In London a customer can compare you with several alternatives in a few taps, so your website has to load quickly on a phone, say plainly what you do and make getting in touch easy. We design and build business websites that do that, and that Google and AI assistants can read as well as people can.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
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2020
Building since
1,000+
Clients served
UK
Registered company
4.6/5
Rated on Clutch
Quick answer
London is the UK's largest market, and for most services there are plenty of competitors a few clicks away. That shapes what a website has to do. A prospective customer who finds you will usually have other options open in other tabs, often on a phone, and decides quickly whether you look credible, relevant and easy to contact. A site that is slow on mobile data, hides the offer or asks for a long form loses that comparison quietly, and nothing in your analytics tells you it happened.
The supplier side is just as crowded. Searching for a web design agency in London returns everyone from solo designers to large digital agencies in Shoreditch and Soho, and quotes for what sounds like the same brief can differ widely. The difference is rarely the visual design. It is how much is built from scratch, whether the old site's URLs are protected during the switch, whether your staff can edit the result, and who looks after it once it is live.
SpiderHunts is an engineering firm first, and that decides where the effort goes: pages that load quickly on a phone, content delivered in the HTML so that Google and AI crawlers both receive it, a content management system your team can use, and migrations mapped URL by URL. If what you need is brand identity or campaign creative, a specialist studio will serve you better, and we will say so on the first call.
On location, plainly: SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team. The London address is a registered office only, so London projects are run through video calls, shared documents and a named contact, in the same way as projects anywhere else in the UK.
What we do
Our web development for London businesses covers six areas. Most projects combine two or three of them: a new design and build, a migration from the old site, and care once it is live.
Structured around the handful of pages that actually win work, laid out for a phone before a desktop, and built on WordPress or hand-coded depending on who will maintain it. Prices for a business website start at £3,000 plus VAT.
Moving an established site to a new design, platform or domain without throwing away the search traffic it has earned. Redirects come from the real list of URLs, are tested before launch and are checked against crawler behaviour afterwards.
For organisations that publish often: news, case studies, events, vacancies. Built with a small set of well-chosen plugins so updates stay manageable, and editing screens set up for the people who will actually use them.
Stores for London retailers and brands, with category structure, product data and filter pages planned so the catalogue can be crawled and found, rather than fixed by an SEO after launch.
Core Web Vitals fixed at the cause, keyboard and screen reader access considered from the first template, and content served in the HTML so AI crawlers that do not run JavaScript still receive it.
Hosting, updates, backups and speed checks, plus a monthly allowance of small changes and a basic SEO health check, from £150 a month plus VAT. Optional, if you would rather keep maintenance in-house.
The London market
Local search in London works at the level of the neighbourhood rather than the city. Someone in Clapham looking for a physiotherapist, or in Islington looking for an accountant, is usually shown businesses close to where they are searching, and a single page that says you serve all of London gives Google little reason to show you in either place. If you genuinely serve particular areas, each area page has to earn its place with something specific: the services you offer there, how you reach customers there and the questions they ask. If you cannot say anything different about an area, it is better not to have the page.
A London website often has visitors from outside the UK. Hotels, restaurants, galleries, schools, law firms and clinics can all expect enquiries from abroad. That affects small things that are easy to get wrong: prices stated in pounds with VAT made clear, phone numbers written in international format, an address and postcode that work in map apps, and no assumption that the reader knows the area. A second language is worth adding only when someone can answer enquiries in it.
Several of London's biggest sectors are regulated, and that changes how a site is run as well as what it says. Financial services firms, solicitors and private healthcare providers usually need wording approved before it goes live, a clear record of what changed and when, and required regulatory details placed where people expect to find them. We set the site up so that this approval process is easy to follow; decisions about the wording stay with you and your compliance advisers.
Finally, assume the first visit happens on a phone, on the move. Plenty of people look up a supplier between meetings or on public transport, where the connection comes and goes. A page that needs a heavy script to load before it shows anything will often be abandoned before it appears, which makes speed on a weak connection the most practical design requirement a London site has.
Cost
Quotes for a London website vary widely because the word website covers very different jobs. A five-page site on a well-chosen theme, a marketing site with original design and a content system, and a site with bookings, payments or a client login are three different pieces of work, and a quote only makes sense once you know which one is being priced.
The things that move the price are fairly predictable. The number of distinct page templates matters more than the number of pages: fifty case studies on one template cost far less than ten pages that each need their own layout. Every connection to another system, such as a booking tool, a payment provider, a CRM or a property feed, adds design, build and testing. Moving and rewriting content from an old site takes longer than most people expect, and an established site with a long search history needs a redirect plan of its own.
