“How much will a new website cost?” is usually the first question a charity asks, and the honest answer is “it depends”. That isn’t very helpful when you’re writing a budget or a funding bid, so this guide explains what actually drives the cost of a charity website in the UK, gives rough price ranges, and covers the running costs people often forget.
Rough price ranges
These are typical UK market ranges for a professionally built site, not quotes. Your own costs will depend on what you need.
| Type of site | Typical one-off cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Simple, template-based site | £1,500 to £5,000 | A small number of pages, a ready-made theme adapted to your brand, contact form, news |
| Custom-designed WordPress or Drupal site | £5,000 to £15,000 | Bespoke design, more content types, events, donation links, accessibility work |
| Site with CRM, donations and membership | £15,000 to £40,000+ | Online donations, Gift Aid, memberships, event booking and a connected CRM such as CiviCRM |
Very small groups can get started for less with a do-it-yourself builder. Large organisations with complex integrations, multiple languages or member portals can spend considerably more.
What drives the cost
Design
Adapting a good existing theme to your brand costs far less than designing every page from scratch. A custom design makes sense when your website is central to fundraising or campaigning and needs to stand out.
Content and pages
The number of page types matters more than the number of pages. A site with news, events, case studies, a resource library and team profiles needs more building than one with a set of standard pages. Moving content from an old site, and rewriting it, also takes time.
Donations, memberships and events
This is where costs rise most, and where the value is greatest. Taking donations and Gift Aid online, selling memberships with automatic renewals, or managing event bookings means connecting the website to a payment provider and, ideally, a CRM. Doing this well saves hours of admin every week.
Accessibility
Charity websites should work for everyone, including people using screen readers or keyboards. Building to accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) from the start costs much less than fixing problems later.
Integrations
Connecting to tools such as Mailchimp, Xero, Eventbrite, JustGiving or your CRM adds cost, but removes the need to copy data by hand. Our integrations service covers the common ones.
The running costs people forget
A website isn’t a one-off purchase. Budget for:
- Hosting: from a few pounds a month for basic hosting to more for fast, secure, UK-based hosting with backups
- Updates and security: WordPress and Drupal need regular updates to stay secure
- Support: small changes, fixes and help when something goes wrong
- Domain and email: usually modest, but they need renewing
- Licences: some premium themes and plugins charge annually
Many organisations cover these with a monthly care plan. Ours start from £65 + VAT a month for website care, and from £85 + VAT a month for managed CiviCRM hosting, with no minimum term. See our hosting and care plans.
How to keep costs under control
- Start with what the site must do, such as taking donations or booking events, not with how it should look
- Prioritise: launch with the essentials and add features in a second phase
- Use open-source software: WordPress, Drupal and CiviCRM have no licence fees
- Ask for a fixed-price quote with a clear scope, so you know exactly what you’re paying for
- Avoid lock-in: make sure you own your website, content and data, and can move supplier if you need to
Funding a new website
Website and digital projects can sometimes be included in grant applications, particularly when they help you reach more people or save staff time. A clear quote, broken down into phases, makes this easier to justify to funders.
Get a clear, fixed-price quote
We build WordPress and Drupal websites for UK charities, membership bodies and small businesses, often connected to CiviCRM for donations and memberships. See our website design service, or tell us what you need and we’ll come back with honest advice and a fixed-price quote.