What a website actually costs in the UK

Website pricing articles almost all work the same way. They print three bands, a small site at one price, a bigger one at another, an ecommerce build at a third, and none of the numbers carry a source. They are the writer’s impression of what agencies charge, formatted to look like research.

A website bill splits into two parts that behave completely differently. The running costs are published by the companies that charge them and can be added up to the penny. The build fee is quoted per project and depends on decisions you have not made yet. This article does the first part exactly and tells you what moves the second.

The running costs you can price today

These are the line items every online store pays whether or not it sells anything. Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own published pricing.

• Domain name. A .co.uk or .com registration, renewed annually. This is the smallest line on the bill and the only one you should never let lapse.
• TLS certificate. Free. Let’s Encrypt issues certificates at no cost and every serious host automates the renewal. If a proposal has a line item for an SSL certificate, ask what it buys that Let’s Encrypt does not.
• Hosting, or a platform subscription. Either you pay a host and manage the stack, or you pay Shopify and they manage it. Those are different bills with different failure modes, covered below.
• Card processing. A percentage of every sale plus a fixed amount per transaction. On a store with real volume this is the largest recurring cost by a wide margin, and it is the one most often left out of a comparison.
• Apps and plugins. Subscriptions for anything the platform does not do natively: reviews, subscriptions, advanced search, bundles. Costs nothing on day one and creeps.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security patching, and somebody to call. On a managed platform this is inside the subscription. On a self-hosted stack it is a real job whether or not anyone is paid to do it.

Shopify’s UK prices, and the point where the cheap plan stops being cheaper

Shopify publishes its UK pricing, so this is arithmetic rather than opinion. Prices checked 17 August 2026.

The subscription is the number everyone compares. The card rate is the number that decides the bill. Because the higher plans buy a lower rate, there is a volume at which the more expensive plan is the cheaper one, and you can find it exactly.

Take a store with a £45 average order value, paying annually, using Shopify Payments so the third-party gateway fee does not apply. Basic costs £228 a year and £1.15 an order (2% of £45, plus 25p). Grow costs £588 a year and £1.015 an order. Grow is £360 more in subscription and saves 13.5p an order, so it pays for itself at 2,667 orders a year.

That is about 222 orders a month. Below it, stay on Basic. Above it, moving to Grow lowers your total bill even though the subscription trebles. Redo the sum with your own average order value, because the saving per order scales with it: at a £150 average order value the crossover falls to roughly 79 orders a month.

What actually moves the build fee

Two stores that look similar can be a factor of ten apart in build cost, and it is rarely the visual design that separates them. In rough order of impact:

1. How many distinct page templates exist. Not how many pages. A catalogue of 4,000 products is one product template. A site with a homepage, a product page, a collection page, a blog and four one-off landing pages is eight designs to draw, build and test.
2. Whether a catalogue is being migrated. Moving products, variants, images, URLs and reviews off an existing platform without losing rankings is a project in its own right, and the redirect map is the part that gets skipped and then costs traffic.
3. Integrations. Anything that has to talk to something else: an ERP, a warehouse, a subscription engine, a CRM. Each one is an interface somebody else controls and can change.
4. Whether the content exists. Product copy, photography and category descriptions are often assumed to be free because nobody has priced them. They are usually the reason a build sits waiting.
5. Who does the ongoing work. A site somebody else has to edit weekly needs an editing experience built for them, which costs more up front and less every month afterwards.

Three questions worth asking any UK agency before you sign

• Is the quote fixed, and what specifically is out of scope? A day rate with an estimate attached is not a price.
• Who owns the code and the accounts? The domain, the hosting, the analytics property and the ad accounts should be registered to you, not to the agency. This is the single most expensive thing to discover late.
• What happens to the URLs? If you have rankings, ask to see the redirect plan before the build starts, not after launch.

What we do

We build ecommerce sites in Birmingham for clients in the UK and abroad, on Shopify and WooCommerce, and we quote a fixed price for a defined scope. Site speed is part of the brief rather than a later fix, because Google’s own thresholds treat it as a ranking input and because a slow store loses the sale before the price is even seen.