A £400 website is not always a mistake, but it becomes an expensive one when it has to do a job it was not built for, and the bill usually arrives around eighteen months later.
Cheap web design has a place. A new sole trader testing an idea, or a club with no budget, can be well served by a simple site at a low price. The trouble starts when a business that needs enquiries buys a site designed only to exist.
This article works through a typical example, with the numbers on the table, to show where the extra cost appears. It is one part of our wider guide to UK web design agencies. Your own numbers will differ, but the pattern is usually the same.
What does cheap website design cost in the UK?
Basic UK websites run from about £200 to £1,000, with good-quality basic sites at roughly £400 to £800, according to one small business cost guide.
The same guide puts advanced sites at £1,000 to £4,000 and bespoke ones at £2,000 to £7,000. It cites no underlying survey, so read the figures as a market guide, not a standard price list. It also lists mid-range UK freelancers at about £50 an hour, and overseas freelancers at as little as £5 to £20.
A £400 quote sits inside the "basic" band. That is not a warning sign by itself. What matters is what the price includes and what the site must do.
What happens to a £400 site over eighteen months?
Take a typical case. A plumbing and heating firm pays £400 for a five-page site on a template, built by a freelancer working to a low fixed price. The problems below are the ones owners most often report.
Months 1 to 3: it looks fine
The site launches. It has a homepage, services, about, gallery and contact pages. The owner is pleased, since it looks like a website. Nobody checks speed, structure or tracking, because they were not part of the price.
Months 4 to 9: it does not bring in work
The site does not appear for searches like "boiler repair Northampton", because it has one services page covering everything and no local detail. Page titles are the template defaults. The contact form sends mail to an address that goes to spam, so some enquiries never arrive. Nobody notices until a customer mentions they emailed twice.
Speed is poor on a phone because the template loads large images and several scripts. The firm does not measure it, and neither does the freelancer, who has moved on to other jobs.
Months 10 to 14: the owner wants changes
The owner wants to add a new service and change the phone number. The freelancer is slow to reply, wants to charge by the hour and says the template makes the change awkward. This is common: a UK Business Forums thread about a designer-related dispute includes the observation that an unsupported platform may mean a backup cannot be passed to another developer.
Another poster in the same thread advised the owner to save their £100 and start again.
Months 15 to 18: the rebuild
The owner pays for a proper build. The new site needs new copy, a page for each service, a redirect plan and tracking. The cheap site's assets are no help: the images were stock, the text was thin and the template cannot be moved.
If the cheap site had sat on a builder such as Wix, the move would be a rebuild too. Wix's support page says a Wix site cannot be moved to another host, because it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers.
What is the full cost in the model?
The cheap route costs more than the right-first-time route once you count the rebuild and the enquiries that never arrived.
The rebuild figure uses the low end of the bespoke range from the cost guide for the rebuild.
| Item | Cheap first, rebuild later | Built properly once |
|---|---|---|
| First build | £400 | £2,000 |
| Hosting and upkeep, 18 months at £20 a month | £360 | £360 |
| Rebuild at month 15 | £2,000 | £0 |
| Build and running costs | £2,760 | £2,360 |
| Enquiries lost over 18 months (see below) | £3,600 | £0 |
| Total cost of the choice | £6,360 | £2,360 |
The row for lost enquiries needs explaining. Assume the weak site brings in two fewer enquiries a month than a well-built one, over eighteen months. That is 36 enquiries. If one in four becomes a job, that is nine jobs, and at an average of £400 a job, £3,600 of revenue.
Change any of those assumptions and the total moves, but the direction rarely does.
The direct saving from the cheap route is negative even before lost work: you spend the £400 and then spend the £2,000 anyway. Lost enquiries are the larger number, and the harder to see.
Why do cheap sites cost less?
They cost less because they leave out the work that is hard to see: planning, copywriting, testing, search set-up and support.
A template site needs an hour or two of assembly, not a design process. The page text is whatever the client supplies, with nobody checking it against what customers search for. Speed, accessibility and tracking are untested.
There is no redirect plan because there is no old site, or because nobody asked. Hosting is the cheapest available, and support is whenever the freelancer is free.
None of these gaps is visible on launch day. They appear later, one at a time, each as a small problem that needs its own fix. That is the sense in which cheap is expensive: the price covers the part you can see.
What does the cheap route usually leave out?
It usually leaves out accessibility, security upkeep, tracking and a plan for change.
Accessibility. The WebAIM Million analysis of one million home pages found detectable accessibility failures on 95.9% of them in 2026. A cheap template is unlikely to be better than average. We cover the repairs in five accessibility fixes most UK SME sites need.
Security and updates. A site with no maintenance falls behind on updates. Our guide to what you pay for on a £50 a month plan shows what upkeep involves and why it has a cost.
Tracking. Without analytics set up to count calls and form submissions, you cannot tell whether the site works. That makes it impossible to judge the next step.
A plan for change. Businesses change. A site that is hard to edit or move leaves you paying whoever holds the keys.
When is a cheap website the right choice?
A cheap site is the right choice when the site has a small job, a short life or both.
Examples include a one-page holding site while you build the business, a site for a temporary event, a simple portfolio or a "find us here" page for a business that gets all its work by referral.
In those cases, spending £400 is sensible and spending £4,000 is not. Our guide on whether small businesses still need a website sets out what a first site should contain at each budget.
For a business that expects customers to find it through search, the answer changes. A professional services firm or a retailer that depends on enquiries or sales needs structure, speed and tracking from the start.
How do you spot a false saving?
Look for what the quote leaves out: ownership, content, search set-up, speed testing, training and support.
Six questions help:
- Whose name is the domain registered in?
- Who owns the hosting account, and what does it cost after year one?
- Is the copy included, or do you supply it?
- How many pages are included, and is there one for each service?
- Will the site be tested on mobile for speed, with results shown?
- What happens when you need a change in month six, and what does it cost?
If the answers are vague, the low price is paying for the omissions. Our article on what your web agency should hand over lists what you should hold at the end, and the questions apply to a £400 job as much as a £4,000 one.
What can you do if you already bought a cheap site?
Fix the cheapest high-value problems first, then decide whether a rebuild is justified.
Check your accounts and ownership. Test the contact form with a real message. Look at the site on your phone for speed and readability. Improve the homepage's opening line, using the method in writing a homepage hero in one sentence. Add a separate page for each main service. These steps can double the usefulness of a basic site for little money.
If the platform blocks the changes you need, plan a rebuild with the redirect map from the start. Our checklist in why redesigns lose traffic for three months explains how. Choosing between a builder and an agency for the second attempt is covered in website builders vs agency: the actual trade-offs.
Get a second opinion
If you are weighing a cheap quote against a larger one, send us both. We will tell you what each includes, what is missing and whether the cheaper one would do. Our website design service covers projects that need more, and you can contact us with the quotes.
