How Much Does a Website Cost in Glasgow?

The honest answer to how much a website costs in Glasgow is that it depends on what the site has to do. A simple brochure site to introduce your business is a very different job from a site with a content management system your team edits weekly, which is different again from a bespoke build with custom functionality. What you can reasonably expect, though, is a fixed price agreed before any work starts. This guide sets out the going rates across the UK market, what actually drives the number up or down, and our own web design tiers so you can see where your project is likely to sit.

We build websites from our Washington Street studio in Glasgow, and every quote is fixed-price after a discovery call. No day-rate meter running in the background, no scope creep, no surprise invoice at the end.

How much does a website cost in Glasgow?

Our brochure sites start at £1,499, business sites with a content management system start at £3,499, and bespoke builds with custom functionality start at £8,000. Those are starting points rather than caps, because the final figure depends on the number of pages, the amount of custom design and any functionality beyond a standard build. The important part is that you get one fixed number for your specific project before you commit.

What websites cost across the UK market

Before you compare quotes, it helps to know roughly what each type of supplier charges. Prices vary a lot by region and by who is doing the work, so treat the following as broad approximations rather than a price list. What matters is understanding why the ranges differ so much.

Template and DIY builders

Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and similar platforms typically run to a monthly subscription of somewhere between £15 and £40, plus your domain. If you build it yourself, that is your only cost. The trade-off is your own time, and it is usually more time than people expect. Choosing a template, writing the copy, sourcing images, wiring up a contact form and getting it looking right on a phone is a week of evenings at minimum. For a sole trader who just needs a presence, that can be entirely the right call. For a business that needs the website to bring in enquiries, the cheap bit up front tends to get expensive later.

Freelancers

A freelance designer or developer will typically build a small business site for somewhere in the region of £800 to £3,000, depending on their experience and how much of the content you supply. Freelancers can be excellent value and you deal directly with the person doing the work. The risks are availability and continuity: if they take a full-time job or go on holiday during your launch week, there is no one else to pick it up. Ask what happens to support and small changes six months after launch.

Small studios

A small studio like ours sits in the middle, and for a business website you should expect to pay somewhere from around £1,500 up to £10,000 or so depending on scope. You get a team rather than one person, a defined process, and someone to call when something breaks. The design work is genuinely bespoke rather than a template with your logo dropped in. This is the band most Glasgow small and medium businesses end up in, because it buys accountability without agency overheads.

Full agencies

Larger agencies generally start around £15,000 and go up steeply from there, often well into six figures for a national brand. That buys account management, strategy, research, user testing and a bigger team. If you are a business with a marketing department and a proper budget, it can be money well spent. If you are a six-person firm in Glasgow that needs a site to explain what you do and take enquiries, you are paying for structure you will not use.

What actually drives the cost

Two quotes for "a website" can differ by a factor of five and both be honest, because the word covers wildly different jobs. These are the things that move the number.

Number of pages. A five-page site is not five times cheaper than a twenty-five-page site, because the design system is the expensive part and it gets reused. But every page still needs layout decisions, content and testing, so page count matters.

How custom the design is. Adapting a proven layout is quick. Designing something genuinely bespoke, with its own typography, illustration and interaction, takes design time and revision rounds. Both are legitimate. Just know which one you are buying.

Whether you need a CMS. A content management system means your team can edit pages and publish posts without a developer. It also means someone has to model the content, build editing interfaces for every block and train your team. That is real work, and it is the main jump between our Brochure and Business tiers.

Who writes the content. Copywriting and photography are the two things clients most often assume are included and most often are not. If you supply finished text and images, the project is cheaper and faster. If you need them produced, that is a separate line on the quote, and it is usually the biggest single reason a project runs late.

Functionality beyond a standard build. Booking systems, member areas, dashboards, payment flows and integrations with your CRM or accounting software all have to be built and tested. This is what separates a bespoke build from a business site, and it is where budgets genuinely need to stretch.

Migration from an existing site. If you already have a site with content and search rankings, moving it across properly costs more than starting from scratch, because the old URLs have to be mapped and redirected. More on that below.

The Brochure tier, from £1,499

A brochure site is the right choice for a lot of small businesses and trades. It presents who you are, what you do and how to get in touch, across up to seven well-designed pages, and it is typically ready in three weeks. It is mobile-first, fast, and set up with the on-page SEO basics as standard: clean URLs, meta titles and descriptions, Open Graph tags, structured data, an XML sitemap and submission to Google Search Console.

If your main goal is to look credible, be found for your name and your service, and give people an easy way to call or email you, this tier usually does everything you need. You will not be editing it daily, so it does not carry the cost of a content management system.

What £1,499 actually buys

It is a fair question, because the number on its own means nothing. At the Brochure tier you get up to seven pages of custom design, a mobile-first responsive layout, a contact form with spam protection, the on-page SEO basics and a full year of fast hosting included. Every project regardless of tier also ships with accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA, a free SSL certificate that renews automatically, Google Analytics and Search Console set up properly, thirty days of post-launch support, and full ownership of your code, content and domain.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Some suppliers keep the site on their own account and hand you nothing if you leave. You should own the domain, the code and the content outright, and you should be able to walk away with all three. Ask any quote you receive whether that is the case.

The Business tier, from £3,499

The Business tier covers up to twenty pages and adds a content management system, so your team can edit copy, swap images and publish blog posts without touching code or coming back to us for every change. It is typically ready in six weeks. This is the tier most growing businesses land on, because control over your own content matters once you are actively marketing.

