Small business websites that bring in enquiries.

What a small business website is for

It is for enquiries, not applause. Nobody in your market is going to admire your website. They are going to spend a few seconds working out whether you do the thing they need, whether you look like you can be trusted with it, and how to reach you. Then they either act or they go back to the search results and try the next firm.

This is where most small business sites go wrong. They are judged by the owner, who has looked at the homepage two hundred times and is bored of it, rather than by a stranger who has never seen it and has four other tabs open. Owners ask for a redesign because the site feels stale. Customers leave because the phone number is in an image, or the page took six seconds to load on a train.

A good site does three things: it makes the offer obvious, it makes the firm look real, and it makes contact effortless. If you want the diagnostic version of that, we wrote one: a beautiful website with zero enquiries, and the four things to fix first.

The eight things that actually decide whether it works

In order. If you only fix three, fix the first three.

1. It says what you do, who for, and where, in the first line. Not a slogan. A sentence. "Emergency boiler repairs across south London, same day" works. "Bespoke solutions for ambitious brands" tells a visitor nothing and could describe four thousand companies.
2. It loads fast on a phone. Most of your traffic is somebody on a phone on a patchy connection. Every extra second of load time loses people who will not wait. Oversized photographs and heavy page-builder platforms are the usual culprits, in that order.
3. There is one obvious next step on every page. One. Call, or fill in this form, or book a slot. A page offering five equal actions is offering none, because the visitor has to decide, and deciding is work.
4. The contact route works, and somebody answers it. Test the form once a month by sending yourself an enquiry. Contact forms break silently and often. There is no error message when they do: the enquiries simply stop, and you assume the market has gone quiet.
5. There is proof a stranger can check. Photographs of your own work, your own staff, your own vans, your own premises. First names on reviews. A review that names the job and the town beats ten five-star ratings with no detail. Stock photography of a handshake in a boardroom is a tell, and buyers read it as one.
6. There is a page for each thing you sell. One page listing eight services will not rank for any of them. Eight pages, each answering the questions a buyer of that one service asks, will. This is the single biggest difference between sites that appear in search and sites that do not.
7. The name, address and phone number match your Google Business Profile exactly. Local search cross-references the two. A different phone number on the site than on the profile, or an old address left in the footer, is a common and quietly expensive mistake.
8. Somebody updates it. Prices change, staff leave, services stop, a location moves. A site eighteen months out of date reads as a business that might have closed. This is the point most small business sites fail, and it is why we sell the running of the site rather than the building of it.

What you can skip, and what never pays for itself

None of the following has ever been the reason a small business won a job. Each one costs money in the build and then costs money again every time the site changes.

• Scroll animations, parallax, and cursor effects. They slow the page down and delight only the person who commissioned them.
• A video background. A large file, poor on mobile, and usually stock footage of somebody else's business.
• A blog nobody is going to write. Three posts from 2024 and then silence is worse than no blog at all.
• Live chat with nobody staffing it. An unanswered chat window is a worse experience than a plain phone number.
• A custom booking system before the volume justifies it. A form and a phone number handle ten enquiries a week perfectly well.
• A client login area, unless a client has asked for one by name.
• A second language before you have customers who need it.
• A brand workshop and a forty-page strategy deck. At this size the strategy is: say what you do, prove you can do it, make it easy to get in touch.
• Custom illustration. Pleasant. Never the reason somebody enquired.

The three expensive ones are the booking system, the login area and the custom illustration. They add cost to the build, then add friction to every future edit, because now every change has to be made in two places. Leave them out until somebody asks.

What a small business website costs in the UK in 2026

There is no single price, because you are not buying one thing. You are buying a build, and then you are buying somebody to keep it alive. Most quotes price the first and stay quiet about the second, which is why two quotes for "the same" site can differ by a factor of five.

The honest middle band for a UK business turning over between £500,000 and £10 million is £1,500 to £5,000 for the build, plus £5 to £30 a month if you look after it yourself and £50 to £300 a month if somebody else does. Below that band you are buying a template with your logo on it. Above it you are paying for agency overhead that may or may not be earned.