For our own work the starting points are published: a business website from £3,000 and an optional care plan from £150 a month, both plus VAT. How far above that a project goes depends on the points in the previous paragraph. You get a written quote with scope agreed up front, listing what is included and what is not, so it can be compared line by line with other quotes.
Some costs sit outside any supplier's quote and are worth budgeting separately: domain names, premium plugin or theme licences, photography, copywriting if you are not writing the pages yourselves, and subscriptions the site depends on, such as a booking system.
Part of the price difference between London suppliers reflects how they are set up rather than the work itself. A large agency with central premises, account managers and a pitch team has to recover those costs, while a solo designer has very few. Neither model is wrong, but it is fair to ask how much of a quote is design and build time, and who will actually be doing that work.
Choosing a supplier
Start with what the site has to do for the business, written down in a few sentences: bring in enquiries for a particular service, take bookings, sell products, help with recruitment, or reassure clients who already know you. Give every supplier the same brief, including the systems the site must connect to and who will write the content, or the quotes will not be comparable.
Then look past the portfolio. Attractive screenshots tell you about visual taste, not about whether the sites load quickly, kept their rankings after a relaunch or can be edited by the client. Ask for a live site the supplier built and run it through Google's PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. Ask how they handled redirects on their last redesign, and what happened to that site's search traffic afterwards.
Ask who does the work. Some agencies, of every size, pass design or development to subcontractors. That can work well, but you are entitled to know who is building your site and whom to call when it breaks. Ask too who owns the domain, the hosting account, the design files and the code when the project ends, and get the answer in the contract.
Ask what happens after launch. A site nobody looks after falls behind: plugins go out of date, forms stop sending and pages slow down as images pile up. Whether the answer is a care plan, a support arrangement or training for your own staff, agree it before launch rather than after the first problem.
If being able to sit in a supplier's office matters to you, let that narrow your list early, because it rules out remote firms like us. If it does not, widen the search: the useful test of any web agency in London or elsewhere is the written answers to the questions above, not the address in the footer.
The London picture
London businesses rarely lose enquiries because a site looks dated. They lose them in the seconds after a visitor arrives from a search, often on a phone between meetings or on a train, and in the parts of the site that search engines and AI assistants cannot read.
Planning a redesign? Talk to us before the new URLs are decided
Half an hour on a free call now costs far less than recovering lost search traffic after launch. If a rebuild is not what you need, we will tell you.
Typical London briefs
Illustrative situations rather than named clients. Each shows what we would look at first.
A small advisory or accountancy firm whose site was built years ago, works poorly on a phone and describes its services in terms only the partners use. Most new clients check the firm after a referral, so credibility and clear service pages matter more than visitor numbers. If the firm is regulated, its required details need a fixed, easy-to-find place.
Aim: a site that reassures a referred client from the first screen
A young company whose site was assembled in a page builder before launch and is now slow, hard to extend and built in a way that gives AI crawlers very little to read. The marketing team wants to publish product pages and articles without asking a developer each time.
Aim: a fast, server-rendered site the marketing team can run
A hospitality business where most visitors arrive on a phone, often from outside London, wanting the menu, opening hours, how to get there and a booking button. Menus uploaded as PDFs and a booking widget that loads last are the usual faults.
Aim: menu, hours and booking that work properly on a phone
A clinic whose treatments, practitioners and fees are scattered across a site originally built for one doctor. Patients compare clinics carefully before booking, so treatment pages that answer their questions plainly matter more than a striking home page.
Aim: treatment and practitioner pages patients can find and follow
A building, plumbing or electrical business serving Croydon, Bromley and Sutton from one address, with area pages that copy one another. Each area page needs real content, such as the jobs and property types it sees there, or it adds nothing.
Aim: area pages that each have a reason to exist
An agency whose listings come from its property software and whose branch pages say almost the same thing. The work is a clean listings feed into the site, quick search and listing pages, and branch pages that describe each area properly.
Aim: listings that load quickly and branch pages that stand apart
How we work
Every stage happens over video calls and shared documents, with one named contact who knows the project. You see the work as it is built rather than only at the end.
A call to understand what the site has to do, who will maintain it and which pages bring in enquiries today. For an existing site we gather its URL list and search data, so the pages that matter are known before anything changes. You then get a written quote with scope agreed up front.
We agree the layout of each template before any colour or imagery, then apply your brand to it. The pages that win enquiries are designed in detail, not only the home page, and you comment on each before the build begins.
Server-rendered, quick on a phone and accessible, in the CMS agreed at scoping. Content goes in as it is approved, and you can review progress on a test version of the site throughout.
Redirects tested before the switch and checked afterwards against how crawlers actually behave. Your staff get a walkthrough of the editing screens, and the site is yours on full payment, as set out in your contract.
