How much does a school website cost?

In the UK a primary school website usually costs between about £900 and £2,800 to set up, plus roughly £300 to £400 a year for hosting and support. Larger schools, secondaries and trusts pay more. Those figures come from the price lists that specialist school website companies publish.

What do you get at each level?

Around £900 to £1,000: a template. You pick a design from a set, your logo and colours go on, and your content goes in. Quick and tidy. It will look like other schools that picked the same one.

Around £1,600 to £2,800: a design made for your school. Your photos, your layout, your character. This is the usual choice for a school that competes for pupils.

Above that: big secondaries, groups of schools, or sites with extras like online payments, parent logins or a full admissions process. That's a custom quote.

What is the yearly fee for?

Hosting, security updates, backups and someone to call. Published prices sit around £300 to £400 a year.

Ask what's included. Some providers count every small change as paid work. Others include support. Over five years that matters more than the set-up price.

What pushes the price up?

• Photography. Good photos of your real school change everything, and they cost extra.
• Moving years of old content across.
• Extra languages.
• Online forms that feed your office systems, payments, or a parent area.
• A group of schools sharing one design.

None of those are tricks. They are real work. Just decide which ones you need before you ask for a price.

Is the cheapest option fine?

For a small state primary with a full roll, often yes. The job is to publish what the rules require and keep parents informed. A clean template does that.

For a private school, a nursery or anywhere competing for families, no. Your website is your first open day. A template that looks like the school down the road tells a parent nothing about why to choose you.

What is the real cost people miss?

A site nobody at the school can update.

The price that matters is not on the quote. It's the hours your office spends emailing a supplier to change a date, or the term dates that are wrong for a month because fixing them was too much hassle. Small businesses end up paying for a website twice for exactly this reason. The first one was locked up.

Before you sign, ask to see the screen where you change a page. If the school secretary can't use it in five minutes, keep looking.

What about outside the UK?

The prices are different and the logic isn't. In countries where few schools have a site, a simple, fast one that works on a cheap phone and has a WhatsApp button will do more than an expensive one.

Pay for clear information and real photos. Don't pay for animation.

What should you ask for in a quote?

1. 01The set-up price and exactly what it includes.
2. 02The yearly price, and what counts as extra.
3. 03Who owns the domain name and the content. It should be the school.
4. 04How you update it, shown to you live.
5. 05What happens if you leave.

We build websites on those terms: you own it and your office can run it. If you want a price for yours, tell me about the school. If you're still deciding what it needs, start with what a school website must have.