Most Edinburgh small businesses pay between £700 and £2,600 to have a website designed and built, then around £400 to £1,200 a year to keep it online and looked after. A simple three to five page site sits at the bottom of that range, while online booking or a shop takes you into £1,500 to £5,000.
Those are the headline figures. What they don’t tell you is which band your own business belongs in, why two quotes for what sounds like the same job can differ by £2,000, or what that annual figure is actually paying for. That’s what the rest of this page is for.
| What you’re getting | Typical Edinburgh price | What it usually covers |
|---|---|---|
| Brochure site, 3 to 5 pages | £700 to £1,300 | Home, about, services, contact. Mobile responsive, basic SEO |
| Small business site, 5 to 10 pages | £900 to £2,600 | Custom design, on page SEO, contact forms, maps, some content help |
| Booking, shop or integrations | £1,500 to £5,000 | Online booking, payments, 10 to 30 pages, blog, advanced SEO |
| Bespoke or large ecommerce | £5,000 and up | Custom functionality, systems that need to talk to each other |
Freelance rates in Edinburgh sit at roughly £35 to £100 an hour, which is worth knowing when someone quotes you a day rate.
For context, Edinburgh sits in the mid to high band for UK web design pricing. A little above Leeds or Sheffield, comfortably below London. So if you’re comparing a quote against a price guide written for the London market, you’re comparing against the wrong city.
This is the bit that drives people mad, and it’s almost never about the design. Six things usually explain the gap.
Who writes the words. A quote that assumes you’ll supply finished copy is a much smaller quote than one where the designer interviews you and writes it. Writing is often the single biggest line item nobody talks about.
Who supplies the photos. Stock images are cheap. A photographer is not. Real photos of you and your premises will do more for your enquiry rate than almost any design decision, so it’s worth budgeting a few hundred pounds separately rather than pretending it’s free.
How many rounds of changes are included. Two rounds or unlimited? This one clause can swing a quote by hundreds.
Whether your old content gets migrated. Moving ten pages of text and a hundred blog posts across from an old site is real work. Some quotes include it, most don’t.
What happens after launch. A quote that ends the day the site goes live is cheaper than one that includes a handover session, a fix period and your first month of support. It’s also the reason so many people end up with a site nobody maintains.
Who ends up owning it. Ask directly: will the domain be registered in my name, and will I have my own login to the site? If the answer is vague, that cheap quote isn’t cheap.
If your quotes are hard to compare, that is usually because they are answering different questions. We have written up the nine questions to ask before you hire a web designer, each with what a good answer sounds like, so you can put the same questions to everyone and see where the difference actually is.
Every Edinburgh pricing guide I’ve read gives you a build price and then waves vaguely at hosting and maintenance without a single figure. That’s how people end up caught out in year two.
Budget roughly £400 to £1,200 a year to keep a small business site online and properly looked after. That covers your domain, hosting, the licences your site needs, and someone keeping it updated, backed up and monitored.
It’s a real cost and worth planning for from the start. It’s also, by a distance, the smallest line in most marketing budgets. The genuinely expensive version is the site nobody looks after, which breaks quietly after an update and takes a fortnight for anyone to notice.
If you want the detail behind that figure, we have broken down what a WordPress site costs to run each year and what that money is actually paying for.
This is where most pricing guides stop being useful, because the honest answer is that plenty of businesses are quoted for far more than they need.
Solicitors, accountants, consultants. One location, no online booking, work comes largely by referral. You need the brochure or small business band, £700 to £2,000. What matters is a clear services structure, a real page about your people, and a contact route that doesn’t ask for a life story. You do not need £5,000.
Therapists, clinics, tutors. If you want people to book without emailing you, that’s the £1,500 to £3,000 band, because the booking system and the flow around it is the actual work. If you’re happy taking enquiries by email for now, you’re back in the £900 to £1,800 band and can add booking later.
Plumbers, electricians, joiners, gardeners. £700 to £1,500 well spent. Mobile first, a phone number that dials on tap, your service area, and photos of finished work. Most trade websites are built as though people browse them at a desk. They don’t. They look at them standing in a wet kitchen.
Artists and makers. £1,000 to £2,500. Your images are the product, so image quality and page speed matter more than anything else. Selling a handful of pieces directly doesn’t require a full shop.
Anyone selling properly online. £2,500 upwards, and be sceptical of anything much below that, because ecommerce is where cheap builds cause expensive problems.
Cut pages, not quality. A sharp five page site beats a vague twelve page one, and it costs less. You can always add pages later. That’s the whole point of building on something like WordPress rather than a locked template.
Write your own first draft. Nobody knows your work better than you do. Getting a designer to edit and structure your words costs a lot less than getting them to write from a blank page, and it usually sounds more like you.
And one that you will regret: choosing on price alone without asking who’ll own the domain. Getting a domain back from a designer who’s stopped replying to emails is the single most miserable job I get asked to do.
The subscription looks cheaper on paper, at roughly £15 to £30 a month, so £180 to £360 a year. The catch is that you’re renting rather than owning. The design, the content structure and the SEO settings all live inside their system, and if you ever want to move onto your own platform, the site doesn’t come with you. For a practice you intend to still be running in five years, that matters more than the monthly figure.
In Edinburgh, £300 to £700 if it’s genuinely one page and you supply the words. It’s a reasonable starting point for a new business that needs to exist online this month.
You shouldn’t. A normal structure is a deposit to book the work, a payment at design sign off, and the balance before launch. Anyone asking for 100% upfront is asking you to carry all the risk.
Usually the same as building new, sometimes slightly more if there’s content to migrate. Redesigns feel like they should be cheaper because something already exists, but the old site rarely saves any work.
Because they’re quoting for a different job: strategy, research, custom functionality, a team rather than one person. That’s a real service, it’s just not the one most small practices need.
Not because of the price. It ranks worse if it’s slow, thin on content, or badly structured, which cheap builds often are but don’t have to be. What actually moves the needle is speed, clear content and a properly filled in Google Business Profile.
Tell me what you do, roughly how many pages you think you need, and whether you want people to be able to book online. I’ll come back with a realistic range for your situation, and I’ll tell you if I think you need less than you’re expecting. That’s the kind of work I do at BrandCrafter, here in Edinburgh, and I read every message myself.
Prices in this guide reflect Edinburgh market rates as at August 2026 and are reviewed annually.
WordPress Running Costs UK: What a Year Really Costs (2026) says:
[…] running cost is annual, and they are separate conversations that often get muddled in a quote. Our guide to what a website costs in Edinburgh covers the build side, and it is worth asking any designer for both numbers before you decide. It […]