The honest answer is anywhere from a few hundred pounds to well over £15,000, and the spread is wider for advisers than for most small businesses. Compliance, calculators and trust signals all add work that a generic small-business site doesn’t need.
This guide gives real figures: what agencies are quoting UK advisers in 2026, what we charge and why, and the running costs that rarely appear in the first quote.
| Type of site | Build cost | Time to launch | Usually suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY website builder | A monthly subscription plus your own time | As long as you can spare | Testing an idea; not ideal once compliance matters |
| Agency site on a WordPress theme | £3,000–£5,500 | 3–5 weeks | A solo adviser or small practice |
| Agency custom build with calculators | £9,500–£17,000 | 8–12 weeks | Firms with several advisers and in-house tools |
| Heer prototype-first refresh of a small site | Under £2,000 | 1–3 weeks after design sign-off | An existing adviser or broker site that needs bringing up to date |
| Heer new adviser site | £2,ooo–£3,000 | 2–4 weeks after design sign-off | A firm starting fresh or replacing a site completely |
The two agency rows come from an agency’s 2026 pricing guide for London advisory firms; quotes from other agencies will vary. The Heer rows are what we actually charge.
Most of the cost of a traditional agency build is design time: mock-ups, revisions and a developer rebuilding the approved design. We prototype in Lovable, an AI design tool, so you see a working page within days of the briefing call and iterate on the real thing. That removes most of the design labour, not the quality. The production site is still built properly in WordPress, with a content editor you can use yourself.
Two adviser sites can look similar and be quoted £2,000 apart. These are the things that usually explain the gap.
[Optional: one line on a real project, anonymised, and which of these factors set its price.]
The build is a one-off; the site then costs money every year. A WordPress site that isn’t updated, backed up and monitored is a security risk, and for a regulated firm a hacked or defaced site is a serious problem.
| Running cost | Typical market range | Heer price |
|---|---|---|
| UK hosting with daily backups | £20–£70 a month | £90 a year on UK Servers |
| WordPress maintenance: updates, backups, uptime and security monitoring | £50–£100 a month for a theme-based site; £100–£240 for a custom one | £50 a month, with a monthly report (Heer WP Maintain) |
| Changes and extra work beyond maintenance | Usually hourly | £60 an hour |
| SEO articles written and published for you (optional) | Varies widely | £200 a month for 8 articles (Heer Content Services) |
Market ranges are from the same 2026 agency pricing guide. Also budget for your domain renewal, business email, and any paid review platform you display.
In practice, the minimum for a Heer site that’s hosted and maintained properly is £140 a month, or £1,680 a year. Content is optional, but it’s the part that brings in search traffic over time: the blog we write for one financial services client now accounts for 23% of their site visits.
Price is only half the comparison. What matters as much is who owns the result, and who makes sure it stays compliant.
| Option | What you pay | What you get | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY website builder | A monthly subscription | Full control and a low starting cost | Your time, and nobody checking the copy against the financial promotion rules |
| Network or template platform | Often bundled with membership, or a monthly fee | A quick, pre-approved site | Copy shared with many other firms, limited design, and a site you may not keep if you leave |
| Freelancer | Usually less than an agency | A custom site at a lower price | One person to depend on for fixes, security updates and changes |
| Agency | £3,000 and upwards | Design, build, copy and support from a team | Quotes that leave out running costs, copy or redirects |
If you’re on a network platform, the ownership question matters most. Find out whether you’d keep the domain, the content and your search rankings if you changed network. If the answer is no, every article you add is building someone else’s asset.
That last one is the question we built our process around. We’ll build a working prototype of your new homepage at no cost, with no proposal to sign first. Put it beside your current site, and if it doesn’t make the case, you keep the comparison.
David Dawkins is the founder and director of Heer Digital. Before founding Heer in 2012, he worked in marketing and product management in regulated financial services at GE Capital, GE Money, GMAC-RFC and the AA. He now leads Heer’s website work for IFAs and mortgage brokers. Connect on LinkedIn.
