A business owner in Hull asked me last month what her website was costing her. Not to build. To exist. She knew what she had paid the person who made it three years ago, and she knew money left her account for something web related every month, and that was about as far as it went.
We went through it together. Five direct debits, two of them for the same thing, and one for a service attached to a site that had been replaced two years earlier. Her annual running cost was about double what it needed to be.
So here is the honest breakdown of what a small business website actually costs to keep running for a year, what each line is really for, and where the money usually leaks.
The domain name
Roughly eight to sixteen pounds a year plus VAT for a .co.uk, depending on where it is registered. Some registrars charge more like fourteen or fifteen pounds including VAT, some are closer to seven or eight.
The trap is the first year offer. A domain advertised at ninety nine pence for year one renews at the normal rate forever after, and the normal rate is the number worth comparing. It is not enough money to lose sleep over, but it is worth knowing what you are actually signed up to.
The thing that matters far more than the price: the domain should be registered in your name, on an account you control, with an email address you still have access to. I have spent whole afternoons trying to recover domains registered by a developer who has gone quiet. If you are not sure, that is worth checking today.
Hosting
This is the widest range on the list. Shared hosting for a small WordPress site runs somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty pounds a year. Managed WordPress hosting, where the host handles updates, staging and better caching, is more like two hundred to five hundred. Serious hosting for a busy site goes up from there.
Most small businesses in Hull are fine at the lower end. What you are paying for as the number goes up is speed, support that knows the platform, and somebody else worrying about backups.
What I would push back on is paying managed prices for shared quality. If the site takes six seconds to load and support takes three days to answer, the tier is not doing its job. A slow site is usually not fixed by paying more for hosting, but bad hosting will undo good work.
The SSL certificate
This one should be zero. Let's Encrypt certificates are free, automatic and trusted by every browser, and nearly every decent host issues and renews them for you without being asked.
If there is a line on your bill for an SSL certificate at sixty or eighty pounds a year, ask what it is for. There are genuine cases for paid certificates, mostly around organisation validation for larger companies. A five page site for a local trade is not one of them.
People forget email is a separate thing from the website, and then they move host and their email stops. It is the most common way a website move goes wrong.
A proper mailbox on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is a few pounds per user per month, so call it sixty to a hundred and twenty pounds a year for one or two people. Some hosts include mailboxes, which is fine until you want to move. I would rather clients own their email independently of whoever hosts the site, because then the two can never take each other down.
Plugins, themes and licences
This is where the leak usually is. WordPress plugins are mostly free to install and then charge annually for updates and support. A typical small site might have one or two paid ones: a form plugin, a booking tool, an SEO plugin, maybe a page builder licence at forty to a hundred pounds a year each.
Individually they look small. Five of them is three hundred pounds a year, renewing quietly, for features that in some cases nobody uses any more. I go through this list properly for clients once a year, and it is normally the single biggest saving available. It also makes the site faster, because every plugin has a cost beyond the invoice.
Maintenance
Either somebody does the updates, the backups and the security checks, or nobody does and you find out the hard way. There is no third option where WordPress looks after itself.
If you do it yourself, it is an hour a month and the cost is your time. If someone does it for you, expect anywhere from thirty pounds a month for basic updates to a couple of hundred for real monitoring, testing and fixes included. I have written up exactly what I do every month so you can compare it against whatever you are being quoted.
The reason this line matters more than the hosting line: the sites I get called in to rescue are almost never sites with bad hosting. They are sites nobody touched for two years.
The lines nobody plans for
Content. New photos, a new page for a new service, seasonal updates. Either your time or a few hours of someone else's.
Forms and sending. Contact form emails that need a proper sending service so they do not land in spam. Often free at small volume, sometimes a few pounds a month.
Stock photography or an icon licence, if the design leans on them.
The annual hour where someone checks the site still works on a new phone, the contact details are right, and the copyright year is not stuck in 2021.
So what is the real number
For a typical small business site in Hull or East Yorkshire, with one or two mailboxes, sensible hosting and a maintenance arrangement, I would expect somewhere between three hundred and nine hundred pounds a year all in. Under three hundred usually means nobody is maintaining it. Over nine hundred usually means there is something on the list that has stopped earning its place.
The number itself matters less than knowing what every line is for. Get the list on one page, with what it does, what it costs and when it renews. Once you can see it, the duplicate direct debits and the subscriptions attached to a site you no longer have tend to stand out on their own.
If you want a second pair of eyes
I do a free thirty minute surgery where we go through exactly this. Bring your invoices and your hosting login and I will tell you what each line is doing, what you can drop, and what you are underpaying for. No pitch at the end. Book a slot here.
One thing out of scope: if you run an ecommerce store and the question is really about platform costs or moving off Magento or Shopify, that is a different conversation with different numbers, and I cover it on headless-digital.com rather than here.
Free 30-min surgery
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