What a website really costs to run each year in the UK

The seven lines on a realistic website budget

Almost every honest annual website budget in the UK is made of seven lines, and plenty of businesses only ever pay four of them.

• The domain name
• Hosting
• Business email
• The security certificate
• Maintenance and updates
• Content changes
• Extras: imagery, software licences and payment fees

For a brochure site for a UK trade or service business, one mailbox and no shop, the lot lands between roughly £150 and £800 a year. The first four lines are commodity costs, near enough fixed whoever you buy from.

What a domain, hosting and business email cost per year in the UK

Domain name: £8 to £20 a year

A .co.uk renews at roughly £8 to £15 a year, a .com at £12 to £20. Ignore the first year price: a £1 domain that renews at £22 is a £22 domain. Privacy is free for sole traders on a .co.uk, but a limited company's registered address is public by law. And letting a domain lapse past its grace period costs an £80 to £100 redemption fee, the most avoidable bill here.

Hosting: £0 to £360 a year

• Static or lightly dynamic brochure site: £0 to £70 a year, often faster than paid shared hosting.
• Standard UK shared hosting: £3 to £10 a month, so £36 to £120 a year. The £1.99 headline usually doubles or triples after the first term.
• Managed WordPress: £15 to £30 a month, so £180 to £360 a year. Worth it for a plugin heavy site, hard to justify otherwise.
• VPS or dedicated: £10 to £40 a month upwards. If you genuinely need this, you already know.

Agencies like to make this line sound frightening. A five page site for a plumber does not need £300 of hosting, so ask what the money buys.

Business email: £0 to £150 per mailbox per year

Google Workspace Business Starter is roughly £6 to £8 per user per month, so £72 to £96 a year. Microsoft 365 Business Basic is £5 to £6, Business Standard £10 to £12 with the desktop apps. A mailbox bundled with your hosting is £10 to £30 a year and is fine for one or two people. Both charge a premium for monthly billing.

The security certificate: £0

Budget nothing. Free automated certificates from Let's Encrypt are renewed by every competent host and give the same padlock as a £60 one. Extended validation stopped showing the company name in browsers in 2019, removing the only visible thing you were buying. If you are billed annually for a certificate, ask why.

Do you need a care plan, and what should be in it

UK care plans run £15 to £60 a month for a small brochure site, and £60 to £150 or more with a shop. Whether you need one depends on what the site is built from.

• WordPress or anything plugin driven: effectively compulsory. Small business sites are rarely targeted, they are neglected, and the culprit is usually a plugin nobody has patched in eight months. That is what maintenance actually prevents.
• A static site with no logins or database: far less to go wrong, though you still want off server backups and somebody to ring.

A plan worth paying for names its contents: updates on a stated schedule, off server backups with a tested restore, certificate renewal, uptime monitoring, spam protection, and a change allowance in hours or named tasks. If it says "support" with no scope, you are buying a feeling.

Ad hoc UK developer rates run £45 to £95 an hour freelance and £100 to £150 at agencies, and most small sites need two to six hours a year. Do that sum against the plan price before you sign.

The costs nobody quotes: imagery, licences and payment fees

These sit outside the quote and are often larger than the hosting everybody worries about.

Stock imagery

Ten images a month is around £26, so £312 a year. Free libraries are fine, but every competitor in town draws from the same photographs. A half day with a local photographer at £250 to £500, paid once, gets you your actual vans and staff.

Software and font licences

The biggest hidden line on the WordPress route, and it renews annually. A forms plugin is £40 to £70 a year, an SEO plugin £70 to £90, a booking system £70 to £200, a page builder £40 to £70, a security plugin £50 to £90. Four or five of those is £250 to £500 every year, and parts of the site break if you let them lapse. Ask which licences the site depends on and whose name they are in.

Payment processing

If you sell online, this dwarfs everything else. Stripe UK is roughly 1.5 per cent plus 20p on standard UK cards, around 2.5 per cent on European cards and about 3.25 per cent further afield. On £50,000 of card sales at a blended 1.9 per cent, that is £950 a year. Some hosted shop platforms add a fee on top if you decline their own gateway.

Builder subscription versus owning the site, over three years

Here is the comparison people actually want, with every assumption written out so you can change them.

Now the honest bit, and it does not flatter us. On cash alone over three years the subscription route is about £310 cheaper. Run it to five years and the gap closes to under £100, because the subscription keeps climbing while the owned site's costs sit still.

So the money is close to a wash, and anyone saying otherwise is selling. Two things are missing from the table, and both matter more than the £310.

Your time. Building a decent six page site yourself takes 25 to 40 hours once you count the writing, the photographs, the page order and the search setup. At £30 an hour that is £750 to £1,200, larger than the entire three year difference. If your evenings are free and you enjoy the work, the builder wins outright, and we will say so on the phone.

What you hold at the end. On the owned route you have a site, a domain and a hosting account all in your name, and you could move the lot in an afternoon. On the subscription route you have paid £887 and you own the words you typed. Stop paying and the site comes down. If that trade suits you it is rational, and the subscription route compared goes into it properly.

What we include as standard and what we charge for separately

Included in every build price, whatever the project costs: setting up the domain in your name, the hosting, the HTTPS certificate, your business email, analytics, Google Business Profile, technical SEO, schema, page speed work and search led copy. That is the setup work, not the suppliers' fees. £470+VAT is where a small site starts, and you can see how we quote in full.

Paid by you, direct to the supplier at their price: the three recurring lines in the table above, the domain at about £12, the hosting at about £72 and the email at about £69. We do not mark them up, we never hold them, and all three are in your name from day one.

Quoted separately, because they are different jobs: a care plan, ongoing search work, paid stock or photography, new pages after launch, and anything with a shop. You get the annual running figure alongside the build price, so the three year number is visible before you commit. See also hosting, domains and ownership answered and what the build itself costs.

And if the honest answer is that you do not need us, we say so. One page, an address, a phone number, no need to rank for anything, run by somebody who likes tinkering: use Squarespace or Wix and spend the £470 on signwriting for the van.

Questions to ask before you sign anything monthly

Print these. They work on us too.

1. What do I keep if I cancel? In writing, not on a call.
2. Is the domain registered in my name, and can I see the record?
3. Who owns copyright in the design and code? Under UK law it stays with the creator unless assigned in writing. Ask for that clause.
4. Is there a buyout figure, and what is it?
5. What does the monthly fee cover, as named tasks or hours?
6. What is the minimum term and the notice period?
7. How much can the price rise, and with how much notice?
8. Can I request a full backup at any time, and in what format?
9. Which paid licences does the site depend on, and whose name are they in?

A supplier who answers all nine quickly is probably fine. One who goes vague on one, three and four has told you something.