It includes a friendly CMS and a training call before launch so your team knows how to use it, plus two visual concept rounds and two revision rounds. Projects over £3,000 also include the discovery workshop free, which is a two-hour session where we map your customers, goals and the pages you actually need.

The Bespoke tier, from £8,000

Bespoke builds are for sites that need functionality beyond a standard business website: booking systems, dashboards, member areas, third-party integrations with Stripe, Xero or a CRM, or anything that has to be built rather than configured. Because every bespoke project is different, the starting figure reflects the additional design and development involved, and the exact price is scoped from what you actually need.

If you are not sure whether your idea is a Business or a Bespoke project, that is exactly what the discovery call is for. We would rather tell you a brochure site covers your needs than sell you functionality you will never use.

Redesign or new build?

If you already have a website, you are pricing a slightly different job. A redesign has to carry across your existing content and, more importantly, the search rankings those pages have already earned. That means recording every URL that ranks before anything changes, redirecting each old URL to its new equivalent one to one, and keeping the page titles and content structure that Google already likes. Skip that step and you can launch a beautiful new site and watch your enquiries fall off a cliff for six months.

Our website redesign service starts at £3,000 for a five-page rebuild, with content migration and redirects included, and a typical small business redesign takes four to eight weeks. Larger jobs sit in wider bands: most multi-page rebuilds with a CMS land between £5,000 and £15,000, e-commerce replatforms and membership sites between £15,000 and £50,000. If you want to work out whether you need a full redesign or just a tidy-up first, our website redesign checklist walks through the signs.

Red flags in a cheap quote

A low price is not automatically a bad deal. A low price with none of the following answered usually is. Before you sign anything, check for these.

No written scope. If the quote does not say how many pages, how many revision rounds and what happens when you ask for a change, the price is not really a price. It is an opening position.

Hosting you cannot leave. Some cheap builds are effectively rentals: a low build fee, then a monthly charge that never ends, on hosting you do not control. Ask directly whether you own the domain, the code and the content, and what happens to the site if you stop paying.

Copywriting and images "to be supplied". Often true and often reasonable, but if nobody has told you, you will discover it three weeks in when the project stalls waiting on you. Ask what content you are expected to provide and by when.

No mention of mobile or accessibility. Most visits to a Glasgow small business site come from a phone. If the quote does not mention responsive design or accessibility standards, assume neither has been thought about.

No plan for your existing rankings. If you have a site already and the quote says nothing about redirects, that is the single most expensive omission on this list.

Day rates with no cap. A day rate is fine for ongoing work. For a defined build it means the final invoice is unknown until it arrives.

What about ongoing costs?

A website is not a one-off purchase that then sits still, so it is worth understanding the running costs up front. Ad-hoc changes are billed at £45 per hour with a 30-minute minimum, so small tweaks stay small. If you would rather budget for it, our Care Plan is £190 per month and includes four hours of changes, hosting, backups, security patches and uptime monitoring, with unused hours rolling over for two months.

Basic on-page SEO is included with every build. Deeper ongoing SEO, meaning link-building, content writing and technical audits, is a separate monthly retainer that starts at £450 per month. You are never obliged to take a retainer, and plenty of clients handle their own content once the site is live.

Why fixed-price matters

The most common complaint people have about web projects is the price moving. A quote comes in low, then the invoice arrives much higher because of hours no one warned you about. Fixing the price after a proper discovery call protects you from that. We agree the scope, we agree the number, and that is the number you pay. If you want to add something later, we price it as a clear extra rather than folding it into a growing, vague total.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a website cost in the UK?

Broadly, a DIY site on a template platform costs a monthly subscription and your time. A freelancer will typically build a small business site for around £800 to £3,000. A small studio sits roughly between £1,500 and £10,000 depending on scope. Agencies generally start around £15,000. Glasgow prices sit slightly below London for equivalent work, but the bands are the same shape wherever you are.

Is the price really fixed?

Yes. After the discovery call we give you one fixed price for the agreed scope. If you later want to add pages or features, we quote those separately so you always know what you are paying for.

How long does a website take to build?

A brochure site is typically ready in three weeks and a business site in six, with bespoke builds scoped during discovery. The biggest delay on most projects is waiting for content, so we send a content checklist on day one. We build on a live staging URL from the start so you can watch it come together and flag changes early.

Do I need the most expensive tier?

Almost certainly not. Most small businesses are well served by the Brochure or Business tier. The Bespoke tier exists for genuinely custom functionality. We will always point you to the tier that fits rather than the dearest one.

What is included in the price?

Design, build and the on-page SEO basics are included with every tier, along with responsive design, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, SSL, analytics setup and thirty days of post-launch support. Hosting is included for the first year on the Brochure tier, and ongoing changes are covered by the Care Plan or billed ad-hoc. We set all of this out clearly in the quote so there are no assumptions.

Get a fixed price for your project

The best way to know what your website will cost is a short conversation about what it needs to do. Tell us your goals, roughly how many pages you have in mind and whether you want to edit content yourself, and we will point you to the right web design tier and come back with a fixed price. If you already have a site, look at our website redesign service instead. And if you are also pricing up a new brand to launch with, our guide to logo design costs in Glasgow is a good place to start. There is no obligation and no sales deck. Get in touch and we will reply within one working day.