The honest answer is that a five page website for a UK small business costs somewhere between eight hundred and three thousand pounds, and the spread has less to do with quality than you would hope.
Here is what actually moves the number.
What you are really paying for
Design and development are usually the smaller half of a build. The larger half is the work nobody quotes for explicitly.
Someone has to decide what pages exist. Someone has to write the words on them. Someone has to chase you for the photographs, the staff biographies and the price list. On most projects that stalls for weeks, and agencies that have been burned by it price the delay into the quote.
When you compare two quotes, check which one includes the copywriting. That single line explains a large share of the difference.
The bands
Under £500. Almost always a template with your logo dropped in, or a very junior freelancer. This can be the right answer if you need a presence and nothing more. It is the wrong answer if the site has to bring in enquiries.
£800 to £1,500. A small brochure site, built properly, with your own content. Realistic for a sole trader or a single site practice. Expect to write your own copy at the lower end.
£2,000 to £4,000. Ten to twenty pages, a content management system you can edit, structured data, proper redirect work if you are replacing an existing site. This is where most established small businesses land.
£5,000 upwards. Ecommerce, booking systems, anything that integrates with software you already run, or sectors where the site carries regulatory obligations.
Costs that arrive after launch
The build price is not the whole cost, and quotes that ignore the rest are not doing you a favour.
Hosting runs from around £60 to £200 a year for a small business site. Domain renewal is £10 to £30 depending on the extension. If you want someone to apply updates, monitor uptime and make small changes, a care plan is typically £25 to £100 a month.
Add those up before comparing a cheap build against an expensive one. A £600 site with £80 a month of mandatory support costs more over two years than a £2,500 site with £29 a month.
Quotes that should worry you
No fixed price. Time and materials on a five page brochure site means the risk sits entirely with you.
A long tie-in. Some studios quote a low build price attached to a three year contract you cannot exit. Read the exit terms before the design.
The domain in their name. This happens more than it should. Your domain should be registered to you, and you should have the login. Everything else can be sorted out later. That cannot.
No mention of what happens to your existing URLs. If you have a site with any search presence, replacing it without mapping redirects will cost you traffic that takes months to recover.
What we charge
Our own prices are on the pricing page, which is a low bar that a surprising number of agencies still do not clear.