The Honest Anatomy of a £1,500 Website

Most pricing posts written by web designers fall into two camps. The agency posts that won’t tell you a number until you’ve filled in a form. The aggregator posts that quote a £200 to £20,000 range and call it useful.

I want to do something different. I want to take a typical project I’d quote at £1,500 and show you, line by line, where the money goes. Hours. Tools. Software. Time on calls. The whole thing.

The number I’m going to break down isn’t theoretical. It’s roughly what I charge for a six-page WordPress site for a small business — a tradesperson, a small consultancy, a local service business with a clear offer. It’s the sweet spot of my work and probably the most common quote I send out.

Let me show you what £1,500 actually buys.

The brief I’m pricing against

To make this concrete, let’s assume the project is a WordPress website for a local business. Six pages — homepage, about, two service pages, a portfolio or gallery page, and a contact page. Custom design rather than a templated theme. Mobile-responsive. Basic SEO. A working contact form. One round of revisions after the first draft.

This is a real shape of project. I quote it most months. The numbers below are my actual numbers, not a sanitised version.

Where the money goes — line by line

Discovery and brief: 3 hours

Before I start designing anything, I need to know what the business is, who they sell to, what their competitors look like, and what they actually need from a website. This is normally a 60 to 90 minute call, plus another hour or so of follow-up — going through their existing site, looking at three or four competitors, taking notes on the brief.

Time: 3 hours.
What it produces: a written brief I send back to confirm we’re aligned before any design starts. If they don’t agree with what I’ve written, we talk again.

Wireframes and structure: 4 hours

Before I open Figma to design, I sketch the site structure. Where does each page sit. What goes above the fold. What’s the hierarchy of information on each page. This is mostly pen and paper followed by rough wireframes in Figma. It’s the part that gets skipped most often by cheap designers and it’s the part that decides whether the site actually works for visitors or just looks pretty.

Time: 4 hours.
What it produces: a wireframe of every page, low fidelity, sent to the client for sign-off before any visual design begins.

Visual design: 12 hours

This is the longest single block. Designing the homepage takes me roughly four to five hours when I’m doing it properly — choosing typography, building the colour palette, sourcing or directing imagery, designing every component (header, footer, buttons, forms, cards, hero), and putting it all together. The internal pages take another six or seven hours combined because the components are now established and it’s mostly layout.

Time: 12 hours.
What it produces: a full set of high-fidelity Figma designs, mobile and desktop, sent to the client for review.

Revisions: 3 hours

Every project includes one round of revisions. The client comes back with feedback — change this colour, move this section up, the headline isn’t right, can we try a different photo. I work through it, send back the revised version, and usually we’re done. Some projects need a second pass and I’ll absorb a small amount of that. More than that is paid extra.

Time: 3 hours.
What it produces: a final approved design ready to build.

Build / development: 14 hours

Now I build it in WordPress. I use a custom theme based on a starter framework I’ve refined over the years (so I’m not reinventing the wheel every project) and a page builder for layout. The build covers — installing WordPress on the staging environment, building the theme, building each page from the design, setting up forms, configuring SEO plugins, optimising images, setting up caching, and getting it pixel-close to the Figma file.

Time: 14 hours.
What it produces: a fully functional WordPress site on staging that matches the design.

SEO setup: 2 hours

This isn’t ongoing SEO. This is the basics that should be in every professional build. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema markup (organisation, breadcrumbs, FAQ where appropriate), XML sitemap, image alt text, robots.txt, and Google Search Console setup. If your designer doesn’t include this as standard, they’re not doing the job properly.

Time: 2 hours.
What it produces: the SEO foundation that means the site can actually rank when it goes live.

Testing and QA: 3 hours

Before launch I check the site on multiple browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge), multiple devices (desktop, tablet, mobile of various sizes), and run it through PageSpeed Insights and accessibility tools. Forms get tested. Links get checked. Anything broken gets fixed.

