Today in this post we will talk about the Web Designer Hourly Rate UK!

There are over 250 000 marketing agencies based in the UK. With so many choices, it can be a minefield to find the best average hourly rate for a freelance web developer.

Hiring a freelancer for the Shopify development work to build your website, especially when most freelancers and agencies will only give you a quote after you submit the requirements for your website projects.

With that in mind, I decided to put this web design pricing guide together so you can have a clear idea of how much your website should be costing you in the UK, in 2025. Let’s go straight to the point!

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the best way to communicate with your customers and clients is online. 

Whether you’re looking to sell your products or services online, show off your creative work, or simply get your company’s name and details out there – the first thing you need to do is set up a website. Fortunately, the Shopify website platform enables you to set up your own website quickly and easily – and they’re pretty inexpensive, too.

Freelance web designer hourly rate UK

Freelancers typically make a higher rate than in-house web designers because they don’t receive health insurance and other perks that employees receive. Freelancers also have much less job security.

As a rough guide, anything between £35 and £45 per hour seems to be around the right figure for basic programming, with more complex services going up to around £55 per hour.

They go from contract to contract. A higher rate compensates them for the lack of long-term commitment from clients. See here how much a website design UK cost in 2025.

A few factors determine whether a freelancer will charge more or less for a project or per hour:

• Pet projects. A freelancer might offer a nonprofit, a friend or family a lower rate.
• Project length. Long-term projects might deserve a slightly lower hourly rate.
• Page count. More pages to design mean more work. Extras like a blog or an e-commerce component can cost more, too.
• Commitment level. If you can only put in a few hours of work here and there instead of committing to the project full-time, the hourly price for a Freelancer will be lower.
• New or old clients. Some web designers will charge a new client to land the project, though this might set a bad precedent.

To explain the cost of a website in the UK, I decided to create a quick scenario which is quite common considering the enquiries I normally get.

Firstly, let’s look into the difference between getting a freelance web designer to build your new website or choosing a web design agency. Next, let’s compare the price difference between a website created using Shopify and a website created using a hard-coding approach.

Magazine / Brochure	Freelancer	Design Agency
Shopify	Starting £800	More than £4000
Hand Coded	Starting £4000	More than £8000

The table below represents the cost of a basic e-commerce website, from 10-20 products and all the basic features to start selling online with an eCommerce website design in the UK.

eCommerce store	Freelancer	Agency
Shopify	£1200	£13000
Hand Coded Shopify	£5000	£25000

Clients love paying web designers flat rates because they know exactly how much they’ll pay upfront. Web design freelancers hate flat rates because you can never be 100 per cent sure how long a project will take, especially if the client asks for endless changes, according to CSS-Tricks.

How much do freelance designers charge?

As an entrepreneur, you need a site that mirrors your image and all the more significantly, a site that does right by you. In any case, do you truly need to pay a large number of pounds for a site that does likewise work (or better) as one that costs not exactly 1,000 pounds?

The price of your website may depend on factors such as your location, its complexity, the level of experience your freelance web designer near me has, the quality of the work needed and the quantity as well. But the two main questions that will determine how much your website will cost are, without a doubt, the following:

• Is your site constructed utilizing a CMS (Content Management System) or is the website specialist utilizing 100% of his hand-coding abilities to make it?
• Is your site worked by a web architecture organization or an independent website specialist?

Average freelance web designer hourly rate UK

First, you have to consider the objective of your website, how large is your budget and how long are you willing to wait for your website to go live. If you choose a freelance web designer who can create your new website using a platform like Shopify, you can expect your website to be:

• CHEAPER – When comparing to a web designer who will be hand-coding 100% of your website and charge you £2,000 for his time and work, a freelance web designer who can build your website using Shopify, will charge you less than £1000 for the same quality, type and size of the website;
• SAFER – Platforms like Shopify are backed by a large community of cybersecurity experts who are dedicating their time to creating and improving their security apps, every single day; good loading times & speed
• EASIER TO MANAGE – A Content Management System is very user-friendly which means you will be able to easily make any changes to your text or images without any coding skills;
• FASTER TURNAROUND – A hand-coded website takes a lot more time and effort to build than a website designed using Shopify. For that reason, with a Shopify website, you can expect a lot more done in a shorter timeframe;
• SCALABLE – As mentioned before, Shopify has an incredibly large community, and you can find an app to add almost every type of functionality that you need to your website. Let’s say, for example, you start with a brochure website, and in a few years you decide to create an online shop, you won’t need to pay hundreds of pounds again.
• BESPOKE DESIGN – With the rise of platforms like Shopify now makes it easier and faster to build a fully bespoke website. It’s just like painting a masterpiece!

Average hourly rate for freelance web designer UK 2025

Nowadays, users from all over the world build Shopify sites, from small business owners, who want to expand their businesses online to authorities in different niches.

When it comes to deciding your website builder and which platform is the best option for you, you need to consider your next move. What is your traffic plan? SEO is a big part of the strategy of many online businesses. Some startups rely entirely on organic traffic from search engines.

In addition, are you aware that the most successful SEO experts use and recommend Shopify? Not surprisingly, one of the reasons why Shopify is so ahead of the competition is that it works so well for SEO.

