Vehicles 2 Lease · Vehicle leasing
Form conversion from roughly 1% to 4%
~1% → ~4%
Form conversion
Manchester · Greater Manchester
Web design in Manchester.
By SimonUpdated 4 September 2026
Bespoke, fast websites for Manchester businesses from £500, with hosting & care from £50 a month — instead of a five-figure build fee and a management charge you never quite understood.
A Manchester build, measured
Pro Pave, Greater Manchester.
A local paving company competing for high-value domestic work. Here is what its homepage actually does, measured in a browser rather than promised on a pricing page.
0.68s
Full page load
live homepage, cold measurement
Source: Browser Navigation Timing, 4 Sep 2026
0.05s
Time to first byte
51 milliseconds
Source: Browser Navigation Timing, 4 Sep 2026
0.56s
First contentful paint
content visible in just over half a second
Source: Browser Navigation Timing, 4 Sep 2026
11
Requests to render
a lean page, not a plugin pile-up
Source: Browser Resource Timing, 4 Sep 2026
Straight talking
What usually goes wrong with a Manchester web project.
A local business pays somewhere between four and fifteen thousand pounds for a website. It launches. It looks good. Then nothing happens to it for three years, because every change costs money and nobody wants to raise a ticket for a typo.
Meanwhile Google changes how it ranks things roughly every quarter. Chrome tightens what counts as a fast page. A competitor two miles away starts answering the questions your customers are actually typing. Your site is not getting worse — it is standing still while everything around it moves, which amounts to the same thing.
The second failure mode is the management fee. You pay a monthly sum, you get a report, and it is never entirely clear what happened in between. The report itself often absorbs a meaningful share of the hours it is reporting on.
Neither of those is a moral failing on the agency’s part. It is just a pricing model built for a slower era, still running in a much faster one.
The alternative
Build it well. Then keep it earning.
The build is the project. After launch, hosting keeps it current and a growth block — when you want one — goes on whatever will grow the business.
Design and build
The site itself — designed for the people who actually buy from you, built to load fast on a phone with one bar of signal.
Local search
Google Business Profile, local landing pages that earn their place, consistent name-address-phone details across the web.
Speed and technical health
Core Web Vitals, image weight, redirects, structured data. The parts nobody sells you and everybody needs.
Content that answers something
Pages written around what people search for, not around what you want to say about yourself.
Conversion work
Watching what people actually do on the site and removing whatever is stopping them getting in touch.
Keeping it alive
Updates, backups, uptime, and being the person who picks up when something breaks.
Local clients
Work for businesses around Greater Manchester.
What gets built
Every kind of build, one set of prices.
Whichever suits the business — including a rebuild of a site that already has customers. The £500 starting point is the same across all of them, and hosting and care starts at £50 a month.
Bespoke WordPress builds for businesses that need to update the site themselves — designed properly, built lean, and fast on a phone.
WordPress shops where the way you sell does not fit a stock platform — a thousand lines sold by the gram, a 17,000-product catalogue, a buying journey nobody has built before.
Shopify and WooCommerce stores built around the parts that actually move revenue: product data, search, speed, and a checkout that gets out of the way.
When an off-the-shelf platform will not model your business, we build it properly — Next.js front ends, custom APIs and Supabase back ends, designed to be maintained.
Identity work that holds together everywhere it appears — logo, type, colour and the rules that stop it drifting — built alongside the website, not separately from it.
Rebuilding a site that already has customers is a different job from building one that has none. The traffic it already earns is an asset, and most redesigns lose some of it.
The platform large catalogues end up on, and the one most likely to be running three versions behind because nobody wanted to touch it.
Headless and composable builds
Splitting the shop front from the shop. Genuinely better for some businesses and an expensive mistake for most, and the difference is knowable before you start.
There are also pages for each sector I build for, from trades and construction to e-commerce, each publishing the real UK search data for that market.
Not sure which? The guide to Shopify, WooCommerce and custom settles most of it in one question, and builder versus bespoke covers the case where you should not commission anything at all.
Who builds it
Simon, web designer in Manchester.
One person, and that person is the one doing the work. I design the site, build it, set up the tracking, do the technical SEO and answer the email. There is no account manager between you and any of that. If a project ever needs a specialist, you are told first and it is on the quote before it happens.
That is the honest reason the pricing works. A block of hours from somebody who built your site and reads its Search Console every month goes considerably further than the same hours from somebody learning your business from a brief. It is also the honest limitation: one person cannot be in four places at once, so if I am full I will say so rather than take the work and do it badly.
More about how I work, what I have actually built and the trade-offs of a one-person studio is on the about page, and the policy behind every figure on this site is at how we measure.
Before you commit
What a Manchester website costs, and whether you need a new one.
Manchester has an unusually deep web design market for a UK city outside London, which is good for you: you can afford to be fussy. The difficulty is that the same five-page site is quoted anywhere from a few hundred pounds to five figures, and almost nobody publishes a number you can compare against.
