Cheapest Way to Set Up a Website in the UK, Ranked

The cheapest way to set up a website in the UK is a DIY builder at around £10 to £20 a month, plus a domain of about £10 a year. That gets a site live. It does not always stay cheapest once you add email, your time, and the enquiries a weak site never wins. Below I rank the real options by cash out of pocket, time, and what you own at the end.

What cheapest actually means

Cheapest this month and cheapest over three years are different numbers. A free Wix or IONOS subdomain costs nothing today. In year two you are still on their platform, and you do not own a portable site. A £1,500 one-off WordPress site looks dear next to £12 a month. Over three years the DIY builder often totals £400 to £700 plus your hours, while the one-off is a sunk cost plus £80 to £150 a year for hosting.

Decide which you are optimising for: cash this month, total cash over three years, or cash plus your time. Most small businesses undervalue the time. If your hour is worth £40, twenty hours of DIY is £800 you never invoice. Rank every option against the definition you actually care about, not the headline monthly fee.

Consumer tools such as Wix and Squarespace usually display prices including VAT. UK hosting and freelance quotes are often plus VAT. Compare like with like or a £10 gap vanishes.

The options, cheapest first

1. Free builders with a branded subdomain

Wix, IONOS, Google Sites and similar let you publish at an address like yourbusiness.wixsite.com for £0. You get a template, a contact form and a site that looks temporary. Customers notice the subdomain. Search engines treat it as weaker than a domain you own. Use this only to test an idea for a couple of weeks, not as a trading website.

True cost: £0 in money, several evenings of your time, and a rebuild the moment you want to look established.

2. A paid DIY website builder

This is the genuine cheapest way to set up a UK website on your own domain.

Typical UK prices on annual billing:

• Wix: about £13 to £17 a month, higher if you need ecommerce
• Squarespace: about £13 to £25 a month
• WordPress.com: about £8 to £25 a month, and the cheap tiers block plugins
• A .co.uk or .uk domain: £8 to £15 a year. Some builders include year one, then charge

Year one cash: roughly £150 to £300. Three years: £450 to £900. You do the design, the words, the photos and every update. Moving off Wix or Squarespace later means a rebuild. The export is not a working WordPress site.

This suits someone already comfortable in Canva, who can write five clear pages, and who does not need booking software, stock control or a client login. If you cannot spare 10 to 20 hours to build it and an hour a month to keep prices and photos current, the monthly saving versus a managed plan is a false economy.

3. Self-hosted WordPress on cheap UK hosting

Buy hosting, install WordPress (most hosts offer one-click), pick a free theme or a £40 to £80 theme, and build the pages. UK hosts such as Krystal, 20i or SiteGround charge about £4 to £12 a month for a small brochure site. Domain: about £10 a year. Page builders such as GeneratePress, Kadence or the default editor are free. Premium add-ons run £50 to £90 a year if you want them.

Year one cash if you do it yourself: £80 to £250. You own the files and the database. You can change host. You also own updates, backups, security and the 2am panic when a plugin fights a PHP upgrade. Plenty of firms run this for years with no drama. Plenty also get defaced because nobody clicked update for six months.

Add professional email on day one. A Gmail address on the contact page undercuts the whole site. Google Workspace starts at £6 a user a month. Microsoft 365 Business Basic is in the same band. Some hosts include a mailbox. Those mailboxes are often a poor fit for a trading business that needs calendar, phone and reliable spam filtering.

4. A cheap one-off build from a freelancer

A UK freelancer working from a commercial theme can deliver a five-page WordPress site for £400 to £900. National cheap design firms advertise £99 to £299. At £99 you are filling in a form so a theme can be cloned. At £500 to £900 you should expect the domain connected, a mobile check, basic page titles and a login so you can edit text.

A more typical one-off small business site from someone who has done this for years sits at £1,500 to £4,000. That is not the cheapest set-up. It is often cheaper than two DIY rebuilds and a year of lost enquiries. I offer both one-off builds and pay-monthly plans. For my figures, use the prices on arlowebstudio.com rather than anything quoted here.

5. Pay-monthly website plans

UK studios and some national firms charge a setup fee, then a monthly amount that includes hosting, updates and ongoing management. You are not learning a builder. Someone else builds the site and keeps it running. This is the lowest-upfront professional route, which is why it fits small businesses with no spare £2,000 this quarter.

