The short answer
These are the rough ranges UK web agencies and freelancers publish in their own 2026 price guides for a small business site of about five pages. Treat them as a guide to the market, not a quote: every business is different, and prices move.
- Building it yourself on a website builder: a monthly plan, commonly around £20 to £50 a month, plus your own time
- A freelancer: roughly £500 to £1,500 for a basic brochure site, and more for anything custom
- A regional agency: commonly £3,000 to £8,000
- A London agency: often from around £8,000
- Online shops and booking systems: usually more again, because they do more
The costs people forget
The build is only part of it. Published guides commonly add a third to a half again for words, photos and search work if those are not included, and the site needs paying for every year after it goes live.
- Your domain name, usually a small yearly fee
- Hosting and keeping the site secure and up to date
- Writing the words and taking the photos
- Changes later: a new service, new prices, new opening hours
What you get at each price
Building it yourself is cheapest in money and dearest in time: you choose the layout, write every word and make every change. A freelancer or agency does the work for you and brings experience, which is worth paying for when the site has to do something complex.
For most small businesses, the job is simpler than that: show what you do, where you do it, and how to get in touch. That is the job where the price has dropped the most.
Where AI fits in
AI website builders, CreonAI among them, write and build the site from a description of your business. With CreonAI you type one sentence and watch it build, and it checks its own pages before it says it is done. You change things by asking in a sentence, which removes most of the cost of changes later.
CreonAI is free to try with 500 credits and no card. Free sites stay online for 7 days. Pro is £19.99 a month and keeps your sites online for good on your own domain. Our pricing page has every plan.
How to decide
Start from what the site has to do, not from a budget. If it has to sell hundreds of products or plug into your systems, talk to an agency. If it has to tell local customers what you do and get them to call, try a builder or AI first: you can see the result before you spend a penny, and you still have the agency option if it is not right.