Time: 3 hours.
What it produces: a site that works properly when I hand it over.

Launch and handover: 2 hours

Migrating the site from staging to live, pointing the DNS, setting up final SSL, submitting to Google. Then a 30-minute call with the client showing them how to log in, how to update text, how to add a blog post if they want to.

Time: 2 hours.
What it produces: a live site, properly handed over.

Email, calls, project management: 4 hours

Across the project there’s a steady drip of email and Slack messages. Quick questions. Image swaps. “Can you check this?” The 15-minute calls that turn into 45 minutes. Project management isn’t free time. I budget four hours for it and a busy project goes over.

Time: 4 hours.

The total: 47 hours

Add it up: 47 hours of work over a 6 to 8 week period. That’s the honest figure for a properly delivered six-page WordPress site.

£1,500 ÷ 47 hours = roughly £32 per hour.

That is not a high hourly rate for skilled creative and technical work. It’s well below what you’d pay a Brighton agency, a similar London freelancer, or a senior in-house designer. It’s higher than what you’d pay someone reskinning a Wix template in their lunch hour, which is exactly the point.

The costs that come out of that £1,500

The £1,500 isn’t profit. There are hard costs that come out of it before it lands in my account.

• Software subscriptions. Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, hosting for staging environments, premium plugins (Yoast SEO Premium, Gravity Forms, occasionally a builder plugin), screen recording tools, project management software. Pro-rated to a single project, this is roughly £40 to £60.
• Stock imagery and resources. Sometimes a project needs a paid stock photo or icon set. £20 to £80 per project.
• Income tax and National Insurance. The freelancer’s painful reality. Roughly 25-30% of profit goes to HMRC.
• Pension and insurance. Self-employed pension contributions, professional indemnity insurance. Pro-rated, maybe £30-50 per project.
• Time spent winning the work. Discovery calls with prospects who don’t end up buying. Quotes I write that don’t convert. Networking. This is real work and it’s funded by the projects that do land.

After all of that, my actual take-home from a £1,500 project is in the region of £700 to £900. For 47 hours of work. That’s roughly £15 to £19 per hour after everything, before any pension contributions or holiday pay.

What this means for you, the buyer

If you’re a small business owner reading this and your reaction is “wait, the freelancer’s only making £700 on this?” — yes. That’s the maths. Anybody quoting you significantly below £1,500 for the same scope is either undercharging (and will be miserable, slow, or quietly cutting corners) or genuinely templating, which is a different product.

If a designer can deliver a similar build for £400, you’re getting one of three things — a templated theme reskin, a junior designer practising, or someone who hasn’t worked out their costs. The first is fine if you don’t mind looking like 200 other businesses. The second is fine if you’re willing to be the practice. The third is a problem because they’ll either go out of business mid-project or stop responding to your emails when they realise they’ve underpriced.

If a designer can quote £4,000 for the same scope, ask what’s different. If the answer is “we’re a bigger studio with account managers”, you’re paying for their overheads. If the answer is “we’ll spend much longer on the design and add custom development”, that may be worth it. If the answer is vague, it’s probably overheads.

Why I’m publishing this

I’ve spent ten years watching small business owners get nervous about web design pricing because nobody will tell them the truth. The £200 quotes feel suspicious. The £8,000 quotes feel ridiculous. The middle ground gets explained in jargon.

Publishing the actual breakdown is uncomfortable. It puts my margins online. It means the next time I’m in a sales conversation, the client knows what I’m earning. I think that’s a fair trade for two things — first, a more honest market in general, and second, the chance to compete on transparency rather than on hiding what’s behind the number.

If you’ve read this and you’re thinking £1,500 is more than you can spend, that’s a real and reasonable position. Have a look at the full pricing guide for more options or DIY routes. If you’ve read this and you’re thinking £1,500 sounds reasonable, you can get in touch or request a free homepage mockup to see what a real version of your site might look like.

Whatever you do, don’t trust a quote that won’t tell you what’s inside it.