This is harder than it sounds, because agency pricing is inconsistently structured across the industry. Some agencies price by deliverable, some by day rate, some by project value. A quote that looks expensive might reflect a more thorough process; one that looks cheap might be missing a significant chunk of work.

That said, there are a few things worth checking. Get quotes from at least two other agencies for the same scope – not to play them off against each other, but to understand the range. Ask each agency to break their quote into phases or workstreams so you can see where the cost sits. If an agency refuses to do that or gives you a single lump-sum number with no breakdown, that's a reasonable thing to push back on.

Day rates are a useful benchmark. A mid-weight developer in a decent agency will typically be £600-£900 per day; a senior strategist or creative director £800-£1,200+. Junior rates are lower. If you can work out roughly how many days are implied in a quote, you get a sense of whether the maths adds up. It won't be precise, but it'll tell you if something's wildly off.

What this means for you: If you're unsure whether a quote is fair, the most direct thing you can do is ask for a line-item breakdown and talk through it with the agency. A good agency won't be offended by that. If they are, or if they can't explain the logic behind individual costs, that tells you something.

Typically three to six months before you see meaningful movement in rankings, and six to twelve months before that translates into reliable, consistent organic traffic. For competitive markets, longer. Any agency promising first-page rankings in four to six weeks is either using tactics that won't hold, or targeting terms with almost no search volume.

The pace is slow because search engines are cautious about rewarding new or changed content. They need to see that a page is consistently relevant and credible over time. A new piece of content might take two to three months to reach its stable ranking position. Building the authority to rank for competitive terms takes longer still.

That timeline is frustrating if you need results quickly, which is one reason paid advertising is often worth running alongside an SEO programme rather than waiting for organic to pick up.

What this means for you: If you start an SEO programme, set internal expectations accordingly. Month three isn't a useful measure of success. Month nine or twelve is. Build your reporting framework around leading indicators – content published, backlinks acquired, crawl health – rather than just rankings, which will be slow to move at first.

It depends on the scope, but most brand projects run between 8-16 weeks from discovery to delivery. We move at pace without cutting corners because getting your brand right is worth the investment. 

We’ll give you a clear timeline upfront and keep you in the loop at every stage. No surprises, no delays, just planning your launch with confidence.

What this means for you: Eight to sixteen weeks is a reasonable working assumption, but the variable that moves it most is your own decision-making. Agree upfront who signs off and how quickly.

A straightforward brochure website redesign for a small-to-medium business – ten to twenty pages, standard functionality, an established brand – typically takes three to five months from kick-off to launch. More complex projects, or ones involving significant content production, user research, or phased rollouts, will take longer.

Where timelines go wrong is usually in the content phase and the review cycle. Agencies can build faster than most clients can produce, approve, or supply content. If you're going into a redesign without a clear plan for who's writing copy, who's signing it off, and when – you'll hit delays. Similarly, if you have multiple stakeholders with sign-off authority who aren't aligned on the brief, you'll end up cycling through rounds of amends that nobody anticipated.

Agencies that quote very short timelines – 'six weeks to launch' for a substantial site – are either cutting things out or setting expectations they won't meet. It's worth asking what specifically would be delivered in that timeframe and what would follow in a second phase.

What this means for you: Build the content plan before you start the design process, not after. It's the single biggest variable most clients underestimate. If you don't have internal resource to handle copy, factor content production into the agency scope and budget from the start.

There are two separate costs here: the agency management fee and the actual media spend (the money that goes to Google, Meta, or whoever you're advertising with). These are often bundled together in a quote, which can make it harder to see what you're paying for.

Agency management fees for paid search typically run 10-20% of media spend, or a flat monthly fee if the spend is low or predictable. Expect to pay £800-£2,000+ per month in management fees for a competent independent agency or specialist; larger shops may charge more. On top of that, your media budget needs to be sufficient for the platform to gather meaningful data – broadly, under £1,500 per month in Google Ads spend is often too little to run effective campaigns in competitive markets.

