You found someone to build your website for £250. Here’s what it really costs.
You’ve seen the ads. Wix: “Build your own site from £13 a month.” Squarespace: “Start your free trial.” GoDaddy: “Get online for £5.” And somewhere in the middle of all that, a business owner types “cheap website” into Google and finds a designer on Facebook Marketplace offering to build a 5-page site for £250.
I get it. I really do. Every business starts somewhere and nobody wants to spend more than they have to. But here’s what nobody tells you about cheap websites — they’re rarely as cheap as they look.
The £250 Website: Let’s Actually Do the Maths
A proper 5-page website — responsive, contact form, basic SEO, phone-friendly, cross-browser tested — takes a professional somewhere between 20 and 40 hours to deliver well. Not because we’re slow. Because that’s what it takes to do it properly.
- Discovery and planning (3 hours) — understanding your business, what you need, what you don’t
- Design (8 hours) — making it look right on phone, tablet, and desktop. Typography, spacing, hierarchy
- Build (10 hours) — setting up the CMS, templates, forms, performance — the actual engineering
- Content (4 hours) — writing and formatting your copy, sourcing images, laying it out
- Testing and launch (3 hours) — checking every link, every form, every browser, DNS, SSL
That’s 28 hours on the conservative side.
£250 ÷ 28 hours = £8.93 per hour.
The UK National Minimum Wage for over-21s in 2026 is £12.71 per hour.
£8.93 is 30% below the legal minimum wage.
You wouldn’t ask a plumber to fit a bathroom for £250. You wouldn’t ask a electrician to rewire your house for £250. But a website — your shop window, your 24/7 salesperson, your first impression with every customer who Googles your name — that’s supposed to cost less than the hourly rate of a Tesco shelf-stacker?
That’s not a bargain. That’s a bad deal.
The “Cheap” Platforms That Aren’t
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The reason people think websites should cost £250 is Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and the rest of the DIY builder industry. They’ve spent billions on advertising telling you that a website costs £13 a month and you can build it yourself in an afternoon.
They’re right about one thing: you can build it yourself. But here’s what they don’t tell you.
Wix — their “Combo” plan at £13/month doesn’t include a custom domain. To remove Wix branding from your site footer, you need the “Business Basic” plan at £22/month. To get a professional email address (not @gmail.com), you need another £5/month on top. That “£13” site is now pushing £30 a month — £360 a year — and you still don’t own it.
Squarespace — the “Personal” plan at £16/month won’t let you add a custom domain without upgrading to the “Business” plan at £23/month. That 10% off if you pay annually? Still £252 a year for a template site that looks like hundreds of others.
GoDaddy, Weebly, IONOS — all the same story. “From £3” is the hook. By the time you add a domain, professional email, SSL, SEO tools, and the features you actually need, you’re paying £25-£50 a month. For a site you don’t own.
And here’s the bit that really stings: £13 a month for 5 years is £780. You’ve paid for a website. But when you want to leave? You can’t take anything with you. No content export. No SEO equity. No design files. You’re renting.
The Real Cost of “Cheap” — Premium Plugins vs Nulled
This is where the £250 website really falls apart. A properly built WordPress site needs a handful of premium plugins to be secure, fast, and functional. Here’s what they actually cost:
- Security — Wordfence or Sucuri: £70-£100/year
- Backups — UpdraftPlus Premium or BackupBuddy: £50-£80/year
- SEO — Yoast Premium or RankMath Pro: £80-£100/year
- Forms — Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms: £60-£100/year
- Caching & Performance — WP Rocket or Flying Press: £50-£100/year
- Security/Monitoring — CleanTalk or Patchstack: £50-£80/year
Total: £360-£560/year — just in plugins. And that’s before you’ve paid for the domain, hosting, or the designer’s time.
A £250 website cannot afford those plugins. So instead, the “cheap” designer uses nulled plugins — pirated copies of premium plugins that haven’t been updated, have no licence key, and are cracked by someone who doesn’t care if your site gets hacked.
A nulled plugin is a ticking timebomb. The original developer injects code into every cracked copy: backdoors, redirects to spam sites, cryptominers that run in your visitors’ browsers, and malware that gets your site blacklisted by Google. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times — a client pays £200 for a “bargain” website, and 6 months later they’re paying me £500 to clean up the mess.
Here’s the thing about plugins: a carefully curated selection of the right ones is the difference between a site that works like a dream and one that’s cobbled together with random plugins that don’t work together. When you install 15 free plugins from different developers, you get conflicts, slow load times, broken forms, and a site that crashes every time you update one of them.
What “Cheap” Actually Looks Like in Practice
When someone buys a £250 site, here’s what they’re usually getting — whether they know it or not:
- A pre-made template with the logo swapped. No custom design — just a theme that was installed, activated, and had colours changed
- Content you write yourself on a Sunday night because “content writing” wasn’t in the scope
- No guarantee it works on all phones — “responsive design” means it at least doesn’t break, not that it’s optimised for every screen
- No backups — because backup plugins cost extra
- No SSL renewal — because that’s an annual cost, not a one-off
- No ongoing support — because £250 doesn’t cover “I’ll be on the phone for the next month”
- Nulled or cracked plugins — because real ones would eat 80% of the budget
That’s not a website. That’s a template with your name on it.
What a Properly Built Site Costs
I build websites for small businesses in Glossop, Manchester, and across the UK. A proper 5-page WordPress site — built properly, with proper plugins, proper security, and proper support — runs £1,200 to £2,500. At 30 hours of work, that’s £40-£83 per hour. That’s the same as a plumber, less than a solicitor, about the same as a mobile mechanic.
At £1,500 you’re paying £50 an hour for someone who:
- Knows why your site needs to load in under 2 seconds or you lose 40% of visitors
- Understands how Google reads and ranks content — and sets up the structure so it actually works
- Curates a plugin stack that plays nicely together — no conflicts, no bloat, no random crashes
- Sets up security, backups, SSL, and performance from day one — not as an afterthought
- Gives you a site you can actually update yourself without breaking anything
- Stays on the phone for the first month when you need changes — because proper work comes with proper support
That’s not a “cheap website.” That’s a professional service delivered by someone who has spent more on their plugin stack alone than the £250 bargain is offering for the whole job.
One More Thing — Bark, Credits, and the Cost of Being Found
I should mention I’m on Bark.com — the lead generation platform. I pay £1.80 per credit to respond to leads. A single lead can cost up to 40 credits — that’s £72 before I’ve even said hello. And the majority of those leads are asking for websites at £200-£250.
So I pay £72 to be told my work is worth less than minimum wage. That’s not a “bargain.” That’s a lead generation platform selling you the hope of a cheap website — and charging you for the privilege of being disappointed.
Worth knowing if you’re using Bark to find a designer.
The Bottom Line
If your budget for a website is £200-£250, that’s fine. But you need to know what you’re buying at that price. You’re not buying a bespoke, professionally built, properly maintained business asset. You’re buying:
- A template with your logo on it
- A platform that you don’t own and can’t take with you
- A stack of plugins that may or may not work together
- And — if the “cheap” route involves nulled plugins — a security risk that will cost you more in the long run
A proper website is a business tool that works 24/7/365. It never calls in sick. It never takes a holiday. It never closes early on a Friday. Every single person who visits it is forming an opinion about your business in the first 0.5 seconds — and that opinion is based on whether your site looks and feels like it was built by someone who cared.
Get in touch if you need a site that actually works. I’ll tell you what it costs, what you actually need, and — honestly — whether a cheaper option could work for you. No hard sell. Just straight numbers.
