website cost in the UK?

Most small business websites in the UK land somewhere between £1,000 and £8,000. Build it yourself and you will pay a few hundred a year instead. Add a shop, a booking system or anything unusual and it climbs well past that. Broadly, the bands look like this.

• Doing it yourself on a builder like Squarespace or Wix: roughly £150 to £400 a year, plus a fair amount of your own time.
• A freelancer, simple site of a few pages: about £1,000 to £3,000.
• An experienced freelancer or small studio, designed properly around your business: about £3,000 to £8,000.
• An agency, or a site with a shop or booking system: £8,000 to £30,000, and upwards from there.

Two things those numbers hide. If the person you hire is VAT registered, add 20% on top, and most quotes for larger work are given plus VAT. And the build is not the whole bill, which brings us to the part people forget.

What drives the cost of website design

Within any of those bands, a handful of things move the price more than anything else.

How many pages, and how different each one is

Ten pages sharing one layout is a small job. Four pages that each behave their own way is a bigger one. It is the number of different things on a site, not the number of pages, that costs money.

Whether the design is yours or borrowed

A template is cheap because the decisions have already been made. A design made for you costs more because someone is making them, with your business in mind. Both are legitimate choices. I have written before about why I build from scratch, including when a template is the sensible call.

Who is doing the work

A freelancer is one person with low overheads. An agency is a team, a project manager and an office, which is why the same brief costs more, and why on a big or complicated job it can be worth it. Cheaper is not worse and dearer is not better. They are different shapes of the same work.

What the site actually has to do

A site that shows your work is one price. A site that takes bookings, takes payments, talks to your calendar or logs people in is another, because each of those is a moving part that has to be built, tested and looked after.

What a website costs to run each year

The build is a one off. Keeping it going is not, and this is where quotes quietly differ from one another. The rough shape of it:

• A domain name: about £10 to £20 a year.
• Hosting: from a few pounds a month for a simple site, more if it is busy or complicated.
• Updates, backups and small fixes: often £100 to £300 a year, or a monthly retainer if you would rather not think about it.

Ask what happens when something breaks at nine o'clock on a Sunday night. The answer tells you what you are actually buying.

When a cheap website is the right call

If you are testing an idea, or you need something live next week, or the site is really just a card with your phone number on it, then a builder or a decent template is the right answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Spend the money when the site has a job to do. When it needs to bring in enquiries. When the way it feels reflects on the work itself. When you will still be living with it in five years.

The useful question is not what a website costs. It is what it needs to earn back, and by when.

What to ask before you agree to anything

Whoever you are talking to, four questions will tell you most of what you need to know.

• What is included, and what counts as extra?
• Who owns the site, and the files, when it is finished?
• What does it cost to run, and to change something next year?
• Can I see something you built that is still standing three years on?

A good answer to those is worth more to you than a low number.

The short version

A small business website in the UK usually costs between £1,000 and £8,000. Less if you build it yourself, more if it has real work to do. The price moves on how much of it is made for you, who is making it, and what it has to do once it is live.

Anyone who gives you a firm price before asking what the site is for is guessing. Anyone who will not give you a range at all is hiding. You want the person in between, who asks a few questions first and then tells you plainly.

If you would like to see what the money buys, the work on this site is a fair sample.