Are there any monthly costs once the site is live?

Not to me. Hosting for a normal site costs nothing and the domain is around £10 a year, which you pay directly to the company it is registered with. If you use a paid service such as a booking tool, you pay that company directly, and I tell you the cost before we include it. If you want changes later, I price each one before I do it, and you are free to use someone else instead.

Can I start small and add pages later?

Yes. Starter covers up to three pages, and you can move up to Business later by paying the difference between the two prices. A site that needs four or more pages from the start is a Business site.

Small business website cost in the UK

The cost of a small business website in the UK depends on who builds it and how you pay, and each route has a price you can check before you start. Building it yourself on Wix costs between £9 and £119 a month plus VAT on a yearly plan, and my fixed prices are £500 for up to three pages and £1,500 for four to eight, with nothing monthly afterwards.

Below are the three ways to pay for a website, with prices you can check for yourself, and what you should own at the end of each.

Building it yourself

A website builder gives you templates to build from and charges a monthly fee to keep the site online. Wix has four paid plans, at £9, £16, £25 and £119 a month. Those prices are for a year paid up front, and VAT goes on top (Wix plans, checked October 2026). Wix also has a free plan, but the site gets a wixsite.com address and Wix ads, and connecting your own domain needs a paid plan (Wix help, checked October 2026).

Squarespace has no free plan, only a 14 day free trial. Its four plans cost between £16 and £89 a month if you pay monthly, or between £12 and £79 a month if you pay for a year at once (Squarespace pricing, checked October 2026). Its listed prices do not include VAT either (Squarespace help, checked October 2026).

The fee is the smaller part of the cost. The bigger part is your time: choosing a template, writing every page, sorting out the domain and the email, and keeping it all up to date. If you enjoy that and have the evenings for it, building it yourself can be the right answer. I compare the two routes in more detail in Wix, Squarespace or a web designer.

Paying a web designer once

A web designer builds the site for you and charges for the job. My prices are fixed, and you get the figure in writing before I start:

Starter, £500: up to three pages, for a new business or one that gets most of its work by word of mouth.
Business, £1,500: four to eight pages, with booking links and an editor so you can change your own text and prices.
Custom, from £2,500: shops, booking systems and member areas, quoted per project.

The prices page has the full comparison. Half books your start date, and the rest is invoiced when the site is ready to go live, so you see the finished site before you pay the balance.

After that, the running costs are small. The domain is around £10 a year, paid to whoever you register it with. Hosting for a normal small business site costs nothing. Stephen’s site, for example, is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, where requests for the ordinary files a site like his is made of are free and unlimited on every plan (Cloudflare’s documentation, checked October 2026). When I rebuilt it, his running costs came down to the price of the domain, about £10 a year.

Paying monthly

Some designers and agencies charge a monthly fee instead, on a contract with a minimum term. A monthly price is hard to compare with a fixed one until you multiply it out, the monthly fee times the number of months in the term, so put your own quote into that sum. Is a pay monthly website worth it? works one through for a three year contract.

The fee may cover hosting, changes and support as well as the build, so find out what yours includes, and whose name the domain is in. The questions worth asking before you sign are on the same page.

Check whether VAT is included

A web designer who is registered for VAT adds it to most of what they sell, at the standard rate of 20% (GOV.UK, checked October 2026). A business has to register once its taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000 (GOV.UK, checked October 2026), so a small business may not be registered at all.

Viaduct Web is not VAT registered, so my prices have no VAT added. Whoever you talk to, ask whether the price you are quoted includes VAT before you compare it with anything else.

What makes the price go up

The biggest things are the number of pages and anything that has to work more like a system than a page: online booking, taking payments, a shop or a members area. On my prices, booking links come with Business, online payments and a blog are add ons to Business, and a shop is a Custom build.

The words cost something too, in time or in money. I shape and tidy what you send me, but I do not invent what your business says about itself. If you want someone to write every word for you, that is a copywriter’s job, priced by them. A logo is a separate job as well, because I build sites rather than design logos.

What you should own at the end

Whatever you pay, ask three things before you agree: whose name the domain will be in, whose account the hosting will be in, and whether you can take the site with you if you leave.

With me, the domain and hosting are in your name from day one, and the site and its code are yours once the final invoice is paid. If you are not sure who holds your domain now, here is how to find out.

How much does a small business website cost in the UK?