But what makes Shopify so unique? Well, here are some answers:

• SEO-friendly permalinks — Shopify comes with the ability to use so-called “pretty permalinks.” That means links to posts and pages can contain keywords so search engines and visitors understand what they are about. … Easy content creation — Content has become the tool to stand apart in search engines.
• Adding Metadata Automatically – The SEO title and the meta description are two major ranking factors. You need to add them to almost every post and page of your website. Including the targeted keyword in the metadata can improve your position significantly.
• Also, they help to increase your CTR since they are viewable on search engines. You only need to install one of the many free Shopify SEO apps that are available for Shopify and then, add them.
• This process does not take more than a few minutes. Then, you can use the same plugin for every post. When you do not add the metadata manually.
• SEO-Optimized Images – Images make your content look more interesting and improve readability since it breaks up the flow of the text. The above affects your SEO indirectly because they improve the user experience. The images, though, should be quality ones and relevant to your articles.
• User Experience – With a good user experience, you can keep your visitors more time on your site and more engaged with your content. A bad user experience can be anything from a bad web design to an ugly structure of the content to poorly chosen images. Google can understand the user experience from metrics like the bounce rate and the average time that a guest remains on your site. You can check the bounce rate on your Google Analytics account. A high bounce rate, when the content is relevant to your ranked keywords, can be an indicator of poor user experience.
• Site Speed – Site speed is not a ranking factor but if the loading time of a site is high, your users will get frustrated and it will be bad news for your bounce rate. Also, if your site is very slow, it may get banned from Google.
• Mobile Optimization – The number of users, who use search engines from their smartphones and tablets, has increased over the last few years. Entrepreneurs must adapt to this new trend.

What’s the cost of hosting a website in the UK in 2025?

In 2025 if you are wondering how much it cost to make a website, one of the factors that you really have to keep in mind is the hosting price.

If you choose shared hosting, this can be anywhere from £2 to £13 a month or sometimes more, depending on the company you choose and the features you need. Managed hosting will cost between £15 to £50 per month, and e-commerce hosting can cost £5 to £25 each month. Dedicated servers will cost somewhere from £60-£80 per month.

E-commerce hosting is more suitable for online stores selling a huge number of products online. Managed hosting is for businesses, people with large portfolios and bloggers with large blogs. If you’re just starting or you have a small business or a hobby website, shared Shopify already includes hosting and will work just fine.

What about extra fees, how much does it cost to build a website for a small business? Freelance web developer rates UK

I already talked about the general costs that you have to deal with when you hire someone to build a website with Shopify. But there are other additional costs that you need to consider when you want to establish your own website.

For example, the domain name can cost anywhere from £10 to £50 yearly, or even a lot more if you want a more established, premium domain. With my Freelance web design services when you decide to hire me the domain name will be FREE for the first year!

Some businesses in the UK not only pay a lot for website security too, but they don’t rely only on what their hosting service has to offer. So you can sometimes pay £100 or even £200 per year if you use solutions like Sucuri, Wordfence, iThemes Security and others.

If you hire someone to integrate custom security solutions into your website, that will cost even more. There is also the fact that you need an SSL certificate (HTTPS://) to ensure your visitor’s privacy. Again with my web design services, you will get that for FREE.

What kind of website design and development mistakes you should avoid? Web Designer Hourly Rate

As a growing brand, the last thing you want is to be guilty of web design mistakes when launching an online presence.

A professional website is a requirement for gaining new customers, establishing credibility and fostering client relationships.

Ideally, the most effective websites provide:

• an optimal user-friendly experience,
• a steady flow of targeted leads,
• and of course, ongoing sales!

There’s no better time to take a look at your web strategy than right now—in an effort to uncover some of the most common web design mistakes to avoid.

I’ll cover seven major issues that will help you bring in more business with quick and easy fixes.

But first:

Before building a new website (or undergoing a redesign), ask yourself a few fundamental questions:

• What are the goals of the website?
• Who are the target customers or clients?
• How will I drive traffic to the website?
• Who is going to update the website, and how often?
• How much will website maintenance or updates cost?

Before contracting the website you should put every aspect on the paper: What do I need? What I don\’t need… Then you will know the new requirements of your website.

In addition, avoid any faulty tech or tools that are really new to the market. Granted, they might give you an advantage and new features.

But if they are not very well tested, you can encounter errors and that will eventually become a problem. Tackling all of that really helps immensely, and it will bring in better solutions in the long run. It’s definitely not an easy thing to do, but it will be worth it.

Web Designer Hourly Rate in the UK 2025

As mentioned above, a common way to determine the average price for website design in the UK is by setting an hourly rate. The same happens with freelancers from other countries like the USA or Spain, where the hourly rate can be as little as £5, which is quite common for freelancers from India or Pakistan thanks to their conversion rates.

Still, the hourly rate can also be £150 per hour or even more than that for more experienced freelancers living in Western countries.

Some freelance web designers like me charge per hourly rate and structure their prices into packages too, where they include all the aspects above mentioned and come up with a fixed cost for every project. Where else, package prices for delivering a website may start around the low hundreds and may go as high as around seven thousand pounds.

The prices usually depend on other factors or additional services provided as well.

To take a rough estimate: A 6-page website should cost you around £720. This number is estimated by taking £60 as the average per hour rate and multiplying it by 2 hours invested in each page.

Conclusion

There’s no denying that you should be very focused on the website costs to ensure that you’re getting the best value for money. Learning how much a website cost is very important, and as you can see, all the little costs can add up very quickly.

Take your time, study the market and make sure that you find the right solution. Click here if you want to see freelance website design work I do

For some, DIY website builders will be enough because they don’t require a massive, complex website, not to mention it’s a great way to save money. However, if you want to create a business website, then hire a great website developer and designer, it will be well worth it in the long run.

These prices are a great estimate and a proper starting point, but you should always ask professionals for a quote, and then pick the one that really delivers the best value for money!