What affects the price of a custom website?
A business owner types "how much does a custom website cost" into Google and gets two hundred studios quoting prices that vary by a factor of thirty. The reason is dull: most agencies were never taught to break a price into line items, so they hand over one big number and ask for a brief. Five things actually move that number.
Scope: pages and how many are bespoke. Five plain pages and five pages with calculators, filtered listings or a booking flow are not the same job. Each unique template adds design and build time, so a site with many similar pages costs far less per page than one with many one-off layouts.
Integrations. A contact form is close to free. A booking system that writes to your calendar, a CRM hand-off, Stripe payments or a second language each add real hours of build and testing. This is where most surprise costs hide on other studios’ quotes.
Content. If you supply the copy, you save the studio’s copywriting time. If the studio writes it, that work goes into the quote. Either way the cost should be stated, not buried.
Speed. A compressed timeline means reordering other work and sometimes adding a second developer, and that carries a premium. A normal timeline does not.
Who you hire. A boutique studio carries less overhead than a large agency, so the same corporate site can cost meaningfully less without cutting quality. Design complexity, by contrast, moves the price by a fraction, not a multiple; engineering and integrations take the bulk of the budget.
UK website pricing breakdown, tier by tier
| Tier | Price | Timeline | What’s included | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page | from £800 | 1–2 weeks | Design, responsive build, form, SEO structure | Campaigns, launches, a single service |
| Corporate website | from £3,500 | 4–8 weeks | CMS, blog, 5+ integrations, multilingual, GDPR | SMBs, professional services, healthcare |
| Custom platform | from £6,000 | 8–16 weeks | Architecture session, dedicated team, SLA, custom integrations | SaaS, marketplaces, complex products |
Every tier ships with the same foundation, whatever the price: copywriting, UI design in Figma, a hand-built front end on Next.js, a Sanity CMS you can edit from your phone, domain and hosting setup, launch, and a full year of support. The full list is on our pricing page. You are not paying for a stripped-down version at the bottom and the "real" thing at the top. You are paying for scope.
Fixed price vs hourly rate: what UK businesses should know
Most of the budget pain owners describe comes from hourly contracts, where the scope is loose and the invoice keeps climbing. You approve a design, the build starts, and three weeks in the estimate has quietly doubled because "the integration took longer than expected." You carry that risk, not the studio.
A fixed price flips it. The scope is locked in the contract, the number does not move unless you ask for something new in writing, and the warranty is part of the deal. You can plan cashflow around it.
At Code-Site.Art every project is fixed price, agreed before a line of code is written. Across 47 projects in four countries we have not missed the price range on a single one. That is not talent; it is having seen 47 similar projects and knowing what each part actually costs.
What a UK web design agency does not include in the price
An honest quote is as clear about what is out as what is in. These usually sit outside a website build, and any studio worth hiring will tell you so up front:
- Product photography and video
- Branding from scratch (logo and brand book)
- Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns
- SEO campaigns after the warranty year
- Hosting after year one, once the accounts are handed to you
None of these are hidden costs when they are stated. They become hidden costs when a studio quotes low, wins the job, then bills them as "extras" later.
How to compare quotes from UK web studios: 5 things to check
Before you sign anything, ask every studio the same five questions, which doubles as a quick contract check:
- Is the price fixed or hourly? "Roughly" or "depends" is not a quote; it is marketing.
- Is copywriting included? This is a £200–£2,000 line on its own and should be spelled out.
- What is the warranty period? Around four in five studios include no support year. Confirm it.
- Do you get the GitHub repo and every account? If not, you are renting your own website.
- What happens if the deadline slips? With no penalty clause, a deadline is a hope, not a commitment.