Short answer: a salon website should cost less than one good colour appointment a month. If it costs more than that, or locks you in for three years to find out, someone's having you.
Salons have it harder than most businesses online, because the booking platforms got there first. Your clients book through an app, your gallery lives on Instagram, and the website is the bit everyone forgets about. Here's what a salon site really costs in 2026, what the booking platforms quietly cost on top, and what the site needs to do to earn its place.
A website that actually ranks pays for itself the moment it turns one search into one booking.The options, honestly priced
Build it yourself
Cheapest on paper. Dearest in the evenings you're not behind the chair.
DIY website builder
Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, with your price list and gallery.
The gallery's the easy part. What gets a salon found is a page for each service people search for, balayage, colour correction, extensions, bridal, plus reviews Google can read. Most template sites stop at one page and an Instagram feed.
The "free website" subscription
Monthly subscription companies
"Free website, just £99 a month." The word free is doing a lot of lifting.
Three years at £99 a month is £3,564, the price of a lot of colour appointments. Stop paying and the site disappears, gallery, reviews and all.
A freelancer or traditional agency
Freelancer or web agency
One-off fee, you own it. Nothing wrong with that in principle.
Every change after launch is on the clock. Updating your price list: £50–£75. Adding a new stylist's bio: £150–£300. So the price list goes stale, the gallery stops updating, and Google quietly drops you.
Your booking system has its own hidden bill
Fresha, Treatwell and similar marketplace booking platforms advertise a low or free entry price, and for a while that's genuinely what you pay. The Independent plan on Fresha runs from around £11–£12 a month. The catch sits in the commission: 20% of the booking value on anyone who found you through the marketplace, with a £6 minimum per booking. On an £18 cut, that £6 floor pushes the real rate to roughly a third of the ticket, not the 20% advertised.
Booking marketplace commission
A salon bringing in 25 new marketplace-sourced bookings a month at a £55 average ticket pays somewhere around £374 a month, roughly £4,490 a year, once the subscription and commission are added together. That's not a one-off, it repeats every month the marketplace keeps sending clients.
None of this means Fresha or Treatwell are a bad idea, they bring real new clients through the door. It means the booking system on your own site, the one that takes a client who already found you through Google, shouldn't be quietly running the same commission on someone who was never a marketplace lead in the first place.
What actually matters for a salonIt has to rank for the searches that book chairs
A beautiful gallery nobody finds is a portfolio, not a business. What earns is a site with a page for every service, colour, cut, balayage, extensions, styling, built to show up when someone searches "hairdresser near me", "balayage salon [town]" or "hair colour near me tonight". That means real service pages, your reviews in the schema so they show as stars in Google, and a booking button that goes to an actual calendar rather than a phone number nobody picks up during a cut.
The one-client mathsDo the sum that counts
A cut and blow-dry outside London typically runs £35–£80, averaging around £55. A full head of colour runs £60–£150, averaging around £100, and balayage commonly runs £100–£200. Put a Starter build, £1,250 and £79 a month, next to that. One extra colour client booked through the site in a slow month covers most of the build outright, and every appointment after that is close to pure profit on the site.
Three tiers, all transparent
A one-off build fee plus a small monthly. No long tie-in. You own the site. Cancel any time after the 3-month minimum.
Three years at the Professional tier is £7,144 all in: about the cost of one agency build, but with 36 months of new content, updates, hosting and ongoing SEO bundled in. Stop any time and you keep the site.
Three questions for a salon website
Will every service I want more of get its own page? One "services" page with a price list won't rank for balayage, extensions or bridal. Separate pages will.
Does the price include a booking system, or is that a separate bill? Know whether your monthly is paying for hosting and content, or whether there's a commission running quietly on top of it too.
If I leave, do the site, the domain and the gallery come with me? Your photos are years of work. Make sure they're yours.
The right question isn't "what does it cost?" It's "does it fill the chair, and is it mine?"
Want to see this built specifically for a salon, rather than bent from a generic template? The hairdresser websites page covers what that actually looks like. And if no-shows are the bigger headache than getting found in the first place, this guide covers what actually reduces them.
Keep reading: How much does a website cost in the UK? Every option, side by side · Every Zenlio price on one page · Salon booking app or your own website?
