It’s that age old question that everyone worries about when they are wanting any website work done, How much does it cost to build a website uk? Unfortunately it’s really difficult to give an accurate price as there are so many variables. However, using my experience as a web developer I will do my best to give you what I would quote for certain pieces of work!
What are you paying a web developer to do?
It might not always be super obvious why you have received such a high quote when what you want seems quite a simple job! There’s usually a number of things that go into a web developers quote which can bump up the price and make it seem a little higher than what you are expecting.

Responsiveness & browsers
A web developer needs to make sure that all the work that has been commissioned will work on every device that your users might visit your website on. This includes any size screens, mobile phones, tablets, we even need to make sure it will work on 4k TV screens!
The desktop version of the website will be considerably different to any mobile versions, if you imagine a desktop screen has 1920 pixels across compared with a phone which has around 350px across. The amount of spaces means the mobile site will almost need to be fully redesigned to account for the lack of space!
Then there’s all of the browsers to consider as well! The website needs to work on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and some people even want to still support Internet Explorer. Each browser will display websites slightly different so we need to test it across them all and make sure the website works on all those as well.
So whilst you may only want a navigation menu added to your website, there’s so much we need to think about and so many different devices to cater for.
How much does it cost to build a website uk – Legacy Code?
In an ideal world we would work with clean code bases or make everything brand new from scratch, but obviously this is the real world! Clients have websites that they have had in operation for a number of years and they may not have been maintained quite as well as we have hoped!
Whilst an old code base doesn’t mean the work can’t be completed it can add time on to the quotes and in turn raise up the price a little bit. This is because the code will be a lot harder to work with, harder to find where to edit parts of it and there maybe parts that can’t be changed at all!
How much does it cost to build a website uk with custom functionality?
There’s certain things that clients ask for that just haven’t been done before or require a completely bespoke solution to be created. There’s a lot of work that will need to go into bespoke components that ranges from designs to user experience.
The developers may not even know the solution off of the top of their head and it will require a number of hours of research before a solution can be started, unfortunately the cost of that time will still be passed on to you as the customer.
Page Speed
It’s all good creating a new website for clients, but if the site takes 10 seconds to load then it’s a waste of time as it won’t have improved the users website experience. So a number of hours will be invested into optimising your website once it’s completed to ensure it loads as quickly as possible for all users.
This will include time spent to go through every image and resize it and optimise the size of the image, lazy loading where possible, combining and minifying files to make sure they load as quickly as possible and caching the new website so it loads super quickly for new users.
Again, this time is imperative but it might not be clear what it means to a customer on a bill. It’s worth considering as well as page speed can have a direct impact on SEO rankings.
How much does it cost to build a website uk?
So, now you know why a simple bit of work can have a higher cost than expected, how much will it actually cost you? Again, this will really depend on the quality of the web developer that you find, the type of developer (whether they are freelance or an agency based developer) & how much pride they take in their work.
A developer that rushes through things to keep costs down will likely leave bugs and issues on your website and it probably won’t be fully optimised.
How much should a navigation bar cost UK?
You should remember that a navigation bar will be completely different on desktop screens and mobile due to the space requirements and links needing to be much thicker on mobile devices for fat fingers!
For a navigation bar you should expect to pay for 10 hours of time, at a large agency this will be around £140/h (£1,400), at a smaller agency you should expect to pay £60/h (£600) or a freelancer will usually charge around £30-40/h.

How much should a two column layout cost UK?
For a two column layout you should expect to pay for about 15 hours of time.
This is because it needs to be able to work with anything being thrown into the columns, including text, videos, images & anything else a client might want in them. This also needs to work responsively.
At a large agency this will be around £140/h (£2,100), at a smaller agency you should expect to pay £60/h (£900) or a freelancer will usually charge around £30-40/h.
How much should a FAQs layout cost UK?
For FAQs you should expect to pay for about 10 hours of time.
This is because it needs to be able to work with anything being thrown into the answers, including text, videos & images. The functionality of the opening and closing of the FAQ needs to be built as well, as well as working on mobile devices with larger links.
At a large agency this will be around £140/h (£2,100), at a smaller agency you should expect to pay £60/h (£900) or a freelancer will usually charge around £30-40/h.
How much should a Blog Homepage cost UK?
Now we are starting to get into the bigger parts of functionality. Developers need to build a number of things for a blog homepage, this includes queries to pull in all the posts required along with the titles, descriptions, images etc.
Everything you see on a blog homepage actually needs to be built and coded to be pulled in, it’s not quite as simple as it looks. Then there might be filters and search that needs to be built, both of which can be very complicated when they all need to work together.
Let’s quote for a ‘worst case’ scenario and you want pagination, search, filters and sorting, you are probably looking at around 30 hours. At a large agency this will be around £140/h (£4,200), at a smaller agency you should expect to pay £60/h (£1,800) or a freelancer will usually charge around £30-40/h.
How much is X?
If you are wanting to get an approximate cost of what to expect or if you want to check if a quote you have received is fair, please feel free to contact us and we would be happy to help!
The key message to take away from this is just to be a little more understanding of quotes if they are higher than what you were expecting. There’s a lot more to consider than might have originally been thought, and it’s not increased to get more money, the price is what it is because there’s so many devices and things to consider!
Remember, whilst you might be asking yourself how much does it cost to build a website uk, it doesn’t have to cost anything! You can use our free guide to build yourself a WordPress website completely for free!


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