What a £500 website actually gets you — and what it doesn't

There's nothing wrong with a £500 website. There is something wrong with paying for one and not knowing what it buys. So here's the honest breakdown.

What £500 usually gets you

• A tidy, ready-made template with your logo, colours and text dropped in.
• A handful of pages — home, about, services, contact.
• A contact form and your details wired up.

For a brand-new business that just needs to exist online, that can be enough to start with.

What £500 doesn't get you

• Custom design shaped around your customers.
• Real speed — builder templates are rarely fast on a phone.
• SEO beyond the basics.
• Ownership — you're usually renting the platform.

The maths people miss

A £500 site with a £25/month platform fee is £500 up front and £300 a year, forever. Over three years that's £1,400 — for something you still don't own. A hand-built site costs more at the start and little to nothing to run, so past the first couple of years it's usually the cheaper option.

So when is cheap the right call?

When you're testing an idea, when the website genuinely isn't where your customers come from, or when cash is tight and a simple page now beats a perfect page in six months. All fair reasons — just go in with your eyes open about the ceiling.