Social advertising (Meta, LinkedIn, etc.) has similar structures. LinkedIn tends to require higher minimum spend to be effective and works better for B2B than B2C.

What this means for you: When getting quotes, ask agencies to separate the management fee from the media budget in their proposal. Also ask what minimum media spend they'd recommend given your market – that's often a more revealing question than the management fee itself.

It depends almost entirely on what you mean by rebranding. A logo refresh and updated visual guidelines for a small business might be £5,000-£12,000. A full brand programme for a mid-size company – including strategy, messaging, visual identity, tone of voice, and guidelines – typically runs £20,000-£60,000. For a large financial services firm where compliance sign-off, a wide range of applications, and internal change management are involved, you can add another zero.

What drives the cost is less the output itself and more the thinking behind it. A new logo is a commodity. A new logo that's the visible expression of a clear brand strategy, built around an understanding of your audience and competitors, is a different thing. You might not be able to tell them apart in a PDF, but one will work harder for you.

The things that tend to inflate brand costs unnecessarily are excessive rounds of revision, scope that expands to include digital or print production work mid-project, and strategy phases that are billed as separate projects rather than built into the programme from the start.

What this means for you: Before you get quotes, be clear about what you're trying to solve. If the answer is 'we look a bit dated,' that's probably a refresh brief. If the answer is 'we're entering a new market and our brand no longer reflects what we do,' that's a strategic repositioning – and the cost and process should reflect that difference.

'Ongoing support' covers a wide range and agencies define it differently, which makes comparing costs difficult. At its most basic, it means someone will fix things when they break. At a more useful level, it means proactive maintenance: keeping WordPress core and plugins updated, monitoring for security issues, managing backups, and having someone available to make content or minor functional changes without going through a full project brief.

A basic maintenance-only package for a WordPress site might run £150-£400 per month depending on complexity. That typically covers updates, backups, monitoring, and perhaps an hour or two of minor amends. A fuller retainer that includes a defined block of development or content hours each month will be more – £600-£1,500+ is common for a meaningful level of support.

What you want to avoid is paying for a support contract that is essentially a promise to respond if something breaks, with no proactive work included. Those tend to look cheap until the site gets hacked or goes down and you find out that 'support' meant email response within 48 hours.

What this means for you: Ask any agency what specifically is included in their support package and what falls outside it. Get a clear answer on response times, whether updates are included or billable separately, and what happens if there's a security incident. If they can't answer those questions precisely, the package isn't well-defined enough to be reliable.

Websites can cost anywhere from a few thousand pounds to several hundred thousand, and both ends of that range can be the right answer depending on what you need. The variation isn't random – it reflects differences in scope, complexity, and how much strategic and creative thinking is involved.

A brochure site with five to ten pages, a CMS, and a standard set of templates will typically sit in the £10,000-£25,000 range at a competent agency. Add e-commerce, a complex integration with a CRM or data feed, a bespoke design system, or significant content production, and that number climbs quickly. Enterprise-scale builds – the ones involving multiple stakeholders, phased delivery, custom functionality, and accessibility auditing – can run to £100,000 or more.

Where agencies tend to differ is in how much thinking sits behind the build. A low-cost provider might deliver a functional website with a purchased theme and light customisation. A full-service agency working on the same brief might spend weeks on user research, information architecture, and design iterations before a line of code is written. Whether that additional work is worth paying for depends on your business, your users, and how much the website has to do.

What this means for you: Be specific about what you need before you ask for quotes. 'A new website' is too vague to price accurately – you'll get wildly different numbers because agencies will be guessing at your scope. The more clearly you can describe the functionality, user types, volume of content, and existing integrations, the more useful the quotes will be.

Discovery is the work of understanding your business, your customers and your constraints before anyone designs or builds anything. Depending on the project it involves some mix of stakeholder interviews, customer or user interviews, desk research and market analysis, a review of your analytics and search data, a content audit, a technical SEO audit, and workshops.

