What it costs
Starting points. Every job is quoted as a fixed price before it begins, and it does not move unless the scope does.
The whole answer, for most people
A small business site, built and looked after: £750 once, then £25 a month.
That is the build, the hosting, the security certificate and your changes made for you. The domain is set up as part of the build and billed at whatever the registrar charges, the one thing here you pay somebody other than me. Bigger sites and busier ones cost more, and the rest of this page is the detail.
Not sure a rebuild is what you need? An audit is £300 and will tell you.
Start here: find out what is wrong
An audit is the cheapest way to find out whether a rebuild is worth it. I check the site by keyboard, measure every colour pairing, blow the text up four times over for anyone who needs it that way, squeeze it onto a phone, and try every form including the ways people get them wrong. Automated tools run first, but they catch roughly a third of known issues and cannot tell you whether a thing makes sense to use. The rest is a person driving your site and writing down what happened. You get the findings ranked by impact, each with a plain-English fix.
-
Accessibility audit
from £300can people use it
Measured against WCAG 2.2 AA. Every control reached and operated by keyboard with the focus always visible, every colour pairing calculated rather than eyeballed, the text blown up to four times its size, and the page squeezed onto a screen 320 pixels wide. Labels, alt text and heading order, the information assistive software reads out, are checked in the markup. The last two are WCAG’s reflow and resize criteria, and they are what automated tools miss most often.
-
QA audit
from £300does it work
Every link, every form, including the ways people fill them in wrongly, on a phone and on a desktop. Plus what your page weighs and what it does to somebody on a bad signal.
-
Combined
from £500both, one report
The two overlap in the middle, so booked together they are £500 rather than £600. One document, findings ranked by impact across both.
An audit tells you what is wrong and how to fix it. Fixing it is quoted separately, and an audit on a site I have never seen often ends in a recommendation not to rebuild, which is a real answer and worth £300 on its own.
The yearly re-test on a Looked after plan is this same process on a site I built and already know, which is why it sits inside a £50 plan rather than costing £500. Most of a cold audit is learning somebody else’s website.
Audits are half up front, half on completion.
Putting it right
Most of what an audit finds cannot be fixed where it is. A Wix, Squarespace or template site has its faults baked into the platform. You cannot repair what you are not allowed to change, so the honest answer is usually to rebuild rather than to patch. I do not sell repairs to sites I did not build, because I would be promising work the platform will not let me do.
And sometimes the answer is that your site is fine and you should leave it alone. You get told which.
-
A small site
from £7503–5 pages
Who you are, what you do, what it costs, how to reach you. A single-location shop is this size.
-
A standard site
from £1,2006–12 pages
Room for a full service list with prices, a team page, reviews and a proper contact route. A stage school with four venues and a timetable is this size.
-
Structured content
from £2,000
Where content has to stay in sync across pages: a timetable, a price list from one source, a blog with a publishing workflow.
What moves it: page count, whether the words and photographs exist, how many forms, and whether a site already exists whose addresses need redirecting to the new one. I will tell you which apply before quoting. The figure you agree is the figure you pay: half to start, half on handover, nothing added at the end.
Looking after it
-
Essentials
£25a month, or £250 a year
Changes included, turned around within five working days and shown to you on a private copy before they go live. Hosting, SSL, and the domain renewed on time.
-
Looked after
£50a month, or £500 a year
Everything above, with your changes first in the queue and turned around within three working days. Uptime monitoring, backups, and your site checked automatically every night with a monthly report. Once a year a person re-tests it rather than a machine, using it without a mouse, blowing the text up four times over, squeezing it onto a phone, then written up the way a paid audit would be.
Changes are included. There is no meter running.
New prices, new opening hours, someone who has joined or left, a paragraph that reads wrong. Send it and it gets done. You never have to work out whether a change is worth the invoice, which is how sites end up a year out of date.
New pages and new sections are quoted work rather than changes, and you will have the price before anything starts.
A site nobody looks after does not fail loudly. It fails on the Tuesday the domain quietly expires, or the week a form stops sending and the enquiries stop with it.
Neither ties you in. Pay monthly and stop whenever you like; pay for the year and if you want to stop, I refund what is left of it. The domain and the files are already yours either way, which is the point. Taking no plan at all is a fair choice too: the files are plain HTML, so you can host them wherever you like and have anybody you like make the changes.