How much does a small business website cost in Scotland?

Ask five people what a small business website costs and you will get five answers between nothing and twenty thousand pounds. Both ends are real. The gap between them is not a mystery about web design. It is four genuinely different things being sold under one word.

Here is what each of them actually costs in Scotland in 2026, what you get, and how to tell which one you are being offered.

The four ways a small business gets a website

Do it yourself on a page builder. Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy. Somewhere between £15 and £30 a month, forever, plus your own weekend. The templates are genuinely good now and the result will not embarrass you. What you are buying is a rental: stop paying and the site goes away, and the platform decides what is possible.

A freelancer or a small local developer. Typically £250 to £2000 for a small business site. You get somebody who talks to you, writes for your business rather than filling in a template, and is still there in a year. This is the band most Scottish small businesses should be looking at, and it is the one this article is written from.

An agency. £3000 upwards for a brochure site (a few pages saying who you are and what you do), and considerably more once anything is custom. You are paying for a team: a designer, a developer, a project manager and an account manager. For a business turning over a few hundred thousand a year that is proportionate. For a two-person joinery firm in Haddington it is not.

A friend who knows computers. Free, and then very expensive. Not because your friend is bad at it, but because a website is not a thing you finish: it needs hosting renewed, security updates installed and prices changed, and "I'll get to it at the weekend" is not a maintenance plan. Half the rescue jobs any local developer sees started here.

What actually drives the price

Three things, in order of how much they matter.

Page count. A website is priced by how much of it there is, because that is what takes the time. Five to eight pages covers most small businesses: home, what you do, a page or two on the specific services, about, contact. Ten or twenty pages costs proportionately more.

Whether the words exist. This is the one nobody warns you about. If you hand over your prices, your opening hours, your accreditations and a paragraph about each service, the build is quick. If somebody has to work all that out with you and write it, that is genuinely half the job. It is also the half that decides whether the site works.

Whether anything has to actually do something. A page that tells people your opening hours is cheap. A page that lets them book a slot in your diary, take a deposit, or get an automatic MOT reminder six weeks before it is due is software, and software costs more than a page. It is also usually where the money comes back.

What you should expect to be included

At the price of a proper small business site, all of this should be in the number rather than added later:

• The domain name (your web address) registered in your business name
• Hosting (keeping the site online) and an SSL certificate (the padlock in the address bar) for the first year
• A business email address on your own domain
• A design that works properly on a phone, which is where most of your visitors are
• Copy written for your business
• Google Search Console, Google's free reports on how your site does in search, connected so you can see what happens
• Being listed correctly on Google in the first place

If a quote does not mention the domain, ask whose name it will be in. If the answer is the developer's, walk away. That is the single most common way a small business ends up hostage to whoever built its website.

The ongoing cost nobody mentions first

A website has a running cost, and any quote that does not state it is incomplete. Expect £15 to £30 a month for hosting, the domain renewal and keeping the software up to date with security updates. That is not a subscription for the website itself, which you own. It is the cost of keeping it online and safe.

Beware two extremes. A quote with no running cost at all usually means hosting has been put on somebody's personal account and will be somebody's problem in fourteen months. A running cost of £150 a month for a five-page brochure site is an ongoing service fee wearing a hosting costume.

So what is a realistic number?

For a typical Scottish small business, such as a trade, a salon, a garage, a cafe or a professional service, wanting five to eight pages that load fast and turn up in local search:

WebLothian does not publish a price list. It is affordable on purpose, because the point of the business is to help local firms keep up with the digital and AI age rather than be priced out of it, and every job is quoted in writing after a free consultation, before any work starts. The domain, hosting, an SSL certificate and a business email address are included for the first year, and after that it is one modest monthly fee with no contract. If one of the other routes above suits your business better, that is worth hearing too, and you will be told so.

The question worth asking instead

"How much does a website cost" is the wrong first question. The better one is: what would one more customer a week be worth to this business?

For a joiner quoting £2000 jobs, one extra enquiry a month pays for any of the options above several times over in the first year. For a cafe, the website is not really about enquiries at all. It is about turning up correctly on Google Maps with the right opening hours, which costs very little and matters enormously.

Work out what the website is actually for, and the price question tends to answer itself. If you want a straight opinion on which of the four routes suits your business, the consultation is free (opens in a new tab) and you will get an honest answer even when it is "you do not need this yet". What the fourth route looks like here is website creation or redesign, and how the cost works explains why it is kept affordable. If what you have already might be worth keeping, redesign, rebuild or leave it alone is the question to settle before the price one.