What a business website actually costs in 2026: UK, USA, Gulf and Pakistan compared

Almost nobody publishes prices, which means every enquiry starts with a guessing game. This is our attempt to end that for anyone reading, whether or not you work with us.

The honest ranges

These are for a professionally built site — not a template filled in over a weekend, and not an enterprise project.

• Brochure site, 5 to 8 pages. UK and USA: $1,500–$4,000. Gulf: $2,000–$4,500. Pakistan: PKR 80,000–200,000.
• Site built to rank, 10 to 25 pages. UK and USA: $3,500–$8,000. Gulf: $4,000–$9,000. Pakistan: PKR 200,000–450,000.
• E-commerce. UK and USA: $3,500–$10,000. Gulf: $4,000–$12,000. Pakistan: PKR 250,000–600,000.
• Custom application. $8,000 upwards everywhere, because the work is genuinely bespoke.

Timeline is fairly consistent regardless of price: four to eight weeks for most business sites, longer if content is not ready.

What actually moves the number

Page count, but less than you think

Going from six pages to twelve does not double the cost. The design system is built once. What costs money is different kinds of page — a booking flow, a product catalogue, a multi-step form.

Who writes the content

This is the biggest hidden variable. If you supply text and photos, the project is faster and cheaper. If the agency writes everything and directs photography, add meaningfully to both the price and the timeline. Neither is wrong — but it needs deciding at quote stage, not discovered in week four.

Integrations

Booking systems, payment gateways, delivery platforms, CRMs. Each one is a real piece of work and each one can break independently later.

Whether SEO is included or bolted on afterwards

A site built with search in mind from the start costs a little more and works considerably better than a beautiful site that gets "SEO added" later. Retrofitting means rebuilding the structure.

The four line items left out of most quotes

1. Hosting and domain

Usually $10–$40 a month, or free to $20 for modern hosting. Small, but it should be stated rather than discovered.

2. Ongoing maintenance

Content management systems need updating. Plugins break. Certificates expire. Either you are paying someone or you are doing it, and if nobody is doing it the site becomes a security problem within a year.

3. Content and photography

See above. The most common cause of a project running late.

4. Redirect mapping on a rebuild

If you have an existing site with any traffic, mapping the old URLs to the new ones is essential. It is a few hours of unglamorous work, it protects everything the site has earned, and it is quietly skipped more often than any other step.

Why the same site costs three times more in London

Mostly overheads. Office rent, salaries and taxes in London or New York are several times higher than in Lahore, and that flows straight into the day rate. It is not usually a difference in the quality of the code.

What you are genuinely paying more for in a local agency is proximity — same time zone, in-person meetings, and a legal entity in your jurisdiction. Those are real advantages and worth money to some businesses. They are just not the same thing as a better website.

If you are considering an offshore team, the questions worth asking are about process rather than price: who is my named contact, what happens when something breaks at 9pm my time, do I own the accounts, and can I see three sites you built that are still live?

What "too cheap" looks like

A $300 website is usually a template with your logo dropped in, no content strategy, no redirect plan, and no testing on real devices. It is not that cheap work is always bad — it is that below a certain price there are not enough hours in the project to do the parts that make a site work.

The test is not the price. It is whether the person quoting can tell you what they will do about your menu, your booking flow and your old URLs. If they cannot, the number does not matter.