Cheap Website Design: What You Actually Get for £500

For around £500 you get a pre-made theme, configured with your logo, colours and content, on a page structure someone else designed. It will be live, it will look reasonably modern, and it will work.

That is not a scam. For some businesses it is exactly the right purchase. The problem is that most people buying at that price think they are buying something else, and they find out around month fourteen.

I sell more expensive websites, so weigh what follows accordingly. I have also inherited a lot of cheap ones, which is where most of this comes from.

What is genuinely included

A theme purchased for £40–£60, or a free one. Your logo and brand colours applied. Your text and images placed into the existing layout. A contact form. Basic mobile responsiveness, because the theme already had it. Setup on hosting.

Usually five to eight pages, one round of minor changes, and two to four weeks.

For a brand new business testing whether an idea works, that is a reasonable trade. Being live matters more than being distinctive when you have no customers yet.

What is not included, and rarely mentioned

Design. Not "cheap design" — none. The layout was designed by the theme author for a generic business. Your site will share its structure with thousands of others, which matters less than people fear visually and more than they expect functionally, because the page order was decided by someone who had never heard of your business.

Strategy. Nobody asked what you want visitors to do, which services make you money, or who your customers are. The pages are the pages the theme came with.

Content. You supply it, or the placeholder text stays. A surprising number of budget sites go live with a section still reading "Lorem ipsum" or "Our Mission Statement Goes Here".

Speed work. Themes ship with everything switched on so they demo well — sliders, animation libraries, icon packs, four font families. Most of it loads on every page whether you use it or not. Budget sites are consistently slow, and that costs both rankings and conversions.

SEO beyond the basics. Perhaps a plugin installed. Not page structure built around what people search, not proper titles and descriptions, not internal linking.

Accessibility. Whatever the theme happened to do. Usually contrast that fails, headings in the wrong order, and forms without proper labels.

Aftercare. Once it is live, it is yours. Updates, backups, security, and whatever breaks.

The costs that arrive later

This is where the £500 site stops being a £500 site.

Changes are expensive. Anything beyond editing text means fighting the theme. A structural change that takes two hours on a purpose-built site can take a day inside someone else's template, and you will be quoted accordingly.

Plugin licences. Budget builds lean on plugins — a slider, a form builder, a page builder, an SEO plugin. Most renew annually at £30–£80. Nobody mentions this in month one.

The theme gets abandoned. This is the real one. Themes are often built by small teams, and when a team moves on, updates stop. WordPress and PHP keep moving. Eighteen months to three years later something breaks and there is no fix, only a rebuild.

Rebuilding sooner. Most budget sites get replaced within two to three years. A well-built site runs five to seven with content updates. Two cheap sites plus the disruption usually costs more than one good one, and you lose the accumulated search authority in between.

When cheap is genuinely the right call

A brand new business with no customers. Get something live, find out whether the business works, invest when it does. This is sensible and I would advise it.

A business that needs presence, not leads. If every customer comes by referral and the site exists so people can check you are real, a template is fine.

A short-term or single-purpose site. An event, a campaign, a temporary offer.

When £500 is genuinely all there is. A cheap site beats no site comfortably. Just go in knowing the shape of the trade.

When it is a false economy

When the website is how customers find you. When you are in a competitive market where the alternatives look better. When you need it to do something specific — booking, payments, integration with your systems. When your brand is part of what you sell. When you will need to change it regularly and cannot.

The questions to ask before you buy

Whoever is quoting, at any price:

• Is this a theme or a custom design? If a theme, which one?
• Who owns the design files and the site when we are done?
• What am I paying annually for plugins and licences?
• What happens if I want to add a page in six months?
• Who does the updates and backups after launch?
• Can I see two sites you built more than two years ago?

That last one is the most revealing question on the list. Anyone can show you a launch. Ask to see something that has had to survive.

What I would actually advise

If you have £500 and no customers yet: buy the cheap site, get trading, and plan to replace it inside two years. That is a real strategy, not a compromise.

If you have £500 and an established business that depends on being found: save for another few months instead. The £2,500 version is not five times better on the day it launches, but it will still be working in year four, and the cheap one will not.

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We quote fixed and itemised, and we will tell you if your budget is better spent elsewhere. Ask us.