Properly built WordPress websites for Wigan businesses from £149.99 one-off. Hand-coded, mobile-first, full local SEO. Not a Wix template, not a pay-monthly platform, not an offshore reseller — a real Wigan agency with real prices.
This page is for the price-conscious Wigan business owner who wants to know exactly what cheap web design should look like, what it should include, and what to walk away from. The good news: properly cheap is achievable. The bad news: most "cheap" quotes are not.
Every price below is fixed and agreed in writing before any work begins. Cheap means honest, not stripped-back — you get the same hand-coded WordPress build at every tier.
Best for: Sole traders, tradesmen, new businesses
Best for: Established small businesses
Best for: Larger businesses, ecommerce, custom functionality
Best for: Businesses wanting to rank and stay ranked
A "cheap" Wix site at £19/month is not cheap — you pay forever. Here’s the real five-year cost-of-ownership comparison the pay-monthly platforms don’t advertise.
| Option | Upfront | Yearly | 5-Year Total | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mako one-page WordPress | £149.99 | £75/yr hosting | £524.99 | You own it outright. Upgradeable any time. |
| Wix Premium (Business) | £0 | £300/yr (~£25/mo) | £1,500 | Locked-in platform. Cannot fully export. |
| Squarespace Business | £0 | £276/yr (~£23/mo) | £1,380 | Limited SEO control. No code access. |
| Large agency template | £2,500 | £300/yr maintenance | £4,000 | Often a Divi/Elementor template at full price. |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | £0 | £180/yr (~£15/mo) | £900 | Cannot migrate. Locked to GoDaddy hosting. |
A Mako Digital one-page WordPress site costs £524.99 over five years — less than two years of Wix, less than two years of Squarespace, and a fraction of a national agency template build. That is what genuinely cheap looks like: low total cost, full ownership, no monthly tax.
The phrase "cheap web design" has been hijacked. Most cheap quotes in 2026 are not actually cheap — they are pay-monthly platforms with low headline prices and high lifetime costs, or freelance template-droppers selling the same site to twenty other businesses. Genuine cheap web design is something different: a properly hand-coded site, fixed price, fully owned by you, built to professional standards, just without the agency overheads that inflate quotes elsewhere.
At Mako Digital, cheap means £149.99 fixed for a complete one-page WordPress build. That price exists because we are a lean Wigan agency — no central Manchester rent, no account managers, no sales team commissions. We pass the operational saving directly to Wigan businesses. The build itself is the same code, same WordPress core, same schema standards used to build sites costing five times this much in London — the same architecture we use to rank our own homepage front-page for “web design Wigan”, applied to your business.
A genuinely cheap Wigan website should include — and ours does — bespoke WordPress design, mobile-first responsive layout, contact form with email alerts, click-to-call phone integration, on-page SEO foundations (LocalBusiness schema, semantic structure), Google Maps embed, GSC submission on launch day, GA4 install, SSL certificate, plus 30 minutes of free training and a written walkthrough document. If a cheap quote excludes any of these, you are buying a stripped-back starter, not a working website. See our full one-page Wigan service for the complete inclusion list.
If your Wigan business needs more than a single landing page, the £449 five-page build is still cheap by any reasonable measure — under £100 per page for a hand-coded WordPress site with full schema markup, services pages, testimonials, and Google Search Console setup. Compare that to the £1,500-£3,500 a national agency typically charges for the equivalent work.
eCommerce stores, booking systems, member portals, custom CRMs — even at our highest tier we are still cheaper than most agencies. £999 fixed for a custom multi-page WordPress build is a fraction of the £3,000-£10,000 quoted by larger Wigan and Manchester agencies for the same scope. Cheap is not just for one-page sites; cheap is the operating principle.
| Provider Type | Typical Cost | Bespoke? | SEO Ready? | You Own It? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mako Digital (Wigan) | £149.99 – £999+ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Large Wigan Agency | £2,000 – £10,000+ | ✓ | Varies | ✓ |
| Freelancer (Fiverr) | £50 – £500 | Rare | ✗ | ✓ |
| Wix / Squarespace | £150 – £400/yr | ✗ | Weak | ✗ |
| GoDaddy Builder | £100 – £300/yr | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
The economics of running a web design agency are simple. Three cost centres dominate: rent, salaries, and client acquisition. In central London, rent runs £80-£120 per square foot. In central Manchester, £45-£70. In Wigan, £8-£15. That overhead difference is roughly an order of magnitude, and it has to be paid by someone — either the client, or the agency’s margin.
