How much should a UK school website cost in 2026 / 27?

Some schools have websites for free through Google Sites.

Why schools choose this tier

It’s free! It’s simple to set up, and Google Sites has a large variety of templates.

Why pay more?

For one, everything needs to be created internally by school staff. It also needs to be maintained. This means an already overstretched staff member giving up their evenings and weekends to create a website. Additionally, many schools may find it difficult to keep the website updated, and they need to keep finding time in their schedule for ongoing maintenance.

These free services are also often not school-specific. This means they lack certain features that come with a specialist school system, like attendance leaderboards, policy managers or booking portals.

This is the template price range! For this price, many specialist school website companies will provide templates, which a school can pick out. These templates can be customised to fit your logo and branding and populated with your own images.

Bear in mind, virtually every website company will charge for hosting separately on top of this.

Some companies offer free websites, with ongoing hosting costing around £500. This can save schools money in the first year. Long term, this doesn’t save much. It also runs into the problem of not having a specialist school website company.

Why schools choose this tier

Good, fast and cheap. You get everything you need. The website is produced by a specialist school website provider who can ensure that everything is compliant.

Additionally, you know exactly what you’re getting before you buy. It’s also very fast, since it’s pre-coded. The cost goes into the deployment of the site.

Why pay more?

1. Many schools prefer the flexibility of a bespoke design.
2. A school website has many potential uses. For some schools, the purpose of their website is to differentiate them from other schools. A template website can’t do this as well as a bespoke website.
3. Additionally, the school may have certain features it wants to promote. Some schools are promoting their attendance; some want to promote their values. Some have unique aspects, like sports facilities, that they want to feature prominently.
4. Within this budget, schools will still have to provide their own graphics, and provide their own photographs and video.

Here, schools can get a fully bespoke website design from a specialist school website provider, built on a system made specifically for schools. Inside this price range, schools can also incorporate some custom brand design elements, graphics, photography and videography.

Why schools choose this tier

This is by far the most popular choice for schools.

They can tailor the website to their specific offering, and can work to appeal to their specific demographics and community.

Moreover, schools can decide what their website is for. Is it to attract more staff, to attract more pupils, to increase parent engagement? Maybe none of these, or a mixture of everything.

The higher price range means the web agency does a lot more of the heavy lifting. They are able to help with content migration, photos, videos and graphics. This takes a lot more of the pressure away from the school itself. The agency can handle a lot more and schools can focus on teaching.

All our websites come with a proprietary backend system built specially for schools called SiteLive CMS. This CMS includes many features schools pay for elsewhere, at no extra charge.

Why pay more?

For most schools this is the price range we recommend. There’s usually little reason to want to go higher. However, we can explain what schools can get from a higher budget next.

In this price range, schools are using their website primarily as a sales tool. Sites in this range are normally more expensive for the following reasons:

• Integrations: deep integrations with external booking systems, MIS software or communication platforms.
• CRM: built-in backend sales and applicant tracking systems.
• Feature-length films: many of these sites will come with promotional films, and even smaller videos for different sections of the website.
• Feature photography: rather than the standard photography day, where a photographer will take pictures around the school, specialist and planned scenes will be set up for various sections of the site.

For DBD Schools, this is outside our normal range. If this is what you want, give us a call. If we can’t help you, we can certainly recommend other suppliers who can.

While the Google Sites option is totally free, all the other options above just include the actual website design, build and deployment. To keep your website online you will need to pay for server rental (called ‘hosting’). This usually runs between £10 and £150 a month. Most of our schools pay £20, or nothing extra with an aftercare package.

In the past, companies would charge for an SSL certificate. That’s the thing that makes your website “secure” and stops the “this website is not secure” warning from appearing. This is an outdated business practice. If your supplier wants to charge you for an SSL certificate, please run!

Not all suppliers migrate content over to your new website for free. It’s worth checking if this is included in your website project.

Very few school website providers, and no non-specialist providers, will do an Ofsted and DfE audit for you as a standard part of website launch. Either you’ll have to remember to do it yourself or ask for it to be quoted separately.

Website technology needs constant maintenance in order to stay fast, reliable and secure.

For website providers that build websites on their own proprietary system, these updates are often automatic, behind the scenes, and at no extra cost.

For providers that use ‘off-the-shelf’ content management systems, like WordPress, updates need to be carefully managed. It’s risky for you not to keep the website upgraded.

You’ll need to ask your potential suppliers how maintenance works.

While it’s not a requirement to have photos on your website, they serve an important marketing function. Without photos, visitors may not trust the website is genuine. It’s also hard to describe the character of your school in words; photos do a much better job.

Photography can be done in-house, but it’s recommended to get a photographer, especially a specialist school photographer who understands the consent and safeguarding principles that govern schools.

School photography usually ranges from £500 to £3,000 a day.