A small business website in Cheltenham typically costs between £300 and £700 for a template-based build of three or four pages. Bespoke design, WooCommerce stores and membership sites are quoted individually. Those are my own published prices, because prising a number out of a web designer should not be the hardest part of the project.
Most studios will not publish a figure at all. I understand why, because scope genuinely varies. But it leaves you ringing round for quotes with no idea whether £400 or £4,000 is the right ballpark, and that helps nobody. So here is the whole thing written down.
What you get at each price
| Price | What it covers | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| From £300 | A three-page site on a well-chosen template. You supply text and images. I handle setup, layout, basic SEO, and submission to Google and Bing. | A trade or sole trader who needs to exist online and be findable. |
| From £500 | A four-page template build: home, services or products, about, and a working contact form. Domain registration included. | A local business that takes enquiries through the site. |
| From £700 | A customised four-page site with bespoke design work and an animated header. Domain registration included. | A business that needs to look distinct from its competitors. |
| Quoted | WooCommerce stores, membership sites, bespoke functionality and integrations. | Anything selling, gating or connecting to another system. |
What pushes a quote up
Four things account for most of the difference between a £400 website and a £4,000 one.
- Selling online: a shop brings payments, tax, shipping rules, stock and a checkout that has to work on every device. It is a different category of build, not a bigger version of the same one.
- Bespoke design: a template that suits you is fast. A design drawn from scratch is not, and the cost is mostly the drawing.
- Content: if you have your words and photographs ready, the build is quick. If they need writing or shooting, that is real work and somebody has to do it.
- Integrations: booking systems, CRMs, accounting tools and anything that has to talk to software you already run.
The costs that are not in the build price
A website is not a one-off purchase, and anyone who implies otherwise is setting you up for a surprise. The running costs are small, but they are real:
- A domain name: usually £10 to £20 a year, depending on the extension.
- Hosting: mine starts at £80 a year through No Problem Hosting, with a discount when it is bought alongside a care plan.
- Maintenance: optional, but the thing that decides whether your site still works in two years. Care plans start at £49 a month, and every site I build includes 90 days of Essential care to begin with.
What a cheap website actually costs
You can get a website for under £100. Usually it is a template filled in quickly by somebody with a hundred other clients, on hosting chosen for its margin rather than its speed, with no plan for what happens afterwards.
The bill arrives later. A site nobody updates gets broken into, and cleaning up a compromised WordPress install is a fixed £200 here. Rebuilding from nothing because there were no backups costs considerably more than doing it properly the first time. A good share of the work I take on is repairing this exact decision.
Common questions
How long does a small business website take to build?
A template build is usually two to three weeks from the point I have your content. The build itself is rarely the slow part. Waiting on text and photographs is what stretches projects, which is why I ask for them early and chase politely.
Do I have to write the content myself?
At the lower prices, yes, and that is what keeps them low. You know your business better than I do. If writing it is genuinely the blocker, say so and we will work something out rather than letting the project stall for three months.
Is WordPress the right choice for a small business?
Usually, because it is flexible, you can be taught to edit it, and it will still be a sensible platform in ten years. Not always, though. I hold Wix and Shopify partner accounts precisely so I can tell you when one of those is the better answer, and I do.
Do you only work with businesses in Cheltenham?
No. A good share of my clients are within half an hour of Cheltenham, across Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Stroud and Cirencester, and being local genuinely helps. But plenty of work is remote and always has been. If you are elsewhere in the UK and the fit is right, distance has never been the problem.
Getting a number for your own project
Tell me roughly what you need and I will tell you what it costs, in writing, before anything starts. If your budget and the job do not meet, I would rather say so at the first conversation than three weeks in. Get in touch, or have a look at what I do first.