A business website in Scotland in 2026 costs somewhere between nothing and about £15,000, which is a useless answer, so here is the useful version. Most small businesses end up in one of three brackets: under £500 if you build it yourself, £800 to £2,500 for a freelancer working from a template, and £2,000 to £8,000 for a site designed and built for your business specifically.
This guide explains what actually moves the price, so you can work out which bracket you belong in before anybody quotes you.
Under £500: you build it
Squarespace, Wix and the rest will get you online for the price of a subscription. If you are testing an idea, or you genuinely need one page with your phone number on it, this is the right answer and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The catch is your time. A tidy five page site is a fortnight of evenings for someone who has not done it before, and the result usually looks like the template it came from. That matters more than people expect. If a customer is choosing between you and two competitors, and all three sites look the same, the only thing left to compare on is price.
£800 to £2,500: a freelancer and a template
This is the most common bracket and the most variable. You are paying for somebody to pick a theme, fit your content into it and get it live. Done well it is good value and plenty of businesses need nothing more.
Three things to check before you commit. Ask who owns the site when the job is finished, because some builders keep hold of the hosting and you cannot leave. Ask what happens when you need a change in six months, and get the answer in writing. And ask to see two sites they built more than a year ago, because a site that still works and still ranks is a different thing from a site that looked good on launch day.
£2,000 to £8,000: designed for your business
At this level nobody starts from a template. Somebody works out who your customers are and what they need to see before they get in touch, then designs around that. You get a site that looks like your business rather than a category, and the structure is built for the searches your customers actually make.
Our own websites start at £2,000 plus a monthly fee from £175. A typical small business site lands between £2,500 and £4,000. If you are selling online it starts at £3,500, because a shop has payments, stock and postage rules behind it and all three need testing properly.
What actually drives the price
Pages, but not the way you think. Ten pages of the same shape cost barely more than five. Ten pages that each work differently is a different job. What costs money is the number of distinct layouts, not the page count.
Whether the design is yours. A template is a fixed cost. A design made for your business is a person’s time, and it is usually the single biggest line in a quote.
What it connects to. A contact form is straightforward. A booking system that checks live availability, takes a deposit and writes the job into the system you already use is a different scale of work.
Who writes the words. This is the one that catches people out. Most quotes assume you supply the copy. If you have never written it, that is genuinely hard and it is usually why projects stall for months.
Why the cheapest option often costs more
The pattern we see over and over. A business spends £900 on a site in year one. By year two the builder has moved on, nobody can log in, the plugins are out of date and the contact form has been quietly failing for months. In year three they pay somebody £3,000 to start again, and the real cost of that first site was £3,900 plus two years of enquiries that never arrived.
The way to avoid it is not to spend more. It is to ask better questions up front, about ownership, about what happens when it breaks, and about who is still there in a year.
The bit nobody quotes for
A website is not a thing you buy once. Software needs updating, security needs watching, and your business changes. Most of the sites we take over were fine on launch day and had simply been left alone for three years.
We charge a monthly fee from £175 which covers hosting, updates, security, support and unlimited changes. The unlimited part is deliberate. If changes are billed by the hour, people put up with the annoyance instead of asking, and the site slowly stops matching the business.
How to budget for yours
Write down the three things a visitor must be able to do. Count how many genuinely different page layouts that needs. Be honest about whether you will write the words. If the answer is a handful of layouts, no integrations and you will supply the copy, you are at the lower end. If you need a booking system, a shop or anything that talks to software you already run, budget from £3,500 and expect it to be worth it.
We quote a set price rather than an hourly rate, so the number is agreed before anything starts and it does not move. You can see how we approach web design, read about web design in Glasgow, or look through our FAQ for the questions people ask next.