Yes, it’s paid. We’re direct about that because the alternative – absorbing it into a build cost – just hides it, and an agency giving away discovery tends to give away the thinking with it.

It isn’t always necessary. Where a brief is tight and contains what’s needed, or where we already know your business well from previous work, it can be reduced or skipped. For a new client on a new website or a new brand, it’s effectively mandatory, because skipping it reliably produces a worse project.

What you get out of it is documented findings, a refined brief and a revised cost estimate – which sometimes means a lower number than the original, once the actual scope is clear.

What this means for you: Treat a paid discovery as a way to de-risk a much larger commitment. If the findings suggest a different project to the one you thought you were buying, that’s the discovery having done its job.

A retainer is an ongoing arrangement where you pay a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope of work. A project is a defined piece of work with a start, end, and specific output. Both have their place.

Retainers make sense for campaign work that has an ongoing nature: paid search management, content production, SEO, social media. These benefit from consistent attention, institutional knowledge, and the kind of optimisation that compounds over time. Switching agencies or approaches frequently resets the learning curve and tends to produce worse results.

Project-based work makes sense for campaign work that has a clear deliverable and end point: producing a specific campaign asset, running a one-off paid campaign for a product launch, building a campaign landing page. You don't need an ongoing relationship to get those done.

The risk with retainers is that they can become comfortable for both sides without either party scrutinising whether the value is there. A retainer that's been running for two years without a proper review is often worth pausing to assess. The agency should be proactively demonstrating value; if you're not sure what you're getting from a retainer, ask for a line-item account of where the time went last quarter.

What this means for you: For any retainer, agree upfront on what success looks like, when you'll review it, and what would trigger a conversation about changing the scope or ending the arrangement. That isn't adversarial – it's just sensible commercial management, and a good agency should be comfortable having that conversation.

Fixed price gives you budget certainty in exchange for less flexibility. You agree on a scope, the agency prices it, and that's what you pay – unless the scope changes. It works well when requirements are clearly defined and unlikely to shift. The risk is that agencies will sometimes add contingency to a fixed price to protect themselves from uncertainty, so you may pay a premium for that certainty.

Hourly or time-and-materials billing means you pay for actual time spent. It's more flexible – if requirements change or the project evolves, you're not constrained by what was agreed upfront. The downside is that it's harder to manage against a budget without active oversight. Costs can drift.

Some agencies offer a hybrid: a fixed price for the design and build phases, with ongoing work billed on time and materials. That often makes practical sense because the project phase is more predictable than what comes after it.

What this means for you: For a well-defined project with clear requirements, fixed price is usually fine and provides useful predictability. For ongoing retainer work or anything exploratory, time and materials tends to be fairer for both sides. The most important thing in either model is a clear, detailed scope – the pricing model matters less than the clarity around what's included.

Mostly scope creep – requests that come in during the project that weren't part of the original brief. Sometimes that's on the client side: new requirements emerge, stakeholders who weren't involved at the start surface with opinions, or the business changes direction mid-project. Sometimes it's on the agency side: the brief was under-scoped at proposal stage, assumptions weren't made explicit, or estimates were optimistic to win the work.

Technical complexity that wasn't visible at the start is another common cause. A third-party integration that looked straightforward turns out to have a poorly documented API. Content arrives late and in a different format than expected, requiring additional work to prepare. Performance issues appear late in testing, which take longer to resolve than anticipated.

It's rarely one party's fault entirely. The more useful question is whether the overspend was flagged early or came as a surprise at the end. A good agency will raise budget risks as they emerge and have a clear change request process – not so that they can add charges for everything, but so that both sides can make informed decisions about what to include.

What this means for you: Before a project starts, ask how the agency handles change requests and at what point they'd flag a budget risk. Agree on what 'in scope' means in writing. That one conversation will save more friction than almost anything else you can do.