What is actually included in a £700 website — and what is not

Cost & buying7 September 202613 min read

Short answer: £700 buys somewhere between a day and a half and three days of skilled work, and everything in the deliverable follows from that. Up to five pages, built properly for a phone, written from what is already true about your business, with a contact route that has been tested, a domain in your name and the technical basics search engines expect. It does not buy photography, a copywriting programme, unlimited changes, or marketing. None of that is hidden — but it is only obvious if somebody writes it down, so this is us writing it down.

Why the number is a day count, not a page count

Every fixed-price website is a bet on hours. Pages are the visible unit, so they get used as the measure, but a five-page site and a seven-page site take almost the same time if the seven-page one is well organised, and wildly different amounts of time if the words for four of the pages do not exist yet.

That is the thing to understand before you compare quotes. The build is a small fraction of it. The time goes on deciding what the pages are, finding out what is actually true about the business, writing it in a way that does not sound like every other trade website, getting it working properly on a phone, and testing that the contact route actually delivers. A quote is a supplier’s estimate of how much of that they will have to do. The wider survey of what different price bands buy is in what a tradesman’s website should cost; this page is about one number.

The line-by-line: what is in

Up to five pages, and which five

Home, about, contact, and two that earn their place — usually your two main services, or one service and one area. Five is not arbitrary: it is roughly the point at which a sole trader has said everything a customer needs before ringing. If you sell six genuinely different services, five pages is the wrong size and you should know that before you buy, which is the argument in how many pages a trade website actually needs.

The words, written from public information

Somebody writes the pages. At this price they are written from what already exists — your existing listings, your reviews, your Business Profile, whatever you have already said about yourself in public — rather than from a long interview. That is a real constraint and it is worth naming: the copy will be accurate and it will be readable, but it will not contain the things only you know unless you tell us. At £1,500 that changes: the copy comes from a phone interview instead.

Built for a phone first

Most people who look you up are standing somewhere holding a phone. Mobile-first is not a feature, it is the default assumption, and any quote that lists “mobile responsive” as an upgrade in 2026 is describing a very old way of working.

A contact route that has been tested

A phone number that dials when tapped. A form that arrives somewhere a human reads. This sounds trivial. It is the single most common silent failure on a small business website — a form quietly delivering into a spam folder for two years while the owner concludes the website does not work. It is one of the causes worth ruling out in why an old website stops bringing in work.

The search basics — which are basics, not marketing

Every page gets a real title and description rather than a placeholder. The site gets a sitemap and a robots file. The pages carry the structured data that describes what the business is. Your Business Profile gets pointed at the site and the site gets pointed back. This is plumbing, and it takes an hour or two, and its absence is visible for years. What it is not is search marketing, and nobody should describe it as such.

A domain in your name

Registered to your business, on your email address. That is a deliberate line rather than a courtesy, and it is worth understanding why before you buy any website from anybody — who actually owns your website is the ten minutes most likely to save you money.

Where the day and a half actually goes

This is the part nobody itemises, and it is the only way to tell an honest fixed price from a guess. Roughly, for a five-page trade site:

• Two to three hours working out what the site is. Reading whatever exists about the business in public, deciding which five pages, and deciding what the one thing is that each page has to get across. This is the hour that decides whether the site is any good.
• Four to six hours writing. Five pages of copy that is accurate, specific and does not read like every other trade site. Writing is nearly always the largest single block, which is why quotes that include a copywriting process cost meaningfully more.
• Three to five hours building. Laying the pages out, making them behave on a phone, getting the type and spacing right, wiring the navigation.
• One to two hours on the plumbing. Titles and descriptions, sitemap and robots file, structured data, the domain, the certificate, the form and where it delivers, and the Business Profile connection.
• One to two hours testing and fixing. On a real phone, not a simulated one. Sending a test enquiry and confirming it lands. Checking it works for somebody using a screen reader or a large font size.
• One to two hours on revisions and launch. Your changes, applied in a batch, then going live.

Add it up and it is twelve to twenty hours. That is the number the price is really describing. When you see a quote at four times ours for the same five pages, the question to ask is which of those blocks got four times bigger — because sometimes the answer is a genuine one, and sometimes the answer is overhead.

The three things that actually move a fixed price

Not the design. Not the number of colours. Three inputs, all of them yours, decide whether a fixed-scope build runs to time or runs over.

• No photographs. The most common. If there are no pictures of your work, the pages get built around that absence, and the site is weaker for it in a way no amount of design fixes. Twenty minutes on your phone at the end of the next job is worth more to the finished website than anything else you could contribute.
• No clear list of what you sell. If “we do most things” is the honest answer, the pages cannot be split, and a site that cannot be split cannot be found for anything specific — the argument in how many pages a trade website needs.
• Changes arriving one at a time. Covered under revisions below. It is the difference between a build finishing in a fortnight and a build finishing in three months.

What a fixed scope protects you from

Fixed scope is usually presented as protecting the supplier, and it does. It is worth being clear that it protects the buyer more.

On a day-rate or hourly arrangement, every question you ask has a meter running on it, every change you request is a negotiation, and the final invoice is not knowable in advance. That is a bad position for someone who has never bought a website before and does not yet know which of their instincts are expensive. On a fixed price the supplier absorbs their own inefficiency: if the build takes longer than they thought, that is their problem, and the number you were told is the number you pay.

