What a £900 custom website should actually include (and the red flags when it doesn’t)

The “custom website for £900” market in the UK is enormous and almost entirely opaque. Some of those £900 sites are genuinely well-built, fast, custom, search-optimised, and ready to grow with the business. Others are a Wix template the freelancer customised in an afternoon, dressed up with the word “bespoke” and sold with a markup.

You can’t tell the difference from a sales call. You can tell the difference if you know what to ask about. Here’s what should be included for £900 and the red flags that suggest you’re about to pay £900 for £200 of work.

What £900 should actually include

Custom design, not a template with the colours changed

The design should be made for your specific business — your trade, your competitors, your customers — not picked from a library of generic layouts and recoloured. A real custom design starts with conversations about who your customer is, what they need to find on the site, and what makes you different from the other businesses in your space.

You can spot the difference by asking the designer: “Can you show me three or four sketches or mockups before you start building?” A custom designer says yes and shows you variants. A template-flipper either won’t, or shows you something that looks suspiciously like a known template with your name swapped in.

Mobile-responsive, designed for phones first

Between 60% and 80% of small business website traffic comes from phones. The site needs to be built for mobile first and then adapted for desktop, not the other way around.

You should be able to see and approve mobile-specific mockups during the design phase. If they only show you desktop designs and promise “it’ll look fine on mobile too”, expect that the mobile version is going to be a squeezed version of the desktop layout — buttons too small, text too cramped, photos out of proportion.

Loads under 3 seconds on a mid-range phone

Performance shouldn’t be a separate line item, it should be how the site is built from the start. Page weight under 1MB, photos compressed, no render-blocking scripts, fast hosting.

You can verify this yourself after launch by running the site through PageSpeed Insights (free, from Google). A custom-built £900 site should score 85+ on mobile Performance. A Wix template at the same price typically scores 30-50. The difference is real and visitors feel it.

SEO basics done properly

At minimum: every page has a unique title tag and meta description, headings are structured properly, images have alt text, the site has an XML sitemap and robots.txt, structured data is marked up for your business type (LocalBusiness schema for trades, FAQPage for question pages, Article for blog posts).

These are the technical fundamentals that let Google understand and rank your site. None of them are exotic — they’re table stakes — but a surprising number of cheap “custom” sites skip them entirely and then sell SEO as a separate upsell three months later.

A working contact form or booking flow

Form submissions should land in your email within a minute. The customer should get an auto-reply confirming you’ve received their message. The form should have spam protection (honeypot field or hCaptcha) so you don’t spend weekly time deleting bot submissions.

For trades and services, “book a call” buttons should integrate with whatever scheduling tool you’re already using (Calendly, Koalendar, Setmore, Square) so customers can self-book without phone tag.

One round of revisions after launch

The first version of any site is never quite right. £900 should include at least one round of revisions — text changes, image swaps, layout tweaks — in the first week or two after launch. After that, ongoing changes are a separate conversation.

Ask explicitly what’s included. “How many revisions are in the price, and what counts as a revision versus an additional change?” A designer who answers clearly is being straight with you. A designer who waves it off as “we’ll sort it out as we go” usually means the budget runs out before you’re happy.

You own the domain, the hosting, and the code

Your domain should be registered in your name. Your hosting account should be in your name. You should have access to the code (a GitHub repository, a downloadable copy, or hosted on a platform you control).

If the designer puts everything on their own account and bills you monthly to “maintain” it, you’re being held hostage. Many small businesses discover this the hard way when the designer becomes unresponsive a year later and the site either goes down or transfers cost £500 to recover.

Red flags when the £900 quote is too good to be true

“It’ll be ready in 48 hours”

A genuinely custom website takes 1-3 weeks even for a small business. Anyone quoting a 48-hour turnaround is either using a pre-built template or skipping the design conversation entirely. The site might be online in 48 hours but it won’t be designed for your specific business.

They can’t tell you what tech the site is built on

“We’ll build it on our platform” without explaining what that platform is, is a tell. A real designer is happy to say “it’s built on Next.js” or “we’re using WordPress with the Bricks builder” or “it’s a Webflow build”. Each of those has trade-offs you should know about — being kept in the dark means the platform is probably bad and they know it.

No mobile preview during design

The mockups they show you only exist as desktop screenshots. They promise mobile will “follow the same design”. This usually means they haven’t designed the mobile version and you’ll see it for the first time after launch.

“We’ll add SEO later as an upsell”

SEO basics (the ones listed above) should be in the build, not a separate service. Ongoing SEO work — content, link building, keyword strategy — is legitimately a separate service. But if they want extra money to add a sitemap or alt text to images, they’re selling you table stakes as a premium feature.

Full payment upfront, no staged deposits

Industry standard is 50% to start, 50% on completion. Some studios (us included) take 0% upfront and bill the full amount only after you’ve seen the finished site and approved it — but those are the exception. Anyone asking for 100% upfront before any work is shown has no incentive to actually finish well.

No domain or hosting transparency

“We’ll handle the domain and hosting, it’s easier” — translation: we’re going to register it in our name and bill you monthly to maintain it. Avoid. Your domain should be in your name from day one.

The portfolio is suspiciously generic

Look at three sites in their portfolio. If they all look like the same template with different colour schemes and logos, they probably are. A real custom designer’s portfolio has visible range — different layouts, different structures, different design languages — because each project was made for its specific brand.

The fair-price benchmark

For a UK small business, fair pricing for a properly-built custom website ranges roughly from £600 (single-page site, trades) to £3,500 (five-page site with booking and SEO, premium positioning). £900 sits comfortably in the middle of that range and should buy you the genuine article — custom design, mobile-first, fast loading, SEO basics, revisions, ownership.

If the quote is much lower than £600 for custom work, it’s either a template or a starter freelancer practising on you. If it’s much higher than £3,500 without a clear reason (e-commerce, complex booking, multiple languages), the designer is either over-engineering for their own enjoyment or charging metropolitan agency rates for high street work.

How to be sure before you commit

Three things to ask before signing anything:

1. Can I see three sites you’ve built for businesses like mine?Live URLs, not just screenshots.
2. Can I run those sites through PageSpeed Insights and look at the scores? Anyone confident in their work says yes.
3. Will I own the domain, hosting, and code at the end of the project? Get the answer in writing.

If the answer to all three is yes and the designer can explain what they’re going to build, you’re probably in safe hands. The audit below also runs the same speed and SEO checks on any URL — handy if you want to vet a designer’s portfolio before booking the kickoff call.