For a trade or service business across Greater Manchester, budget £500 to £2,000 for a site designed for you, fast on a phone, and structured so each service and area can rank for its own search — then from £50 a month to keep it that way. A shop, or anything with a booking flow or a calculation in it, is a bigger job and should be scoped before anybody quotes a number.
And if you already have a site, the first question is whether it needs replacing at all. Roughly half the businesses that ask me for a redesign need one; the other half need a few days of work on what they already have, and that is the cheaper answer I would rather give.
Service area
Where I work.
Based in Manchester and working across all ten Greater Manchester boroughs, plus Northern Ireland and the Republic where existing clients are. If you are just outside, ask — it is rarely a problem.
Websites for Rochdale businesses, from someone who has already built one here — a thousand-line sweet shop with a pick-and-mix builder that sells by the gram.
Websites for Bury businesses, from someone who has already built one here — an FCA-authorised vehicle leasing broker competing in one of the most crowded price-comparison markets there is.
Wigan is the least contested search market in Greater Manchester, and almost nobody local is competing for it. Here is the evidence, and what a Wigan business should do about it.
An affluent town with a strong independent retail scene, and a main search term nobody is competing for. That combination is unusual enough to be worth explaining.
Warrington has the most valuable clicks of any town on this list and almost no organic competition for them. That gap is the whole argument for building a page here.
The most open local market of the thirteen boroughs I checked — nobody is competing for the Oldham searches at all. This page explains what that is worth, and what it is not.
Bolton is the most contested design market in Greater Manchester outside the city — and its SEO terms are completely undefended. That split decides what a Bolton business should actually do.
Stockport has the second-highest advertiser value of any town here and a design market that is genuinely hard to break into. The way in is the search terms, and this page shows why.
Macclesfield, Wilmslow and Knutsford are one buying market with three sets of search terms, and every one of them is winnable. Here is the data for all three.
Salford is a small search market and an almost completely undefended one. This page publishes the numbers, including the part where the numbers are modest.
A borough where nobody is competing for the local searches and no advertiser is bidding on any of them. Small, undefended, and worth being honest about on both counts.
Websites for businesses in Northern Ireland, from a Manchester studio that has built two of them — including a wedding gift-list platform for a family furniture retailer trading since 1972.
The largest piece of work on this site is for an Irish retailer: a 17,000-product furniture catalogue that went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month in five months.
Also covered, without a page of their own because there is nothing first-hand to say about them yet: Trafford, Sale, Didsbury, Chorlton, Prestwich, Whitefield, Ramsbottom, Middleton, Heywood, Eccles, Swinton, Urmston, Leigh, Atherton, Glossop and the surrounding towns. A page about a town I have never worked in would be worth nothing to you and slightly less than nothing to Google.
- Manchester city centre
- Salford
- Stockport
- Bolton
- Bury
- Oldham
- Rochdale
- Tameside
- Trafford
- Wigan
- Altrincham
- Sale
- Didsbury
- Chorlton
- Prestwich
- Ramsbottom
Questions
Web design in Manchester — the practical bits.
How much does web design cost in Manchester?
Almost nobody in this market publishes a figure — on the live Manchester search result read on 4 September 2026, exactly one ranking studio displays a starting price at all, and it reads "from £1500". Realistically, budget £500 to £2,000 for a bespoke site from a small studio and considerably more from an agency. Mine start from £500 for the build and £50 a month for hosting and care, because I do not make my money on the build. There is a full breakdown in the guide to what a website costs.
Do you meet clients in person in Manchester?
Yes, and for local clients I would usually suggest it for the first conversation. It is much easier to understand a business by sitting in it for an hour than by reading a brief. After that most work happens over email and calls, because that is what wastes least of your time.
Which parts of Greater Manchester do you cover?
All ten boroughs — Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan — plus the surrounding towns. Vehicles 2 Lease, one of the case studies on this site, is based in Bury. Pro Pave works across Greater Manchester from a base in the city.
Will my site rank for local searches?
That is a large part of what a growth block goes on. Local ranking comes down to a properly optimised Google Business Profile, pages that genuinely serve the search rather than repeating the town name, fast loading on a phone, and consistent business details across the web. It is unglamorous and it works.
Do you build on WordPress or something custom?
Whichever suits. Most local businesses are best served by a properly built WordPress site they can update themselves — Pro Pave is a bespoke WordPress theme that renders from eleven requests. E-commerce usually means Shopify or WooCommerce. Where a business needs something genuinely custom I build it in Next.js.
How quickly can a new site go live?
A focused local business site is usually live within four to six weeks of starting, depending on how quickly content and photography come together — which is almost always the bottleneck, not the build.
Who will actually build my site?
Simon — the same person who replies to your first email, sets up the tracking and answers when something breaks. There is no account manager, nothing is passed to a junior, and nothing is subcontracted.
Can you redesign my existing site rather than start again?
Often, and it is the option an agency has least reason to suggest. If the structure is sound and the problems are speed, an awkward enquiry journey or missing pages, that is usually days of work rather than a rebuild. Ask for that option to be priced before agreeing to a new site.
Manchester business, tired website?
Send me the address. I will look at it properly — speed, search visibility, the journey someone takes to get in touch — and come back with what I would change first.