The 5 Best Web Design Agencies in Manchester

A small brochure site on a template runs £2,000 to £6,000. A bespoke marketing site with custom design, a CMS and 10 to 20 pages is £8,000 to £25,000. A Shopify store with custom theme work is £10,000 to £40,000 depending on integrations. Adobe Commerce or a large custom build starts around £50,000 and goes well past £200,000. Ongoing costs are the ones people forget: hosting, platform licences, a maintenance retainer of £200 to £1,500 a month, and Shopify Plus alone starts around £2,000 a month.

Match it to who maintains the site. WordPress has the largest pool of people who can pick it up, and the largest security surface. Webflow gives a marketing team real control without developers, and locks you into their hosting. Shopify is the default for retail under significant scale, and takes a cut of revenue. Adobe Commerce is for large catalogues and complex B2B, and needs specialist developers permanently. Craft CMS is excellent and has a smaller talent pool. Ask what happens if you part ways with the agency, and how many local people could take the site on.

Some do. Webflow Premium Partner and Shopify Plus partner status are awarded on delivered project volume, client feedback and platform expertise, so they are genuine evidence. Adobe Solution Partner requires certified developers on staff. A generic "we build WordPress sites" is not a credential, because anyone can say it. Ask how many projects on that platform were delivered in the last year and ask to speak to one of those clients.

Get it in writing before the build starts. You want the domain registered in your name, admin access to hosting and DNS, a full assignment of intellectual property in the design and any custom code on final payment, and the repository handed over or accessible. Watch for proprietary frameworks: some agencies build on their own CMS, which means nobody else can maintain the site and leaving means rebuilding. Ask directly whether the platform is open and whether another agency could take it over.

Losing organic traffic on launch day. A redesign changes URLs, page structure, internal links and content, and without a redirect map and a technical plan a site can lose most of its non-brand search traffic overnight and take six months to recover. Two agencies here handle SEO in house partly for this reason. Ask specifically who is writing the redirect map, who is checking crawlability before launch, and what the rollback plan is. If the answer is "we will look at SEO after launch", that is the wrong answer.

Six to eight weeks for a marketing site, which is what Influx publishes and matches the market. Ten to sixteen weeks for a Shopify store with custom functionality. Six months or more for a large Adobe Commerce build or a migration. The delays are almost never development: they are content and sign-off. Every agency here will tell you the same thing, that the project stalls waiting for copy, images and a decision from someone who was not in the kickoff. Assign one approver before you start.