Mako Digital chose to base in Wigan because the operational saving is significant and the work is identical. Our £149.99 fixed price is not a stripped-back offering — it is the same hand-coded WordPress site we would build for £400-£1,200 if we operated from a Soho office and needed to cover that overhead. We do not, so we do not.
The right question isn’t cheap vs expensive — it’s whether the site is built correctly. A £149.99 site built on solid WordPress foundations with proper SEO will outperform a £2,000 template site with neglected on-page optimisation every single time. Cheap-and-correct beats expensive-and-careless on every metric Google measures.
What you want to avoid is false cheap — a site so stripped-back it’s built on a free Wix template with no SEO, no mobile optimisation, and no thought given to how Wigan customers actually search. That kind of cheap costs you more in lost business than a proper £149.99 build would have cost in the first place. Want proof of approach? Look at Whittles Bakery — £149.99 build, ranking, converting, indexed in Google’s first page within weeks.
Cheap is not theoretical — here are live builds at each price point. Click through to the case study or visit the live site. No theory, no stock photos — real Wigan and UK businesses paying these exact prices.
Third-generation Pemberton bakery. Single-page WordPress with full product showcase, opening times, Google Maps embed, LocalBusiness schema. Live in 72 hours from sign-off.
Bristol landscaping company. Premium 5-page custom build — slate/teal/copper palette, GD brick monogram logo, portfolio gallery, full LocalBusiness schema. Proves we deliver UK-wide.
Former rugby league pro and certified MHFA instructor. Bespoke multi-page WordPress build — Amelia booking system, custom testimonials database with admin panel, 25+ speaking & training pages, full schema graph, SMTP-routed enquiry alerts. Booking-led custom site.
Cheap upfront quotes often hide real costs in add-ons. Here’s what we include as standard at £149.99 — and where other "cheap" providers tend to charge separately.
Often charged extra by "cheap" agencies — schema, GSC submission, GA4, meta tags. At Mako Digital all of this is included as standard on every build. A cheap site without SEO does not rank, which means it does not work, which means it was never actually cheap.
Should never be an extra in 2026. Some cheap quotes still deliver desktop-only sites and charge for the "mobile version". Every Mako Digital site is mobile-first by default — built that way from wireframe stage, not bolted on later.
Cheap quotes often assume you provide all the content. We can write content or work with what you provide — agreed upfront, never a surprise. We tell you which approach actually saves you money depending on your situation.
Not included in any web designer's build cost — but cheap sites sometimes hide this. Hosting is typically £5-15/month on a managed shared plan. We host most clients on Hostinger and tell you the cost upfront, not after launch.
Optional with Mako Digital — but not with most cheap-monthly platforms. "Cheap from £19/month" sites lock you into perpetual maintenance fees you cannot opt out of. WordPress is yours after handover; you can self-manage indefinitely if you prefer.
Cheap can be brilliant or disastrous — depending on what you’re actually buying. Here’s what to walk away from when a quote looks too cheap.
A genuine cheap WordPress site is bespoke. If the demo they show looks identical to ten other sites with different logos dropped in, you are buying a template. Templates lock you into a layout that does not fit your business.
"Cheap from £29/month" sounds great until you do the maths. £29 × 60 months = £1,740 over five years. A £149.99 one-off Mako Digital build with own hosting is £524.99 over the same period. Pay-monthly is rarely the cheapest option.
If they propose Wix, Squarespace, or "their own platform", you cannot ever migrate the site away. That is not cheap — that is a permanent revenue stream for them. Always insist on WordPress or a comparable open-source CMS.
A cheap website without SEO is invisible. Schema markup, GSC submission, page-speed optimisation, and meta tags should be included. "We charge separately for SEO" usually means they cut SEO corners on the cheap build entirely.
"Around £40-60/hour, project depends on scope" is not a quote — it is an open invoice. A real cheap web design package is fixed-price against a written scope, agreed before any work begins. No surprises at handover.
Some "cheap UK agencies" outsource builds to overseas resellers and mark up minimally. The site arrives but no one local can support it. Mako Digital builds in Wigan with direct contact — no outsourcing, no agency-of-an-agency relay.
Honest answers to every question Wigan businesses ask before booking a cheap web design package. Common worries, common myths, common questions.
Cheap web design built properly is excellent value. Cheap web design built badly — template-stuffed, slow-loading, with no SEO foundations — actively damages your business. The price-quality relationship people assume is wrong. A £149.99 Mako Digital site is hand-coded WordPress with full LocalBusiness schema, mobile-first design, and SEO baked in. A £400 template site from a freelancer or platform builder is often technically worse despite costing more, because templates carry code bloat that slows load times and weakens search rankings. The right question is not "how cheap" but "how is it built".
