How much should a website cost ?

It’s an important and fair question when you can find anything from £50 templates to agencies quoting tens of thousands. Add AI tools and no-code platforms into the mix, and the picture gets even more confusing. If a prompt can generate a page in seconds, why would anyone pay an agency to build one ?

Yesterday, someone emailed me asking “how much for a website,” after a short summary of what he needed. It’s an important and fair question when you can find anything from £50 templates to agencies quoting tens of thousands. Add AI tools and no-code platforms into the mix, and the picture gets even more confusing. If a prompt can generate a page in seconds, why would anyone pay an agency to build one? So what is the difference between a template website you’ve bought for £50 and a custom built website?

And is a website that an agency creates better than a website built on an AI builder like Lovable?

Let’s dig in.

Building a website isn’t hard. Creating an effective website is.

A website can absolutely be thrown together in a day, and there are times when that’s all a business needs. I’ve got friends who have come to me asking for a website to prototype a business idea and for them, I send them to Lovable. I had a family member reach out asking for a portfolio website but had a budget of £100 and to them, I recommend a template.

There are cheap and easy ways to get up and running and frankly, going to an agency probably isn’t going to be the best use of time and budget.

But let’s say you have a 20 person team and a lot of your business is determined by your online presence. Perhaps your average staff salary is £35,000. That means your annual payroll alone is at least £700,000, before you consider rent, operations, training, insurance or anything else. For a team like that, the website is no longer a “nice-to-have” presence on the internet. It’s not just a brochure website. It is part of the engine that funds those salaries.

Perhaps it will even play a role in:

• attracting talent
• engaging partners
• supporting funders
• building credibility

At that scale, even a modest improvement can have a measurable impact. Does it make sense to edit a £50 template for a 20 person organisation where the website is critical to ensure those salaries are paid?

Let’s run a simple thought experiment. Say your website currently generates 100 inbound enquiries a year — whether that’s prospective clients, parents, partners or funders. You invest in a site that clarifies your message, improves user journeys and eliminates friction. Your goal is modest: a 10% increase in traffic and inbound leads. Suddenly, you’re looking at 110 enquiries instead of 100. Now let’s apply an average conversion value. This is whatever “winning” looks like for your organisation. Maybe:

• your average client service engagement is £20,000,
• each new donor relationship is worth £5,000
• or a new school partner represents £100,000 over time

Even at the lowest end, an additional one or two converted enquiries can cover the entire cost of a strategically planned website for the year. And every additional conversion beyond that becomes net benefit. If your average contract is £20,000, a 10% increase in inbound leads that produces even one additional client returns 4–10x the investment. Suddenly, a £15,000 website is not an expense — it’s a massively helpful investment. The irony is that organisations often spend hundreds of thousands paying staff, tens of thousands on events or recruitment and practically nothing on the thing that introduces them to the world when someone types their name in to a search engine (eg. Google) or answer engine (eg. ChatGPT).

A good website:

• saves time
• removes confusion
• pre-answers questions
• filters out poor-fit enquiries
• attracts the right opportunities
• strengthens reputation
• and functions 24 hours a day, without taking a holiday or sick day.

Seen through that lens, the question becomes:

What would an extra 10% mean to your organisation? And what is the cost of not achieving it?