The cheapest line in that table is not automatically the best buy. The do-it-yourself row costs about £1,200 in cash and roughly forty hours of your own evenings, and the site looks in year five the way you left it in year one. The full breakdown, including the line items most quotes leave out, is here: what a small business website actually costs in the UK in 2026. Our own numbers are on the pricing page.

Build it yourself or hire someone, honestly

Squarespace or Wix is genuinely the right answer when you are a sole trader or a very small team, enquiries through the site are useful rather than essential, you have more time than money, and the site is essentially a business card. About £20 a month, live in a weekend, nobody else involved. If that is your situation, we will say so on the call rather than sell you something you do not need. There is no version of this page where paying us £49 a month beats spending a Saturday on a template you are happy with.

Hire someone when enquiries through the site are how you get paid, when you need to appear in local search (a different job from making a page look nice), when the site runs past about eight pages, or when you have started it twice already and it has been nearly finished for six months. The real cost of the do-it-yourself route is rarely the £20 a month. It is the half year the site sat unfinished while you ran the business.

The third route is a one-off build, then you maintain it. That works when somebody in the business will genuinely do it. It fails the same way every time: the person who built the site moves on, nobody has the login, and eighteen months later it is slow, wrong and quietly losing you work. If that has already happened, start here: your web designer has gone quiet, a recovery checklist.

How long a small business website takes

Ours goes live in about a week. A thirty-minute brief, a draft inside two working days, one or two rounds of revisions, then we ship it and point the domain. That timeline holds because we write the copy rather than waiting for you to.

A typical agency project takes four to twelve weeks. Very little of that is build time. It is waiting for the photographs, waiting for the copy the client agreed to write, waiting for the third person to approve the homepage. Doing it yourself takes a weekend if you are decisive about content, and several months if you are not.

Whichever route you take, the content is the bottleneck. Which brings us to the list worth doing before anyone starts.

What to have ready before you start

An afternoon on this saves a fortnight later, and it is the same list whether you are hiring us, hiring somebody else, or doing it yourself.

• One sentence describing what you do and who for. If you cannot write it, no designer can write it for you.
• The services you actually want enquiries for, in priority order. Not everything you are capable of.
• Prices, price ranges, or an honest reason you cannot publish them.
• Ten to twenty photographs of your own work, staff and premises. Phone photographs are fine. Stock is not.
• Three recent reviews, and permission to quote them with a first name and a town.
• Your domain registrar login. This is the single most common cause of a delayed launch.
• Access to your Google Business Profile, or the admin email that owns it.
• The phone number and email address that actually get answered, not the ones from three years ago.
• Any registration, accreditation or insurance numbers you are entitled to display.
• Two or three websites you like, with one line each on what you like about them.

How we do small business websites

We build the site and then we run it, on one flat monthly fee. Essentials is £49 a month, Growth is £79 a month, Pro is £200 a month. £0 setup on every tier. 10% off if you pay for the year up front. Inside thirty days, tell us to cancel and we refund the months you have paid, and you keep the domain.

That fee covers the hosting, the domain, the SSL certificate, the content edits, the Google Business Profile maintenance and the on-page SEO. There is no separate maintenance contract and no per-edit charge, because point eight on the list above is the one that decides whether the site still works in two years, and charging per edit is how sites stop being updated.

The sites are static and sit on Cloudflare's edge network. No database, no plugins, so there is nothing to patch and very little that can break. Every page goes through a Lighthouse, accessibility and broken-link check before launch and once a quarter after it, and you get the output rather than a claim about it. You own the source code and the domain from day one.

We are based in East Dulwich, London, and work with owner-run businesses across the UK, and the areas we cover in person are on our London and Surrey pages. The line-item version of what is included is on the services page, the tier detail is on the pricing page, and the Sameday Jetwash case study shows a recent build at this price, on a pressure-washing business we run ourselves, and what changed after it went live. The Dirty South Power Wash case study is the client version of the same thing: a Horley firm whose nine-page builder site became 90 pages, written up from the site's first month with the first Search Console figures in it, 10,854 impressions and 13 clicks.