Prices, published

What a new website should cost a small service business in the UK

SAM COGGIN · SYDEX · 30 AUG 2026

A properly built website for a small service business in the UK should cost somewhere between £2,000 and £6,000 to build, and £100 to £400 a month if someone competent runs it for you. Sydex charges £2,950 for the rebuild and £295 a month for care, published, same for everyone. Here is why the market is so much murkier than that, and what your money should actually buy.

Why is website pricing so hard to pin down?

Most agencies quote after a discovery call, not before. Unpublished pricing lets the number stretch to fit the customer, and it hides a market where £5,000 routinely buys a site that looks nice and does nothing. Owners are taught to expect too little: a brochure that sits there, a monthly report nobody reads, and an invoice that keeps arriving. Mediocre results at inflated prices have quietly become the industry standard.

What should the build price include?

If you are paying £2,000 to £6,000, all of this should be in, not sold as extras:

• A site that works on a phone first, because that is where your buyers are.
• Your prices published in a format buyers, Google and AI assistants can all read.
• Pages that answer real buyer questions, written from what people in your area actually search.
• Proper technical SEO and structured data, so machines understand who you are and what you do. This is what gets you named in AI answers, and almost nobody selling cheap sites does it.
• A quote form a buyer can fill in at midnight, with a photo, in under a minute.
• Your domain in your own name. If an agency registers it in theirs, they own your address. Walk away from anyone who resists this.

What should the monthly fee include?

A retainer that buys "hosting and support" is £30 of server dressed up as £300 of service. A monthly fee worth paying is someone actually working the site: content added, the search plan worked, rankings and AI answers tracked, and numbers you can read: visitors, leads, and what they turned into. If you have not seen a number from your current agency this month, you are paying for hosting.

The cheap routes, honestly assessed

A DIY builder at £15 a month is genuinely fine if you have the hours and the patience, though the templates fight you on everything that makes a site findable. A £500 site from a freelancer is usually a template with your logo on it. Neither is wrong, but neither will show up when someone asks ChatGPT who to hire, and that is where recommendations increasingly happen.

The only way to buy this with no risk

The way I do it removes the gamble entirely: I rebuild the site first, at my own risk, and show you the finished thing working on a real link. You have already used it before you decide. If you do not want it, you pay nothing and keep your old site. If you do, it is £2,950 and it goes live on your domain in a day.