The Honest Guide to Web Designer Pricing in South East London

Google "web designer south east london" and you'll get three kinds of result. Fiverr listings at £150, freelancers quoting £1,500, and agencies with landing pages that say "investment starts from £8,000" as if the investment is in their rent.

All three are real. All three are justified by someone. And none of them are helpful if you run a cafe in Peckham or a clinic in Dulwich and you just want to know what a website will actually cost you.

This post is the plain English answer. I run a one-person web design studio in East Dulwich. I've looked at a lot of other quotes, seen a lot of contracts, and built a lot of sites. Here's what's actually going on with the numbers.

£0 to £300 — DIY on Wix, Squarespace, or a cousin

A cheap site is not the same as a free one. Wix and Squarespace charge £10 to £25 a month to host the site. Over three years you've paid £360 to £900, and you still don't own the code.

The hidden cost is your time. Most small-business owners who start on Wix spend twenty to forty hours learning the platform, writing copy, hunting for photos, and tweaking. At any sensible hourly value of your time, the "free" site isn't.

The other hidden cost is performance. Wix and Squarespace sites generally load slowly on mobile, rarely score above 60 on Google's mobile speed test, and include scripts the platform uses for its own tracking and features. This caps how well your site can rank, no matter how good the rest is.

When it's the right call: a brand new business with no budget, no email list, no customers yet. Get something live, test the idea, replace in twelve months.

£300 to £1,000 — Fiverr, cheap freelancers, friend-of-a-friend

At this price you're paying someone to assemble a template faster than you could. They use a page builder like Elementor, drop in your logo, and hand it back within a week.

The site will be fine. It will go live. It will look broadly like a thousand other sites because the template pool is finite. SEO will be basic. Handover is often one revision and a "best of luck". If you want changes in six months, you're paying again.

What you're not paying for: thinking, writing, performance tuning, proper schema, or a site that feels specifically yours.

When it's the right call: you genuinely need something-is-better-than-nothing in a hurry, you have no strong brand, and you'll replace it within eighteen months when the business grows.

£1,500 to £4,000 — proper freelance, custom work (the sweet spot)

This is where most small businesses in South East London should land, and where most don't because they don't know this tier exists.

At this level you get a real conversation, a proper brief, a custom design (not a template), hand-coded or cleanly built output, proper local SEO from day one, real photography guidance, and a site designed for your specific business rather than slotted into someone else's layout.

A clean, custom five-page site for a clinic, salon, cafe or trade, with proper local schema, mobile optimisation, and content help, sits at the £1,500 to £2,500 end. Slightly more complex projects with booking integrations, multiple service pages, or e-commerce hit £2,500 to £4,000.

Full disclosure: Stagg Studio sits below this tier on the headline price, with a different model — websites starting from £350 plus £30/month for hosting, management and ongoing SEO. The total cost over a typical 3-year client relationship lands inside this tier, but the entry price is much lower because there's no agency overhead and the recurring covers what would otherwise be billed as ongoing work. Other good London freelancers sit in the middle of this £1,500–4,000 range without a recurring component. All of us are building the same kind of product.

When it's the right call: you have a real business, real reviews, a bit of word of mouth, and you want a site that can actually earn customers for two to four years without needing a rebuild.

£5,000 to £25,000+ — agency work

Agencies charge more for reasons that are sometimes good and often not. At the good end, you're paying for project management, multiple specialists (designer, developer, copywriter, SEO), legal contracts, accessibility audits, and ongoing support packages. For a business that needs complex e-commerce, a content strategy, team training, and a retainer, this can be money well spent.

At the less good end, you're paying for a nice office in Shoreditch, an account manager who forwards emails, and a junior who's actually building your site while also working on four others. The output is sometimes worse than a good freelancer would produce, for five times the price.

Agencies win when the project is genuinely big. Most local South East London businesses, with under ten employees and a turnover under a few hundred thousand, are not that project.

When it's the right call: you have a turnover above roughly £500,000, a team that needs to use a CMS, or a genuine digital strategy that needs multiple specialists working in parallel.

What actually drives the price, regardless of tier

Strip out the marketing and every quote breaks down into the same four things. Any designer you talk to who can't explain their price in these terms is worth being careful with.

• Pages and complexity. A five-page brochure site is a different animal to a fifteen-page site with booking integration and a blog. Every extra page, form, integration, or dynamic section adds real hours.
• Design from scratch vs template. A custom design takes two to five times longer than adapting a template. It's also the reason most websites in a given sector all look the same.
• Copy and photography. A designer doing your copywriting is a designer charging for another job. Good sites need good words. Decide early whether you're writing it or the designer is, and price accordingly.
• SEO depth. There's a big gap between "the site works on Google" and "the site is genuinely optimised for local search". Proper schema, local citations, internal linking, and technical SEO add real value and real hours.

What Stagg Studio charges, and why

No mystery: websites starting from £350 for the one-off custom build, plus £30/month covering hosting, ongoing management, tweaks and continued local SEO. For a standalone SEO audit of an existing site, I charge £30 and you get the full report whether you work with me after or not.

I can run at the £350 starting price because I'm genuinely a one-person studio, based in East Dulwich, with no office, no salesperson, no junior to subsidise, and a stack that lets me move fast. The £30/month covers what other agencies bill ad-hoc — content tweaks, tech updates, monthly SEO maintenance, the lot. No lock-in. Cancel anytime if the site is doing what you need without ongoing work.

If the project gets more complex (booking system, e-commerce, multiple service pages, content reconstruction from an old WordPress site, multi-location), the build price scales transparently and I tell you the new number before any work starts. The £350 starter is for clean five-page brochure sites — clinics, salons, cafes, tradespeople, single-location service businesses — which is most of who comes through the door.

You see the finished site on a preview link before any invoice is sent. If you don't like it, you don't pay. I've not had to write that sentence seriously yet.

How to decide what tier is right for you

Three honest questions. Be honest.

1. Are you already getting customers? If yes, you can justify the £1,500+ tier because each new customer pays for a chunk of it. If not, £300 DIY and focus on getting the first ten.
2. Will visitors judge you on the site? A podiatrist, a financial advisor, a solicitor, a private clinic, an architect. These are trust-first businesses where the site is the interview. Spend more. A sandwich shop next to the station with a queue of regulars needs less.
3. Are you willing to rebuild in two years? A cheap site is a shorter runway. A proper custom site at £2,000 lasts three to four years of growth. Spread across that time it's £500 a year. Most businesses spend more on their energy bill.

If you want a straight quote

If you're a local business in South East London and you want a specific, honest price for your specific site, get in touch. Tell me what you do, where you are, and roughly what you want. I'll write back within 24 hours with a real number, not a range.

No pitch, no pressure, no investment-starts-from rubbish. Worth a read alongside this one: how much a website costs in 2026, and Wix vs a custom website if you're still deciding between the two.