Ask five people to quote the same small business website and you can genuinely get answers from £300 to £30,000. That range is not a sign that four of them are trying it on. It usually means five people heard five different jobs, because "a website" is not a specification any more than "a vehicle" is.
Here is what actually drives the number, so you can read a quote before you sign it.
What you are actually paying for
Almost nobody is charging you for HTML. On a typical build, writing the code is perhaps a third of the work. The rest is:
- Working out what the site is for. Which visitors matter, what you need them to do, and what happens after they do it. Skip this and you get a brochure that wins compliments and no customers.
- Design. Not decoration - the order things appear in, what gets cut, and how the page reads on the phone your customers actually use.
- Content. Words and photographs. This is the most common reason projects stall, and the cost most often left out of a quote.
- The unglamorous half. Forms that deliver, analytics set up correctly, security headers, backups, testing on real devices, and the accessibility work that keeps you the right side of the Equality Act.
Roughly what the bands buy you
Under £1,000
At this level you are buying a template with your logo dropped in, or somebody working evenings. That is not automatically wrong. If you are a one-person trade business who needs a credible page with your number on it, a well-chosen template you maintain yourself is a sensible purchase, and I will tell you so rather than sell you something bigger.
What you should not expect is anyone thinking hard about your customers, or being there in eight months when something breaks.
£1,500 to £5,000
The realistic band for a small local business that wants the site to actually bring in work. Custom design against your brand, a handful of pages written around real customer questions, proper enquiry handling, sensible analytics, and someone accountable for it afterwards.
This is where most Dumbarton and Glasgow small businesses genuinely sit. It is also the band with the widest quality spread, so it is the one worth scrutinising hardest.
£5,000 to £15,000
Now you are paying for complexity rather than polish: bookings, payments, customer accounts, stock, integration with software you already run, or content structured well enough to compete for search traffic in a crowded category.
£15,000 and up
Genuine web applications. If you are being quoted this for a five-page marketing site, ask precisely what the money buys.
Five things that quietly move the price
- Who writes the content. Copywriting is real work. If a quote assumes you will supply finished text and photographs, that is a cost sitting on your side of the line.
- How many decision-makers there are. Two owners with different tastes can add weeks. That is not a criticism, just scheduling reality.
- Whether you need to edit it yourself. A content management system is worth paying for if you will genuinely use it, and money wasted if you would rather email changes over.
- Integrations. Anything that has to talk to a booking system, an accounts package or a payment provider costs more than it sounds like it should, because the failure cases are where the work is.
- Migration. Replacing an existing site means preserving URLs and search rankings. Done carelessly, a redesign can cost you traffic you spent years earning.
How to read a quote
A quote you can act on tells you what is included, what is not, when it will be delivered, and what it costs to run afterwards. If it is a single number with no scope attached, you cannot compare it to anything.
Worth asking before you sign:
- What happens if the scope changes halfway through - is that an agreed rate, or an argument?
- What are the ongoing costs, and which are licences you cannot cancel without breaking the site?
- Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting account at the end? This one matters more than people expect, and it is worth getting in writing rather than assuming.
- What does support look like in month six, and what does it cost?
The cheap-now, expensive-later trap
The most expensive websites I have seen were not the ones with big invoices. They were the ones built quickly on a page builder with a dozen plugins, where every change needs a specialist, the licences renew forever, and eventually something breaks that nobody can fix without rebuilding. The build was £800. The next four years were not.
The honest version of this advice is that the right spend depends on what the site has to earn. If a website winning you two extra jobs a month is worth thousands to your business, then arguing over a few hundred pounds at the start is the wrong argument to be having. If it is a digital business card, buy a digital business card.
Where I sit
For transparency, since it would be odd to write this and stay coy: a starter site for a small local business begins at £1,500, and a full project build with a defined scope begins at £4,500. Every project is quoted at a fixed price with a delivery date before any work starts.
You can see the full breakdown of how I work, or just ask me what your job would cost. I will give you a straight answer, including if that answer is that you do not need me.