The honest answer: less than you think, and less than most web agencies will quote you.
We work with cafés, salons, trades and shops across Saltaire, Shipley and Bingley. The spread of what they pay to have a proper online setup is narrow. There's no mystery to it. Here's what the numbers actually look like.
A typical Saltaire or Shipley small business spends between £600 and £1,200 up-front to get properly online — website, Google Business Profile, photos, a booking or payment setup — and £15 to £80 a month after that for hosting and any ongoing content or social work. Anything above £2,500 for a small local business is almost always overpriced.
The one-off costs
These are the things you pay for once. Done properly, they last years.
- Website from £349 to £749. A multi-page, mobile-first, fast website on your own domain. Cheaper is usually a template with your logo slapped on. More expensive, for a local business, is usually someone selling you features you won't use. Our pricing is here.
- Photography shoot: £150 to £400. A couple of hours on-site, 30 to 60 edited photos, full usage rights. Pays for itself the first time you stop having to use a blurry phone photo.
- Google Business Profile setup: £0 to £150. Free if you do it yourself with a guide. Around £150 if you want someone to do the full 28-point setup and wire it into your website.
- Brand kit (logo, colours, fonts, templates): £200 to £500. Only if you don't already have one. A small kit is usually enough.
- Booking or payment setup: £100 to £300. Wired into your site once, then it just runs. Salons, clinics and restaurants recoup this inside a month of reduced no-shows.
The monthly costs
- Hosting & security: £15 to £30. SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security headers. Not optional.
- Domain: £10 to £15 a year. A rounding error.
- Social content pack (optional): £150 to £400 a month. Only makes sense if you actually post. If you don't, don't buy it.
- Ongoing SEO (optional): £0 to £300 a month. Most Saltaire businesses don't need ongoing SEO for the first year. A well-built site and an active Google Business Profile does most of the work.
What you probably don't need to pay for
Every small business we audit has at least one of these on a direct debit:
- A £50-£200/month “SEO retainer” that produces a monthly PDF and nothing else.
- A third-party booking platform charging per booking when a one-off integration on your own site would cost less over a year.
- A Facebook Ads budget aimed at a website that's broken on mobile.
- A “premium directory listing” on a site nobody visits.
Cancel these and you've usually paid for a whole new website inside six months.
How to actually budget it
Think of it as two numbers: a one-off setup and a monthly run-cost.
For most local businesses in BD17 and BD18, a sensible setup budget is around £800 and a sensible monthly run-cost is £20 to £30 if you're doing the content yourself, or £200 to £400 if you want content done for you.
That's it. That's the whole thing. If someone is trying to sell you more than that for a small local business, ask them to justify every line item in plain English. If they can't, walk away.
Where to start if you've got nothing
Website first, photos second, Google Business Profile alongside both. Everything else is optional. We can do all of it under one roof, one invoice — but only the bits you actually need. Here's the full list if you want to see what the end state looks like.