Clear scope · Regular demos · Full handover
Honest fit
Our strengths are speed, structure, migrations and maintainability rather than branding. The two lists below show which side of that line a project usually falls.
Your options
London has every kind of supplier. Each suits a different kind of project, and the right choice depends on scope, budget and how much help you want after launch.
| Website builder | Freelance designer | Large agency | SpiderHunts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suits | A very small site you will run yourself | A simple site, or design help for an in-house team | Brand, campaign and site together, on a large budget | Business sites, redesigns and migrations where being found matters |
| Who does the work | You do | One person, usually design and build | A team, sometimes with subcontractors | Our remote team, from structure to launch |
| Meeting in person | Not applicable | Often possible | Usually, at their premises | No: video calls and shared documents |
| Brand identity | Whatever the theme offers | Varies from one freelancer to the next | Usually in-house | Not something we do; we apply your existing guidelines |
| Migrations and redirects | Limited redirect tools | Ranges from thorough to absent | Often a dedicated SEO or technical lead | Mapped URL by URL and checked after launch |
| After launch | Yours to maintain | As and when they have capacity | Typically a monthly retainer | Optional care plan from £150 a month plus VAT |
| Starting cost | Lowest outlay | Usually modest | Usually highest | Business websites from £3,000 plus VAT |
Sectors
The capital's main sectors each put different demands on a site. These notes describe typical needs, not a list of clients.
FAQ
Questions London owners and marketing teams raise on a first call.
Still have a question?
Ask us directly. A senior engineer reads every question.
Ask about your projectNo. SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team, and works with London businesses through video calls, shared documents and a named contact. The registered office, at 182-184 High Street N, Office 14607, London E6 2JA, is the company's legal address rather than a place the team works from, so there is nowhere for us to meet you in person. We would rather you knew that before the first call.
With us, a business website starts from £3,000 plus VAT, while ongoing care, if you want it, is from £150 a month plus VAT. Where a particular project lands depends on the number of distinct page templates, the systems the site connects to, how much content has to be written or moved, and whether an established site has to be migrated. Across London, quotes for similar-sounding briefs vary widely, so compare what each one includes rather than the totals. You get a written quote with scope agreed up front.
It depends on the job. A good freelancer can be excellent value for a simple site, and you deal directly with the person doing the work. The risks are capacity and continuity: one person can be ill, busy or move on, and jobs such as migrations, integrations or accessibility work need several skills at once. An agency or company gives you more cover and a wider range of skills, at a higher overhead. Whichever you choose, ask who builds the site, who owns the accounts and what happens after launch.
It can, and in a market as competitive as London there is always someone ready to take the positions you drop. The usual cause is a redirect plan built from URL patterns, which covers the tidy pages and misses the irregular ones that often carry the most history. We map every URL with traffic or links, test the redirects before launch and check them afterwards. Nobody can promise rankings, but a mapped and tested migration removes the most common reason sites lose them.
Very little of a website project depends on being in the same room. Briefs, design reviews, content approvals and training all work over video calls and shared documents, and the build happens on a computer wherever the developer sits. What matters more is overlap in working hours and a clear point of contact: we schedule calls in UK business hours and give you one named contact. If face-to-face workshops matter to your team, a supplier with premises will suit you better.
It depends on who maintains the site and what it has to do. WordPress suits organisations that publish regularly. Shopify suits most shops that want a hosted platform with payments handled. A custom build makes sense when the site is really an application, such as a client portal or a booking system with its own rules, which is where our custom software work for London businesses comes in.
Yes. We do not design logos or brand identities, but we apply existing guidelines carefully and can work alongside the brand or creative agency that has done that part. Usually the brand agency sets the look and we turn it into templates that are fast, accessible and editable.
We build sites server-rendered by default, so the content is present in the HTML that every crawler receives. That matters because AI crawlers generally do not run JavaScript, and a site assembled in the browser can look fine to visitors while giving ChatGPT or Perplexity almost nothing to read. Rendering is the foundation; whether assistants actually mention you also depends on wider search work.
Yes, if you want us to. The plan includes hosting, software and plugin updates, backups, speed checks, some small edits each month and a basic SEO health check, from £150 a month plus VAT. It is optional, and you can look after the site yourself or use another provider. The site is yours on full payment, as set out in your contract.
Send the form with your current site, if there is one, and a few lines on what the new one has to do. A senior engineer reads it and comes back with questions and an honest view on fit. If you would rather start smaller, the free website teardown is a short recorded video with three specific fixes for the site you have now.
Start here
Send a link to the current site, the pages that matter most and who will maintain the new one. We will reply with questions, a suggested plan and a likely budget range in pounds. If you would be better served by fixing the site you have, we will tell you that instead.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.