Three reasons. First, we are a lean Wigan-based agency — no Soho rent, no account management layer, no sales team commission. Second, we build on WordPress with custom PHP rather than expensive proprietary platforms. Third, we have systematised our build process across 270+ pages of our own SEO content, so our hourly output is far higher than agencies still hand-building each project from scratch. The saving comes from operational efficiency, not from cutting build quality.
No catch. £149.99 is the fixed one-off price for a complete one-page WordPress site — bespoke design (not a template), mobile-first responsive layout, contact form, click-to-call, Google Maps, on-page SEO foundations, schema markup, GSC submission on launch day, 30 minutes of training, and full handover. The only ongoing costs are hosting (£5-15/month, your choice of provider) and your domain name (£10-15/year) — and those go to the hosting company, not us. We do not lock you into a monthly retainer or platform subscription.
Because the upfront price hides the real cost. Wix and Squarespace charge £15-25/month — that is £180-300 per year, every year, forever. Over five years a "cheap" Wix Premium plan costs £1,500. A Mako Digital £149.99 WordPress site plus £75/year hosting is £524.99 over the same five years — under a third of the cost — and you own it outright. Cheapness is not the same as low monthly fees. True cheapness is total cost of ownership.
Some are. Mako Digital does not. Every site we build uses hand-coded PHP templates with custom CSS, written specifically for your business. AI-generated sites tend to be generic, structurally weak, and difficult to optimise for SEO because they have no semantic intent baked into the code. We use AI to speed up parts of our workflow (research, draft copy, schema validation) but the actual website code is human-written and built for performance.
If a quote is below £100 in 2026, you are almost certainly buying a template with your logo dropped in. Below £50 means a freelancer somewhere overseas reusing the same theme they sold to twenty other clients. £149.99 is, in our view, the sensible floor for a genuine bespoke build because below that the maths does not work — the time required to design, build, and properly SEO a one-page site cannot be priced lower without cutting corners.
A freelance web designer is one person — your project is in their queue between other freelance work, and if they get sick or busy your site stalls. A cheap web design agency like Mako Digital is a team operating with formal processes — your project has a fixed timeline, written specification, and continuity if anyone is unavailable. The price point can be similar but the reliability is fundamentally different.
Yes — when built correctly. A £149.99 Mako Digital one-pager ships with LocalBusiness schema, semantic HTML, fast page-speed scores, GA4 install, and GSC submission on launch. That is the same technical SEO foundation as a £999 build. The page ranks based on how Google reads it, not how much it cost to build. Our own pages rank front-page for "web design Wigan" using the same hand-coded approach.
You lose page count, not quality. A £149.99 one-page site has the same hand-coded WordPress foundation, the same schema markup, the same mobile-first design, and the same SEO setup as a £999 multi-page build. What you gain by paying more is more pages targeting more search terms, more sections to build trust, and more content to convert visitors. If your business needs five pages, the £449 five-page build is the right choice — but if a one-pager covers your scope, paying more for empty pages is wasted money.
Wigan offers the best price-to-quality ratio in the North West. London agencies charge £400-£1,200 for a one-page WordPress build of equivalent quality. Manchester agencies charge £300-£900. Wigan agencies including Mako Digital charge £149.99 fixed. The build quality is identical because the same code, same WordPress core, and same schema standards apply nationally — but Wigan rent and salary costs are a fraction of those in London or central Manchester, and that saving passes to clients.
No. The only optional extras we offer are local SEO retainers (from £99/month, completely optional) and ongoing maintenance (also optional, no required minimum). The £149.99 build includes everything needed for a working professional website. We do not lock you in, do not charge platform fees, and do not have surprise extras at handover. Hosting and domain costs are paid directly to the providers — not to us — and we tell you upfront what those will be.
Yes. Because every Mako Digital site is built on WordPress with a custom theme, you can scale up at any time — adding pages, adding ecommerce, adding booking systems, or migrating to a custom multi-page design. You own the site outright, the code is yours, and any competent WordPress developer (us or anyone else) can build on it. That portability is what separates real web design from rented platform builders.
Same network, different angle. Pick whichever route matches what you’re actually looking for.
Tell us what you need and we’ll give you a clear, itemised quote before any work begins. From £149.99 fixed, no monthly fees, no hidden extras, no obligation.