Typical UK market: setup of £0 to £500, then £30 to £150 a month, depending on page count, ecommerce and how much support sits in the fee. A £50 a month plan over three years is £1,800 plus setup. Ask who owns the site if you stop paying. Some contracts keep the design. Some hand over the WordPress files. Read that clause before the monthly number.

What the numbers look like side by side

Those figures exclude your time, professional photos and copywriting. Add them if you will pay someone else.

Costs people forget

• Photos: a half-day photographer in the South East is often £150 to £400. Phone photos in daylight, cropped and compressed, cost £0 and beat generic stock.
• Words: a freelance writer for five pages is commonly £200 to £600. Thin copy on a cheap site wastes the hosting too.
• SSL certificates: should be free via Let's Encrypt. If a host charges £40 a year, change host.
• Privacy policy and cookies: a plugin plus a generator is £0 to £50 a year. You need both if you use analytics or a form.
• Email: £6 to £12 a month per person. Not optional if you want the site to look like a business.
• Old site redirects: if you already have a domain with pages indexed, budget an hour or a £50 to £150 job so Google does not 404 the useful URLs.

Google Business Profile is free. For a local service it often produces more calls in year one than the website. Set it up the same week the domain is live.

If you need it live on almost no money

1. Register the domain yourself at a UK registrar such as 20i, Cloudflare or 123-reg. Pay with your card. Keep the account in your name. About £10.
2. Claim Google Business Profile the same day.
3. Choose the tool: Squarespace or Wix if you want the fewest moving parts; 20i or Krystal WordPress if you want to own the site later.
4. Build five pages only: Home, Services, About, Areas covered, Contact. Do not start a blog until the five pages are finished.
5. Use your own photos. Export from your phone, compress so each image is under 200KB.
6. Write the way you talk to a customer on the phone. One idea per short paragraph. Put the phone number in the header and again by the form.
7. Set up name@yourdomain before you print the address on invoices or a van.
8. Add a privacy policy and a cookie banner.
9. Check the site on your phone using mobile data, not the office Wi-Fi.
10. Skip paid SEO retainers in month one. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console, then watch which pages get impressions.

When the cheap route costs more

You pay twice when you outgrow the platform. Wix to WordPress is a rebuild. A £199 locked theme with no login is a rebuild. A slow mobile site never sends an invoice for the job you did not win, so the loss never shows in a spreadsheet.

For a local service business the cheapest set-up that still does the job is: a domain you own, pages that load fast on a phone, services written in plain English, a tap-to-call number, and a named person who will update prices. That person can be you on WordPress. It can be a pay-monthly plan if your billable hour is more than the monthly fee.

I see firms run a £12 builder for a year, then pay for a rebuild because they could not edit a section or rank for the town they work in. Starting on something you can leave is cheaper than a bargain you are stuck with.

Frequently asked questions

Can I get a UK website live for under £100?

Yes. A domain is about £10, and a DIY builder billed monthly, or cheap WordPress hosting, can fill the rest. Under £100 for the whole of year one is tight once professional email is added. Budget £150 to £300 if you want your own domain and a site that looks intentional.

Is WordPress cheaper than Wix or Squarespace?

Self-hosted WordPress is usually cheaper in cash, at about £4 to £12 a month for hosting versus £13 to £25 for a builder. You pay in time and in the risk of skipped updates. WordPress.com at the low tiers can cost similar money to Wix but with fewer features, so read the plan limits before you pick it as the cheap option.

Do I need a limited company to buy a domain?

No. Anyone can register a .co.uk or .uk domain. Put the registrant in your name or the trading name, keep the login, and do not let a designer register it under their account. Transferring a domain you do not control is a faff you do not need.

What is the cheapest professional email that looks trustworthy?

Google Workspace at £6 a user a month, or Microsoft 365 Business Basic at a similar price. Avoid using a free @gmail.com address as the public contact. Host-included mailboxes are cheaper, but they are often weaker on spam filtering, calendar and phone access.

Should I start on a free subdomain and upgrade later?

Only for a throwaway test lasting days, not months. Moving later still means rebuilding pages, reconnecting email and losing any early history on that URL. Buy the domain in week one. It is about £10 and it is the one part of a cheap set-up you should not skip.

Is a pay-monthly website cheaper than doing it myself?

Not in cash. A typical UK plan of £30 to £150 a month over three years costs more than DIY hosting. It wins on time and usually on quality, and it keeps the upfront bill small. DIY wins if you enjoy the tools and will actually maintain the site. Count your hours at your real rate before you call DIY cheaper.