How much does a website cost per year in the UK?

If you look after it yourself, about £12.57 a month: £150.79 a year divided by 12, for hosting, a .co.uk domain and one mailbox, all ex VAT. Beyond that, the biggest factor is who does the looking after. Here are four common setups for a small business site, with the same domain and one email mailbox on each, so the rows compare fairly.

The cheap rows are cheap because you supply the time. As an assumption only: if looking after the site takes you 1 hour a month and an hour of your time is worth £30, that is £360 a year, which takes the DIY row from £150.79 to £510.79. The expensive rows buy that time back. Put in your own hours and rate. If you would pay someone by the hour instead, what web designers charge in the UK gives the going rates.

Five lines, three of them small.

• Domain: your address, renewed every year. Usually under £10 for a .co.uk.
• Hosting: the server that keeps the site online. From a few pounds a month.
• Email on your domain: Google Workspace Starter is £5.90 per user per month (Standard £11.50) on an annual plan, ex VAT; paying monthly costs about 20% more. Microsoft 365 Business Basic is another option; check its current UK price on Microsoft's Business Basic page.
• SSL certificate (the padlock): free from Let's Encrypt, and free on all plans at IONOS, Krystal and 20i. 123 Reg includes it on its Economy plan for the first year only.
• Maintenance: updates, backups, checks and changes. From your own time to a monthly plan.

If you are still deciding how to get the site built, how much a website costs to build in the UK covers build prices, and whether you have to pay monthly for a website compares paying monthly with paying once over five years.

Shared hosting is enough for most small business sites. The headline price is usually an introductory offer; the renewal price is what you pay from then on.

Managed WordPress hosting, where the host handles more of the upkeep, costs more: 20i charges from £10 a month up to £300 on its biggest plan, and Kinsta starts at $35 a month ($30 billed annually), in US dollars ex tax.

Nominet, which runs .uk, charges registrars a wholesale price of £3.90 a year for a .uk or .co.uk, a price set in January 2020. Registrars add their margin.

• Krystal: £7.99 a year to register and the same to renew, ex VAT.
• 20i: £9.99 a year, the same on renewal.
• IONOS: £1 for the first year, ex VAT, with £10 shown beside it as the usual price. The renewal price is not stated.
• 123 Reg: £3.99 for the first year, then £12.99 a year, ex VAT.

Check the renewal price before you buy, and make sure the domain is registered in your name. Who owns your website, and how to check explains what to look for.

Maintenance plans range widely, because they include very different amounts of work. These are published UK prices:

Compare what each tier does as well as its price. A useful plan should say plainly whether it covers:

• Hosting, or only maintenance of a site hosted elsewhere.
• Software and plugin updates, and backups you can restore from.
• Checking that enquiry forms still send.
• Monitoring for downtime, and who fixes it.
• Content changes: how many, and what counts as one.
• A notice period, so you can leave.

Coltura's Growth Care at £149 a month sits at the top of this table. It includes hosting, SSL, backups and updates, uptime and form checks, speed and search indexing monitoring, content changes within a fair monthly allowance, new service pages as you grow (larger campaign pages are quoted separately), a monthly report and a quarterly conversion review. It is optional: cancel any time, with a month's notice. More options are on our website maintenance plans page.

If you are thinking of leaving a builder, see Wix vs custom websites.

• More mailboxes. Email is priced per person: three Google Workspace Starter mailboxes are £212.40 a year, ex VAT.
• Paying monthly. Builders and email cost more billed monthly than yearly; Wix Core is £228 against £192, both plus VAT.
• Managed hosting. 20i's managed WordPress plans run from £10 to £300 a month.
• Paid plugins and apps. WordPress add-ons and builder apps renew every year.
• Someone else's time. A care plan is the biggest single line, from £30 to £149 a month in the tables above.

Not on this page: advertising, SEO services and paid content writing. They can be worth paying for, but they belong in your marketing budget, separate from the cost of keeping a website online.

Doing nothing still costs the hosting, domain and email. The hidden costs come from what lapses:

• Intro prices end. Hosting can jump to several times the first-year price, as the example above shows.
• Free SSL can stop. 123 Reg's Economy plan includes it for the first year only. Since July 2018 Chrome has marked every site without it “Not secure”.
• Plugin licences renew. On WordPress, paid plugins bill yearly; Elementor Pro renews at its regular rate after any first-year offer.
• Domains expire. If a renewal fails, the website and any email on that domain stop working.
• Forms break quietly. Nobody tells you an enquiry form has stopped sending. You only notice the phone is quieter.

Put the domain and hosting renewal dates in your diary, keep a card on file that will not expire, and send yourself a test enquiry every month. If the site has dropped out of search, why a website is not showing on Google walks through the checks.

• Do it yourself if you are comfortable logging in to a hosting account, can spare an hour a month, and the site is simple. About £151 a year ex VAT is hard to beat.
• Use a builder if you built the site yourself on Wix or Squarespace and are happy to keep it there.
• Pay for a maintenance plan if the site brings in work and you would rather not be the one who notices it is down.
• Choose Growth Care if you want hosting, changes and monitoring handled together, with a monthly report and someone looking for improvements. It costs more than a basic plan, and that is the trade.

If Coltura built your site for £1,400, you own it and can host it yourself on any of the hosts above. If you are not sure what your current site is costing you, or whether it is worth keeping, a free Growth Audit gives you a written, prioritised list of what is costing you enquiries and what we would do about it, whether or not you go ahead. If it is time to start again, what a website redesign costs in the UK and the Growth Website page cover that.