Most UK charities pay between £3,000 and £20,000 for a professionally built website, from around £150 a year if you build it yourself, up to £50,000 and beyond for complex platforms with CRM integration. Every cost guide on the internet will tell you that much.
What many won’t tell you is what those numbers are made up of, what the site should return, or who might pay for it. Our aim is to expand on just another “how much is a website” guide and show off real project costs line by line, the honest five-year total, payback maths you can put in front of trustees, and the UK funders who actually fund websites.
The market at a glance
| Approach | Typical cost | Best for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £150 to £600 a year, plus your time | A quick, presentable site while you’re getting established | Fine until you need something it doesn’t support: Customised analytics, an integration, proper accessibility control. And you can’t take the site with you. |
| AI site builders (Lovable and similar) | £20 to £60 a month, plus your time | Prototypes and getting a first version live fast | You get code without a CMS: day-to-day edits need the tool or a developer, and accessibility is whatever the AI happened to produce. |
| Freelancer or template WordPress build | £1,500 to £5,000 | Standard brochure site with a basic donate function | Quality, support and accessibility vary wildly with the freelancer. The upside: it’s WordPress, so you can take it with you. |
| Specialist agency, custom WordPress | £5,000 to £20,000 | Most small and mid-sized charities: custom design, accessibility, donation journeys, integrations | Needs a real budget and 8 to 12 weeks. Overkill if all you need is a holding page. |
| Larger agency, complex platform | £20,000 to £50,000+ | Endless integrations, supporter portals, service directories, high-traffic campaigning | The price, mostly. Justified at scale, hard to justify below it. |
That top band is real: larger charity digital agencies quote up to £50,000 for builds with donations, login areas and CRM integration. Whether your charity needs that is a different question, and for most, the honest answer is no.
What real projects cost, line by line
A single figure hides more than it reveals, and it’s why comparing agency quotes feels impossible: you’re comparing totals without knowing what’s inside them. So here’s what’s inside ours. These are rounded figures from real projects, anonymised, across the three shapes of build we see most often.
| Stage | Focused build (Eg. £4,500) | Full rebuild (e.g. £11,000) | Integration-heavy (e.g. £19,000) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery and scoping | £500 | £1,200 | £2,000 |
| Design and prototyping | £900 | £2,300 | £3,500 |
| Build (custom block theme) | £2,200 | £4,500 | £7,000 |
| Donations, Gift Aid and integrations | £400 | £1,300 | £4,000 |
| Content migration and redirects | £200 | £900 | £1,500 |
| Accessibility QA, launch and training | £300 | £800 | £1,000 |
Three things worth noticing. Design and build dominate every project, which is why the number of distinct page layouts matters more to your quote than the number of pages. Integrations are the swing factor: connecting a CRM, event booking or fundraising platform is where an £11,000 project becomes a £19,000 one. And migration scales with history: moving 40 pages is an afternoon, while moving twelve years of content URL-for-URL (as we did for Sight Research UK) is a project in itself. When an agency won’t break their quote down like this, ask why.
The five-year truth: a £10,000 website costs £20,000 to £25,000
The build is the cost everyone budgets for. It’s roughly half the real number. A well-run charity site also carries a domain (£10 to £20 a year), hosting (£15 to £100 a month), maintenance and security (£50 to £250 a month for updates a human has actually verified, monitoring, backups and someone to call on a Friday evening) and plugin licences (£100 to £500 a year). Call it £1,500 to £3,000 a year for a site that stays fast, secure and accessible.
Run that forward and the arithmetic is blunt: a £10,000 build is really a £20,000 to £25,000 five-year commitment. That’s not an argument against building one. It’s an argument for budgeting the whole thing at the start, because the alternative, skipping maintenance, is how charities end up paying for the same website twice. One more line for the spreadsheet: if your donation platform takes 2 to 5% of every gift, that’s a running cost too, and over five years of fundraising it can quietly outgrow the build itself. It’s why we built forGood to keep donations on your own site without per-gift percentages.
The question your trustees will actually ask
“How much does it cost” is the wrong question to take to a board. The right one is “what does it return”, and for fundraising charities you can put real numbers on that. Here’s the worked example, with every assumption visible so you can swap in your own figures.
Say your donate page gets 300 visits a month and 45% complete a gift, averaging £25. That’s 135 gifts, or £3,375 a month. A rebuilt donation journey that lifts completion to 65% makes that 195 gifts and £4,875 a month: an extra £1,500 a month, £18,000 a year, from the same traffic. On those numbers a £10,000 rebuild pays for itself inside seven months, and everything after is return.
Is 65% realistic? It’s conservative. When we rebuilt Sight Research UK’s donate flow, the completed journey hit an 87.3% donation rate. Your baseline and traffic will differ, so run the maths with your own analytics, but run it: a website is one of the few charity costs that can put a payback date in the trustee paper.
Who will actually pay for it
Now the part every other cost guide waves at with “look for grants” and leaves you to it. The sector context first: the Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 found 63% of charities name squeezed finances as their biggest barrier to digital progress, and only 17% accessed digital funding this year, down from 30%. The money exists; most charities just don’t know where it is or how to ask.
We maintain a free, filterable database of UK grants that fund charity websites and digital projects.
Three more ways to close the gap:
- Write the website into your next bid. Funders increasingly accept digital infrastructure as a legitimate project cost rather than “overheads”, but only if you cost it explicitly: name the build, the annual running costs and what the site delivers for beneficiaries. A website buried in “core costs” gets cut; a website framed as service delivery gets funded.
- The Google Ad Grant. Up to $10,000 a month in free search advertising for eligible charities. It won’t pay for the build, but it puts the site you’ve built in front of people searching for your cause, which changes the return side of the maths above. Our Ad Grants guide for UK charities covers eligibility and keeping the grant once you have it.
- Ask for the charity rate. Many agencies and software suppliers discount for registered charities without advertising it. Ours is a standing 15%. Always ask.
The expensive part is the cheap website
The costs that hurt most never appear on a quote. An awkward donate journey leaks gifts every day it’s live, and you’ve seen above what 20 percentage points of completion is worth. An inaccessible site turns away the supporters who most need it to work, then costs more to retrofit than accessibility would have cost to build in. An unmaintained site is a security incident on a timer: we’ve broken down what a hacked charity website costs to clean up, and it’s rarely less than the maintenance plan that would have prevented it. And a locked-in platform charges its real price when you try to leave: our guide to choosing a platform (and how to leave it) covers the exit costs nobody mentions at signup.
Five questions to ask before you sign anything
- Can you break the quote down by stage?
- Who owns the code, the content and the domain when the project is finished?
- Which accessibility standard is written into the contract? Ask for WCAG 2.2 AA.
- Will you map every old URL to a new one so we keep our search rankings?
- What happens if we want to leave: how do we export everything and move on?
The honest summary
Budget £3,000 to £20,000 to build it and £1,500 to £3,000 a year to run it well, which makes the five-year commitment roughly double the build cost. Take the payback maths to your trustees, take the funder list to your fundraiser, and ask every supplier for the charity rate. If a quote comes in far below these ranges, check you’re getting the right sort of website and important factors aren’t missing like accessibility, support or ownership. If it comes in far above, ask to see it broken down by stage.
Want a real number instead of a range? Tell us what your site needs to do and we’ll come back within a day with honest thoughts and a stage-by-stage estimate.
