You’ve searched three agency sites this morning. None of them show a price. That’s frustrating, so here’s the honest answer for a small business in Tunbridge Wells.

The starting point

A straightforward five-page SEO site, built properly, starts from £800. That gets you a home page, a services page, an about page, a contact page, and one more of your choice. It ranks on Google, loads fast on a phone, and sends enquiries straight to your email or WhatsApp. No login to learn, no monthly platform fee on top, no mystery.

Thats the floor. Most small businesses in Tunbridge Wells, a sole trader, a clinic, a tradesperson, a specialist retailer, sit somewhere between that floor and the next tier up. The question is what pushes you higher.

What genuinely moves the price up

Each of these adds real build time. None of them is padding.

  • A CMS (content management system). If you want to log in and edit your own pages, someone has to build and test that interface. It takes longer than a static site. How much longer depends on how many page types you need to control.
  • A booking or reservation system. Connecting a calendar, handling availability, sending confirmation emails, these are each their own small project inside the project.
  • A stock or livestock display. One of our first builds was for Walk On The Wild Side Reptiles & Aquatics in Ashford. Showing live stock online is a different problem from showing a static services list. It needs a feed, a display layer, and logic for what happens when something sells or gets reserved. That site pulled in 1,500 visits in month one, 39 enquiries, around 20 sales and 8 reservations, with 75% of traffic coming from Google. The results were real because the build was right for the business, not because we used a cheap template.
  • A quote or configurator tool. If your customers need to build a quote before they call you, that logic has to be written. Every rule in your head becomes a line of code.
  • Volume of content. Ten pages takes longer than five. Forty takes longer than ten. Writing the copy, sourcing images, structuring it all for search, that time is real.

Any of these moves the price into scoped territory. We dont publish a number for them because the right number depends on your specific requirements, and guessing would be doing you a disservice. A short conversation is all it takes to give you a real figure.

Ongoing costs after launch

A website isnt a one-off purchase. Hosting, security updates, and small changes add up. Expect to pay somewhere in the range of £50–£100 a month for maintenance and support, depending on what the site does and how often you need changes made. That range covers a lot of different arrangements, so treat it as a planning number until you have a specific quote.

Red flags in a cheap quote

A £300 website from a freelancer directory or an overseas agency isnt always a bad deal, but watch for these:

  • A template you cant own. Some builders lock your site to their platform. If you leave, the site disappears. Ask who owns the files.
  • No mention of SEO. A site that Google cant find is a brochure in a locked drawer. Ask how the build handles page titles, meta descriptions, site speed, and mobile layout. If the answer is vague, that’s your answer.
  • No local knowledge. Tunbridge Wells has a specific mix of businesses: independent retail, professional services, health and wellness, hospitality. An agency that has never worked in that context will write copy and structure pages for a generic audience. That costs you in search rankings and in conversions.
  • A price that includes “unlimited revisions.” Nobody offers unlimited anything at a profit. It usually means the revisions are slow, disputed, or quietly capped after round two.

How to think about return

The question isnt “how little can I spend?” It’s “what does one extra customer a month cover?” Work that out for your business, then look at the cost of the site against it. A site that brings in two or three new customers a month pays for itself quickly. A cheap site that brings in none costs you more than the saving.

What to do next

If you want a straight conversation about what your site would actually cost, no form-filling, no sales deck, just a plain answer, take a look at how we price our work and get in touch from there.