It's one of the most searched questions in small business land, and the honest answer is: it depends, but probably not in the way you think. The range is genuinely enormous - from nothing to tens of thousands of pounds - and somewhere in that range is a figure that makes sense for a local business in Sutton Coldfield or Dudley or Coventry. Let me break it down plainly.
Option 1: DIY website builders (Wix, Squarespace, etc.)
Upfront cost: £0 to start. Ongoing: £12–£35 per month.
Builders like Wix and Squarespace are genuinely impressive bits of software. You can get something decent-looking up and running in a weekend if you're patient and reasonably tech-confident. For some businesses - a freelancer with a small portfolio, a one-person consultancy - they work well enough.
The drawbacks are real, though. The designs can look templated and generic unless you put serious time into customising them. The SEO (how well you rank on Google) is often weaker than a properly built site. You're tied to that platform - if they change their pricing or go under, your site goes with them. And that monthly fee adds up: £25 a month is £300 a year, year after year, for something you don't own.
If your time is worth anything, factor that in too. Many small business owners in places like Lichfield or Walsall start a Wix site, spend two frustrated evenings on it, and abandon it half-finished.
Option 2: A freelance web designer
Typical range: £400–£2,500 for a small business site.
A decent freelancer will build you something properly - not a template you've been handed the keys to, but a site designed for your business. The quality varies a lot, as you'd expect. Someone charging £400 is probably fairly new or working very fast. Someone charging £1,500 to £2,500 should be delivering solid work with proper attention to mobile, speed, and local SEO.
The main risk with freelancers is availability and longevity. What happens when you need something changed in two years and they've moved on or gone travelling? Make sure you own the domain and the site files outright - not all freelancers make this clear upfront.
Option 3: A local web design agency
Typical range: £1,500–£6,000+ for a small business site.
Agencies in the West Midlands - Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry - vary wildly. Some do excellent work at a fair price. Others have high overheads and will charge you accordingly for a site that's really not much different from what a good freelancer would produce for half the price.
The pitch you'll often hear is that you get a "team" and an "account manager" and "ongoing support". Sometimes that's genuinely valuable. Often it's just admin that you end up paying for. Ask to see examples of sites they've built for businesses similar to yours, and ask specifically who will actually be doing the work.
Option 4: A national or London-based agency
Typical range: £5,000–£25,000+
Unless you're a fast-growing company with complex needs, this is almost certainly not where you should be spending your money as a small West Midlands business. The work gets outsourced down the chain, the account management overhead is enormous, and you're paying for a postcode and a fancy office more than anything else.
What actually drives the cost up
A few things genuinely justify higher prices:
- E-commerce - selling online adds significant complexity. A proper WooCommerce or Shopify setup, payment integration, and product management takes real time.
- Custom design - a site designed from scratch for your brand, not a modified template, takes more hours.
- Lots of content - a fifty-page site is more work than a five-page site. Obviously.
- Ongoing SEO work - getting you ranked for competitive search terms over time is a separate service from building a site.
For most local service businesses - a plumber, a café, a beauty salon, a small accountancy firm - none of these apply. You need a clean, fast, well-written five to eight page site. That shouldn't cost the earth.
The hidden ongoing costs nobody warns you about
Whatever route you take, there are ongoing costs to budget for:
- Domain name: around £10–£15 per year for a .co.uk
- Hosting: £5–£30 per month depending on quality
- SSL certificate: usually included in good hosting, but worth checking
- Maintenance and updates: if you're on WordPress, plugins need updating regularly or the site becomes a security risk
- Content updates: some agencies charge for every small change. Make sure you know what you can edit yourself.
Over five years, those ongoing costs can easily match or exceed what you paid to build the site. It's worth knowing that going in.
Where WestMidsWeb sits - and why the model is different
I built WestMidsWeb around one idea: local businesses in the West Midlands shouldn't have to gamble on a website they haven't seen yet.
So I build your site first. You see the finished thing before you pay a penny. If you love it, great - the price is £175 for a Sprint site, £275 for Standard, or £495 for Pro. If you don't love it, you owe me nothing and walk away.
That's not a gimmick. It's just how I think it should work. You wouldn't pay a decorator upfront and hope for the best. Why should a website be any different?
I'm not the right fit for everyone - if you need a large e-commerce build or something very bespoke, you probably need a bigger operation. But for a straightforward small business site in Cannock, Stourbridge, Coventry, or anywhere across the West Midlands, this is a fair deal with zero risk attached.
See it before you spend a penny
I build your site first. You only pay if you love it. From £175.
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