If you have ever tried to get a straight answer on how much a website costs, you will know how frustrating it can be. Prices online range from a few hundred pounds to tens of thousands, and nobody seems to explain why. So here is an honest breakdown from a web agency based in Northern Ireland that works with small and medium sized businesses every day.
We hear this a lot: "I just need something simple." And that is completely fine. A simple one page website for a small business starts at around £300 with us. That is a fully custom designed, properly coded website built to represent your brand - not a template with your logo dropped in.
From there, prices scale depending on the number of pages and features you need. A business website with four or five pages - a home page, about, services, blog, and contact - typically starts at around £800. Add in ecommerce functionality and you are looking at closer to £2,000, depending on how many products you have and how complex the buying experience needs to be.
Every project is quoted individually because no two businesses are the same. A five page website for a sole trader is a very different job to a five page website for a company with three service lines, a team page, and a case study section.
The build cost is a one off investment. On top of that, we charge an annual fee to cover hosting, your domain, and business email setup. This typically starts at around £10 per month depending on your requirements - billed annually so there are no surprise monthly charges landing in your inbox.
Maintenance is separate and varies depending on how much your website needs to change over time. Some businesses need very little, others need regular updates as their services, team, or content evolves. We price this individually based on what you actually need rather than locking you into a package that does not fit.
Yes, you can. And for some businesses on a very tight budget a website builder is better than nothing. But before you go down that route it is worth understanding what you are actually signing up for.
Wix starts at around £9 a month. Squarespace is around £12. That sounds cheap until you add it up - £108 to £144 a year, every year, forever. After three years you have spent £300 to £450 and you still do not own anything. The moment you stop paying, your website disappears.
But the monthly fee is not the real issue. The real issue is what you end up with. Website builders make it look easy to create a website. And technically it is easy - drag something here, drop something there. What they do not tell you is that building a website that actually attracts customers requires a working knowledge of SEO, design, user experience, copywriting, and web performance. Without those skills you can spend weeks building something that looks decent to you but does nothing for your business.
We see this regularly. Precision Sports Injury Clinic came to us after hitting a wall with a website builder. The design did not reflect their brand, they struggled to secure their domain, had no business email set up, and were not sure what pages or content they even needed. What was left was an unfinished Wix site sitting on a Wix domain - which was actively damaging their brand rather than helping it. We rebuilt their website from scratch and the difference was night and day.
When you work with Webbie you are not just paying for someone to put some pages together. You are getting experts who guide you through the entire process - from the initial design and the content structure, through to development, SEO, testing, launch, business email setup, domain management, and ongoing hosting.
You are also paying for the long term. One thing people do not think about is what happens when you add content to your website later down the line. A new service, a team member, a product range update. On a custom built website that kind of change needs care - adding content carelessly can break the design and structure that made it look great in the first place. We factor that in from the start and we are here to make sure it still looks as good in two years as it did on launch day.
Not always. If your budget is genuinely very tight and you need something online quickly, a website builder can serve a purpose while you get established. We would never tell someone to spend money they do not have.
But if you are serious about your business and you want your website to work as a sales tool rather than just a digital business card, a custom website will almost always be the better investment. Our pricing is competitive - and when you stack it up against what you would pay a website builder over two or three years, the gap is smaller than most people expect.
We have had clients decline quotes to build their website themselves for less. That is a completely valid choice. But the time, the frustration, and the monthly fees that follow are costs too - they just do not show up on an invoice.
To give you a rough starting point:
Every project starts with a free discovery call where we get to know your business, talk through what you need, and put together a detailed quote. No obligation, no hard sell - just an honest conversation about what would work best for you.
If you are a small business in Northern Ireland or anywhere across the UK and you are trying to work out whether a new website makes sense for you right now, we are happy to talk it through.
Get in touch for a free no obligation discovery call. We'll explore your goals and map out a bespoke digital path for your brand.
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