Somewhere between "my nephew will do it for £200" and an agency quoting £15,000, there's a sensible number for your business. Here's the honest map.
Business website cost UK: the bands
Under £500: a template with your logo dropped in, or DIY on a site builder. Fine for testing an idea. It will look like what it is.
£800–£2,500: the small-business sweet spot. Custom design, proper SEO structure, real copywriting, mobile-first build, analytics wired in. This is where a brochure site that actually earns enquiries lives — and where we do most of our Manchester web design work.
£2,000–£6,000+: e-commerce. The range is wide because catalogue size, payment flows and integrations vary wildly. Anyone quoting e-commerce without asking how many products you have is guessing.
£10,000+: custom web applications, booking systems, portals. A different product wearing the same name.
The costs nobody mentions
Hosting (£5–£30/month done sensibly), the domain (£10–£15/year), and content. Content is the silent killer — "we'll add the text later" delays more websites than any technical problem. Budget for copywriting or accept the site launches when you finish writing.
Cheap web design in Manchester: when it's fine
A one-page site done properly beats a ten-page template done cheaply. If the budget is tight, shrink the scope, not the standard — a focused single page with fast load, one clear action and honest copy converts better than a sprawling £400 template that takes six seconds to appear.
One thing worth knowing about how we build: this site loads in under a second on a phone. That isn't luck, it's the build method — and it's the standard your site gets, because speed is revenue.