Most people ask what a website costs to build. Far fewer ask what it costs to keep running, and that is the bill that catches businesses out. The build is a one-off you plan for. The running costs arrive quietly, on separate invoices, from several different companies, usually with a price rise in year two.
If you have ever wondered where your website money actually goes, here is the honest breakdown. We have covered what a website costs to build separately, so this is purely about the yearly cost of keeping one alive.
The line items
All figures are typical ranges rather than quotes, and they move around depending on provider and country.
- Domain name: roughly £10 to £20 a year. A .com or .es is cheap and non-negotiable. Watch for first-year discounts that renew at three times the price.
- Hosting: £40 to £250 a year for shared hosting, considerably more for managed or business-grade. This is the line where cheap genuinely costs you, because slow hosting drags down everything else, as covered in why a slow website is costing you customers.
- SSL certificate: usually £0. Let's Encrypt is free and perfectly valid, and most decent hosts include it. If someone is billing you separately for a basic certificate, question it.
- Plugins, themes and licences: £0 to £250 a year. Mostly a WordPress reality. Premium themes, form builders, booking tools and SEO plugins tend to be annual subscriptions, and they stop getting security updates when you stop paying.
- Backups: £0 to £80 a year. Sometimes included, often an add-on. Skipping it is a false economy you discover at the worst possible moment.
- Maintenance and updates: £0 if you do it yourself, or £15 to £80 a month if someone does it for you. Software updates, security patches, checking things still work after an update.
- Content changes: £40 to £80 an hour if you pay a developer per change. This is the one that surprises people most. Three small text changes a year can cost more than your hosting.
- Business email: around £5 to £7 per user per month if you want yourname@yourbusiness.com on a proper provider.
Three realistic scenarios
The DIY builder route (Wix, Squarespace and similar). Around £190 to £400 a year all in, since hosting, SSL and the platform come bundled. Cheapest in cash, and you supply all the labour. The trade-offs are covered in Wix versus hiring a designer.
Self-hosted WordPress, maintained by you. Roughly £100 to £500 a year depending on your plugin habit. Cheap on paper. The real price is your time and the risk of being the person responsible when an update breaks the contact form or the site gets compromised.
Someone else handles everything. Typically £400 to £1,200 a year for a small business site, whether as a monthly plan or a care package. More cash out, but domain, hosting, updates, backups and changes are all somebody else's job. Our own plans start from £49 a month with everything included, which lands in that range.
The honest summary: if you enjoy the technical side and have the time, doing it yourself is genuinely cheapest. If you do not, paying a fixed monthly amount is usually cheaper than paying hourly for changes plus carrying the risk yourself.
The costs that catch people out
- Renewal price jumps. That £2.99 a month hosting deal is an introductory rate. Year two is often three or four times higher. Always check the renewal price, not the signup price.
- Losing your domain. Miss a renewal email because it went to an old address and you can lose the domain entirely, which is the single most expensive mistake on this page. Keep auto-renew on and the contact email current.
- Paying per tweak. If every price update or new photo means an invoice, you will simply stop updating your site, and a stale site quietly costs you customers.
- Cleaning up after a hack. Recovering a compromised site costs far more than the maintenance that would have prevented it, and it usually happens to sites running years-old plugins.
- Not owning your own assets. Make sure the domain is registered in your name, not your web person's. This matters enormously the day you want to move.
Work out your own total in ten minutes
- Check your card or bank statements for the last twelve months and list every recurring charge relating to the site: registrar, host, plugin subscriptions, email, any retainer.
- Add anything you paid a developer or agency for changes during the year.
- Note the renewal date and renewal price of each item, not the price you first paid.
- Check the domain is in your name and set to auto-renew.
Most small business owners doing this exercise find one of two things: they are paying for something they no longer use, or they have no idea when the domain expires. Both are worth ten minutes to fix.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run a website for free?
Nearly. Free tiers exist, but you normally get a subdomain rather than your own address, adverts you do not control, and no support. For anything customer-facing, your own domain is worth the small annual cost on credibility alone.
Why did my hosting price go up so much in year two?
Because the first-year price was a promotion. It is standard practice across the industry. Check the standard renewal rate before you commit, and diarise the renewal date so it does not surprise you.
What happens if I forget to renew my domain?
Your site and any email on that domain stop working. There is usually a grace period to recover it, sometimes with a redemption fee, and after that it can be bought by someone else. Keep auto-renew on.
Do I have to pay for an SSL certificate?
Generally no. Free certificates are standard and browsers treat them identically. Paid certificates only make sense in specific commercial situations, which almost certainly do not include a small local business site.
Is it cheaper to pay once or monthly?
A one-off build is cheaper in total if you can handle the ongoing work yourself and nothing goes wrong. A monthly plan costs more over several years but includes the maintenance, support and changes, and spreads the cost so there is no large bill up front. Which is better depends entirely on how much of the work you want to own.
The point of all this is not that websites are expensive, because they are not. It is that the cost should be predictable and you should know exactly what you are paying for. If you would rather have one monthly figure covering the domain, hosting, maintenance, updates and changes, that is what we do. See our websites or get a free consultation and we will happily go through your current bills with you, even if the answer is that you are better off as you are.