What you give up is elasticity. A fixed scope has edges, and going past them costs extra — which is exactly why the exclusions list above matters more than the price does. A supplier who will not put the exclusions in writing has given you the worst of both: a fixed number with an undefined boundary.

The line-by-line: what is out

This is the more useful list, and the one most quotes leave you to discover.

• Photography. Nobody is coming to your sites with a camera. Real photographs of your own finished work, taken on your own phone, are what goes on the page — and they genuinely work better than stock. But if the pictures do not exist, they do not appear, and a website of stock imagery is worse than one with fewer pictures.
• A copywriting process. Words get written. Nobody spends a week working out your positioning, interviewing your customers, or drafting three versions of the home page.
• Unlimited revisions. Changes are batched into rounds. See below.
• Marketing of any kind. No advertising, no ongoing search work, no content programme, no social media. There is a whole industry that sells these bundled into a build price, and the effect is that you cannot see what either cost.
• Bespoke functionality. Booking systems, customer portals, payment flows, job management. Worth saying plainly because trades often ask for a “website” and describe business software — they are different products with different prices.

What a revision round actually is

This is where fixed prices are won and lost, and almost nobody explains it. A revision round is not “one change”. It is one pass: you look at the entire site, write down everything you want different, and it all gets done together.

The reason a limit exists is not meanness about the changes themselves. It is the round trips. Four separate emails a week apart, each with one small change, cost more time than forty changes sent at once — because each one means stopping other work, reloading the whole job into your head, making the edit, redeploying, and writing back. A supplier who says “unlimited revisions” either has that cost priced in somewhere you cannot see, or is about to have an unhappy conversation with you.

The practical advice is the same whoever builds it: gather your changes, send them once, and you will get more out of a limited number of rounds than someone with unlimited rounds who dribbles.

The four things that get billed later

Not by dishonest suppliers particularly — by all of them, because they genuinely were not in the price. Ask about all four before you pay a deposit anywhere.

• Extra pages. The most common overrun by a distance. You buy five, you realise during the build that you sell four services and cover three towns, and you now want nine.
• Copywriting. Usually surfaces as “can you make it sound more like us”, which is a rewrite rather than a revision.
• Photography. Surfaces at the moment the pages go up and the pictures look thin.
• Search work. Surfaces two months after launch when nothing much has happened, which is normal and expected — for the reasons set out in why a new website is not showing up on Google.

First-year totals, as arithmetic

Comparing a build fee against a subscription is comparing two different shapes, so the only fair comparison is the first-year total and then the run rate after it. Using our own published numbers, all excluding VAT, and a builder subscription at the level the platforms publish themselves — Squarespace’s pricing page is the easiest to check, and it moves, so check it rather than trusting this sentence:

• Builder subscription, built by you: roughly £120–£180 in year one, and the same again every year. Plus your own time, which is the part that never appears in the comparison and is argued out properly in builders versus a built site.
• £700 build then £65 a month: £700 + £780 = £1,480 in year one, then £780 a year.
• £1,500 build then £145 a month: £1,500 + £1,740 = £3,240 in year one, then £1,740 a year.

Two things fall out of that arithmetic and neither is a sales point. First, the gap in year one is much smaller than the gap in the build fee, because the monthly dominates quickly — which is the case for reading what the monthly actually covers before you compare anything. Second, over five years the recurring side is the whole story: £780 a year is £3,900, and by then the build fee is a rounding error. Whatever you buy, buy the monthly carefully.

Who £700 is wrong for — in both directions

It is too much for a sole trader who genuinely needs one page. If you do one thing, in one town, and the website’s entire job is to prove you exist and give someone a number to ring, a single well-made page is the honest answer and you should not be talked up from it.

It is too little for a firm with ten services and three depots. Not because the work would be poor, but because five pages cannot carry ten services without collapsing them into a list, and a list is the thing that stops a page being findable for any of them. That firm is looking at the £1,500 or £3,000 shape, not because the pixels are better but because there is more of it. The same is true of a scaffolding contractor being checked by a surveyor before a tender — the evidence load is higher, which is the subject of what wins commercial scaffolding work.

And there is a third case worth naming honestly: if the entire problem is that nobody has ever heard of you and the phone does not ring, a website is not the first thing to buy. Reviews, a complete Business Profile and the work you already have coming through word of mouth will move the needle sooner.

Where we stand on this

£700 plus VAT, up to five pages, then £65 a month. £1,500 and £145 for up to ten pages with the copy taken from a phone interview. £3,000 and £295 for up to twenty with a full interview and three revision rounds. Every one of those numbers is on the pricing section rather than behind a form, and the exclusions above are the same exclusions we apply to ourselves.

We also build the thing before the conversation, from public information, so what you are judging is a finished website rather than a promise about one. That is the part of this we would actually defend: you can see exactly what a few hundred pounds buys before you spend it. If you are not sure the website is even the right thing to spend on first, the Growth Diagnostic is five questions and will sometimes tell you it is not.

What no price buys, at any tier, is an outcome. We can promise you the build. Nobody can promise you the phone call.

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