Search "cost of website design UK" and you'll get answers ranging from £200 to £20,000, which is about as useful as being told a car costs "somewhere between a bike and a private jet". So let's actually talk about it - and about the bit most price guides skip entirely: whether the site you're paying for will actually work properly once it's live.
I'm Jamie, and I build websites on my own, from a desk in Hythe, Kent. No account managers, no juniors passing your job around. Just me, working directly with you. That matters when we get to pricing, because you're not paying for an office full of people - you're paying for the work itself.
The honest answer is that a website is not one product. A five-page site for a local tradesperson and a booking system for a busy salon are both "websites", but they're wildly different jobs. Price depends on things like:
Cheap, mass-produced sites usually skip the part that actually decides whether your website helps your business: how well it performs once someone lands on it.
This is the part that gets left out of most quotes, and it's the part I care about most. A website that looks nice in a screenshot but takes six seconds to load on someone's phone outside a shop in the rain isn't doing its job. People don't wait around. They tap back and try the next result.
Usually it's not one big thing - it's a build-up of small ones. Oversized images that were never resized properly. Bloated templates with features nobody uses. Plug-ins piled on top of plug-ins until the whole thing groans. Cheap hosting that can't keep up. None of this is visible when you're looking at a homepage design mock-up, but it's exactly what decides whether real visitors stick around.
Google pays attention to how fast your pages load, particularly on mobile, and it factors that into how your site ranks. So a slow site isn't just annoying people - it can be quietly working against you in search results too. That's worth remembering when you're comparing a bargain price against a proper one: a slow site can end up costing you more in missed visitors than you saved on the build.
When I quote for a website, the price covers building something that's genuinely fast and works properly on a phone, not just a desktop screen it looked fine on during the demo. Concretely, that means:
None of that is exotic or expensive to do right - it just takes knowing what you're doing and not cutting corners to hit a lower price point. That's the difference between a website that costs less upfront and one that costs less overall.
DIY builders and template sites have their place, and I won't pretend otherwise - if your budget genuinely doesn't stretch further, something is better than nothing. But they come with trade-offs worth knowing about upfront:
A site built by one person who understands both design and how the thing actually runs under the bonnet tends to end up faster, cleaner, and easier to live with day to day. That's not a knock on DIY tools - it's just a different product, at a different price, for a different job.
I won't give you a number that promises to fit every business, because that would be exactly the kind of vague answer I'm trying to steer you away from. What I will say is this: ask any designer or agency you're getting quotes from what they do about page speed and mobile performance. If the answer is vague or they haven't thought about it, that tells you something about what you'll actually end up with, whatever the price tag says.
A website is one of the few things in your business that works for you around the clock, so it's worth judging on more than just the upfront cost. A fast, clean site that loads properly on a phone and doesn't embarrass you when a customer clicks through from Google is worth paying properly for.
If you'd like to talk through what a website would actually cost for your business - no jargon, no pressure, just a straight answer from the person who'd be building it - get in touch through ArloWebStudio. I'm happy to talk you through it.