Everyone asks it and almost nobody answers it, so here is a straight answer.
A business website in Guernsey in 2026 typically costs between £2,500 and £12,000, and most of the local businesses we work with land somewhere in the middle of that. Online shops and custom platforms sit above it. Very cheap template sites sit below it, and the reasons they do are worth understanding before you buy one.
Below is what you actually get at each level, what pushes a quote up or down, and the ongoing costs that a lot of proposals quietly leave out.
The short answer
| What you are buying | Typical range | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Template site, lightly customised | £750 to £2,000 | Getting online quickly on a tight budget |
| Custom-designed brochure site, 5 to 10 pages | £2,500 to £6,000 | Most Guernsey businesses |
| Larger marketing site, 15+ pages, bespoke design | £6,000 to £12,000 | Established firms with a lot to say |
| Online shop | £8,000 to £20,000 | Selling directly, with payments and stock |
| Custom platform, portal or booking system | £15,000+ | When the site is the product |
These are ranges, not a price list, and the honest reason is that “a website” covers everything from a tidy five-page site for a local trade to a booking system handling hundreds of transactions a week. Pricing those the same would be dishonest to one of you.
Why there is a range at all
A builder cannot tell you the cost of “a house” without knowing how many rooms, what finish and which site. Websites are the same.
What you are really buying is a mix of design time, development time and the thinking around both: how the site is structured, how it reads on a phone, how it turns a visitor into an enquiry. A cheap site nobody contacts you through is expensive. A well-judged site that quietly brings in work pays for itself many times over.
What actually moves the number
A handful of decisions do most of the work.
- Size and scope. A five-page site is a smaller job than a forty-page one. More pages mean more design, more content and more to test.
- Custom design versus a template. A layout built around your brand from scratch takes longer than adapting a ready-made theme, and it looks and performs like it.
- Functionality. A brochure site that tells people about you is straightforward. Add payments, bookings, member logins, a searchable directory or a link to another system, and you are into real development work.
- Content. If your words and images are ready, things move quickly. If you need copywriting, photography or help shaping the message, budget for it. It is usually the best money in the project.
- Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, an accounts package, a payment provider or a mailing list adds moving parts that have to be built and tested properly.
None of these are extras for their own sake. Each is a decision about how the site earns its keep.
Template or custom build
Most Guernsey businesses sit in one of two camps, and the gap between them is the single biggest factor in the price.
A design-led marketing site is about presenting you clearly and winning enquiries. That is the heart of our web design in Guernsey work: a fast, distinctive site built around your brand that reads well on every screen and makes the next step obvious. For most businesses this is the right level.
A bespoke platform is a different animal. When a site needs custom functionality, a portal, a shop with unusual rules, a booking engine or a tool your customers log into, that is custom web development, priced on the complexity of what is being built rather than the number of pages. It costs more because it does more. You can see the range of both across our recent work.
The costs most quotes leave out
The build is not the only line in the budget, and a good agency is upfront about the rest.
- Your domain. A
.ggdomain runs about £49 a year plus a small management fee. A.comis usually cheaper. Either way it is an annual cost that never stops. - Hosting. Your site has to live somewhere. Budget hosting starts around £5 a month, though managed hosting for a business site is more, and it is not a place to cut corners.
- Maintenance. Software needs updating, backups need taking, things occasionally break. Website maintenance keeps the site fast, safe and current, and it is far cheaper than rescuing a site left to rot.
- SSL, email, and the small stuff. Usually minor, but they belong in the budget rather than arriving as a surprise.
Factor these in from the start and the true cost of owning a website is clear rather than creeping up on you.
What a very cheap website actually costs you
You can get a website in Guernsey for a few hundred pounds. Sometimes that is genuinely the right call, for a brand new venture testing an idea, say.
But cheap sites usually save money on the parts you cannot see: page speed, mobile layout, security, and the underlying structure that decides whether Google can understand your site at all. Those are exactly the things that determine whether anyone finds you and whether they trust you when they do.
The test is not what the site cost. It is what it brings in. A £600 site that produces nothing is worse value than a £5,000 site that brings in two decent jobs a year.
How we quote
We do not publish a fixed price list, because a list either overcharges the simple jobs or undersells the complex ones. Instead we quote each project after a short discovery call, where we ask what the site needs to do, who it is for and what a good result looks like.
From there you get a clear, itemised proposal. A fixed price, agreed before any work starts, with no vague figures and no surprises.
That call is free and useful even if you decide not to go ahead, because it turns a fuzzy “how much is a website” into a real number for your actual project.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest a decent business website can be? Around £2,500 for a properly custom-designed small site. Below that you are into templates, which can work, but you are trading away originality and often speed and structure with it.
Why do quotes vary so much between agencies? Because they are quoting different things. One may be adapting a theme in a few days, another designing from a blank page and building it from scratch. Ask what is actually included, especially design time, mobile testing and who owns the site afterwards.
Do I pay it all at once? Usually not. Most projects are staged, with a deposit to begin and the balance across agreed milestones, so the cash flow is predictable.
What will it cost me each year after launch? A domain renews yearly, hosting is a modest monthly or annual cost, and a maintenance plan is optional but sensible. We are clear about all three before you commit.
How do I get an accurate figure for my project? Book a short discovery call. Tell us what you want the site to do and we will come back with a proper quote rather than a guess.
If you are weighing up a new site or a rebuild, get in touch. No jargon and no pressure, just an honest sense of what your project involves and what it will cost.
