Are There Grants for a Small Business Website in the UK?
It’s a fair question to ask. You’ve started something, money is tight, and the website is the bit that costs hundreds of pounds before you’ve earned a penny. So you search for a grant, and you find a lot of pages that sound encouraging without ever quite telling you where to apply.
Here’s the honest answer up front: there is no single national UK grant for building a small business website. There is no “website grant scheme” you can apply to on gov.uk. Anyone telling you otherwise is usually selling something.
That’s not the whole story, though. Real support does exist — it’s just local, patchy, and rarely called a website grant. Below is what’s genuinely worth your time, and what to walk away from.
Why there’s no national website grant
Government business support in the UK tends to fund things that are hard to measure loosely — capital equipment, taking on staff, exporting, energy efficiency, research. A five-page brochure website doesn’t fit any of those categories neatly, and it’s too cheap to justify the administration costs of a national scheme.
What you’ll find instead is digital support wrapped inside broader schemes: a general start-up grant you could choose to spend on a website, a “digital adoption” programme that includes some advice and maybe a small voucher, or free training rather than money.
That distinction matters when you’re searching. “Small business website grant” returns very little because the thing barely exists. “Business support [your county]” returns rather more.
What actually exists, and where to look
These are the routes worth checking. None are guaranteed — availability changes constantly and varies enormously by area, so treat this as a list of doors to knock on rather than a list of things you’ll definitely get.
| Route | What it typically offers | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|
| Your local Growth Hub | Free advice, signposting, occasional local grant schemes | Always check first — it’s free |
| Your council’s business pages | Start-up grants, high street or town centre funds | Very variable, but genuinely local money |
| gov.uk “Find a grant” | The official search for government grants | Check it, but expect few website-specific results |
| British Library BIPC network | Free business and IP advice, workshops, market research databases | Excellent free resource, no money changes hands |
| Start Up Loans (British Business Bank) | A government-backed loan, not a grant, plus mentoring | Useful — but it’s borrowing, treat it as such |
| Sector or community funds | Rural, coastal, heritage or community-business specific pots | Worth a look if you fit the category |
Two things to note. First, several of these are advice, not cash — which sounds like a consolation prize but often isn’t. An hour with a Growth Hub adviser who tells you what your competitors are actually doing is worth more than £200 towards a website you hadn’t thought through.
Second, Start Up Loans are a loan. They’re often mentioned in the same breath as grants because they’re government-backed and the rates are reasonable, but you pay it back.
The scams, and how to spot them
This is the part worth reading twice, because the search term “website grant” attracts a specific kind of cold call.
The lease agreement dressed up as a grant. You get a call offering a “government-funded” or “grant-supported” website for your business. There’s an enthusiastic sales pitch, a designer who calls the next day, and paperwork to sign. What you’ve actually signed is a finance or lease agreement — often with a third-party finance company, often for three to five years, often non-cancellable even if the website is never delivered or the agency disappears. The monthly figure sounds small. Multiply it by sixty and it rarely does.
The tell: any mention of a grant alongside a document you sign with a finance company’s name on it. Never sign a finance agreement for a website. If you take nothing else from this article, take that.
The grant application service. A company offers to find and apply for grants on your behalf, for an up-front fee or a percentage. Genuine grant-writing consultants exist and earn their money on large, complex funding bids. For a website costing a few hundred pounds, paying someone to hunt for a grant that probably doesn’t exist is a straightforward loss.
The “you’ve been selected” email. Real grant schemes don’t select you out of nowhere. They have application windows, eligibility criteria and a website you can find independently.
A simple rule: check the scheme independently before you talk to anyone about it. Search for the scheme name, not the caller’s company name, and see whether it appears on a .gov.uk or council website. Legitimate support is easy to verify. Scams rely on you not checking.
The bigger problem the grant would solve
Step back a moment and ask what the grant is actually for. Almost always, it’s for the up-front build cost — the £300–£1,500 a freelancer typically charges in the UK, or the £1,500 and up an agency might quote, with the usual caveat that these vary by region and by how much you need. That lump sum, at the exact moment you have the least money, is the barrier. Running costs afterwards are comparatively modest.
If that’s the real problem, a grant is only one possible solution — and given how rarely they exist for websites, probably not the most likely one. Other routes to the same outcome:
- Do it yourself with a builder. Wix, Squarespace and the rest cost £10–£40 a month and you supply the labour. Honest about the trade-off: it costs evenings rather than pounds. We’ve compared them in our guide to website builders for UK small businesses.
- Start with your Google Business Profile. It’s free, it’s often what people actually find first for a local search, and it will carry you for a while. It’s not a substitute for a website long-term — we’ve set out why in detail here — but it costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
- Reduce the scope. Most new local businesses need one page that says who they are, what they do, roughly what it costs and how to get in touch. That’s a much smaller job than the site people imagine they need. What to put on a small business website covers the actual essentials.
And here’s where we declare our interest, openly. We’re Ready Set Web, and this problem is the reason our offer exists: we build the website free for new UK businesses, on a free .co.uk domain, with hosting at £24 a month including VAT as the only cost (no minimum term, no setup fees). We build it from your Google Business Profile, so once the domain is registered the site is live within 48 hours. No grant, no application form, and definitely no finance agreement — here’s how it works.
If you only do three things
- Find your local Growth Hub and your council’s business pages and see what’s currently open in your area. It’s free and it takes twenty minutes.
- Check gov.uk’s grant finder so you’ve looked at the official route, while expecting little that’s website-specific.
- Assume any inbound call offering a funded website is a lease agreement until you’ve read every page of the paperwork and searched the scheme independently.
The uncomfortable truth is that most UK small businesses pay for their own website, one way or another. The good news is that the full breakdown of what a small business website really costs is usually less alarming than people expect — and if you’re right at the beginning, our checklist for starting a business online in the UK is the place to start.