Cost guide
The hidden costs of a cheap website
Almost nobody sets out to overspend on a website. They agree a sensible figure, and then discover over eighteen months that the figure was for the build and nothing else. Here is the full list of what turns up afterwards.
| Cost | Typical UK price | On our plans |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £10–£20 a year | Included |
| Hosting | £60–£400 a year | Included |
| SSL certificate | £0–£150 a year | Included |
| Premium theme & plugin licences | £100–£500 a year | Not used — hand-built |
| Stock photography | £50–£300 one-off | Sourced for you |
| Copywriting | £150–£600 a page | Included on key pages |
| Small text or price changes | £40–£150 an hour | Included every month |
| Security fixes after a hack | £300–£1,500 one-off | Our problem, not yours |
| Rebuild when the platform ages out | £2,000+ every 3–5 years | Kept current, no rebuild fee |
Where these numbers come from. They are indicative UK ranges for a small business website of roughly 5–15 pages, based on published rate cards and the quotes clients show us when they come to compare. They are not a survey, and your own quotes may land outside them. Our own prices are exact, because they are ours.
The five that catch people out most
1. The hourly rate for small changes
This is the big one, and it is rarely hidden so much as not thought through. At £95 an hour with a one-hour minimum, changing your prices costs £95. Adding a member of staff costs £95. A Christmas opening notice costs £95. What happens in practice is not that businesses pay it — it is that they stop asking, and the site slowly stops being true.
How to avoid it: agree an included allowance up front, or agree a rate with a fifteen-minute minimum rather than an hour. Ask what a typical month has looked like for their other clients.
2. Premium theme and plugin licences
A lot of £1,500 WordPress builds are assembled from a commercial theme and eight or ten paid plugins. Those licences are annual. In year one they are often bought on the developer’s account and absorbed; in year two they land on you, or they silently lapse and the plugins stop receiving security updates.
How to avoid it: ask for a written list of every paid component, its annual cost, and whose account it is registered to. If the answer is vague, that is your answer.
3. Hosting that was cheap for a reason
Introductory hosting deals at £2.99 a month renew at three or four times that. More importantly, the cheapest shared hosting is where slow websites come from — hundreds of sites on one overloaded machine, and your Core Web Vitals paying for it. Speed is a ranking factor, so this is not merely an aesthetic problem.
How to avoid it: ask what the renewal price is, not the first-year price, and run the finished site through Google PageSpeed Insights before you sign anything off.
4. Getting hacked
An unmaintained WordPress site with out-of-date plugins will eventually be compromised — usually by an automated scan rather than anybody targeting you. The clean-up runs to several hundred pounds, and if Google has flagged the site in the meantime, the traffic takes weeks to come back.
How to avoid it: somebody must be responsible for applying updates, and it needs to be a named person or a plan, not an assumption. Confirm that backups exist, are automatic, and have been tested by actually restoring one.
5. The rebuild nobody mentioned
Most small business sites get rebuilt every three to five years. The platform ages, the plugins become unmaintained, the design dates, or the person who built it has moved on and nobody else wants to touch it. That is another build fee, and it is the single largest hidden cost of the lot.
How to avoid it: favour simplicity. The fewer moving parts a site has, the longer it lasts. A hand-built site with no plugin stack does not rot in the same way, which is the main reason we build them that way.
Seven warning signs in a quote
- No mention of hosting. Every site needs it. If it is not in the quote, it is not included.
- The domain is registered to them. This should be you, always. Ask directly.
- “SEO included” with no deliverables listed. Ask what will be done, and what report you will see.
- No change policy at all. Not even a rate. This means the conversation happens when you are least able to negotiate.
- Copywriting unmentioned. Assume you are writing every word, and budget the evenings.
- No mention of backups. A site without backups is a site you will one day rebuild for free, in a hurry.
- A single number with no breakdown. You cannot compare it and you cannot hold anybody to it.
Check who owns your domain name right now. Log in to the registrar yourself — if you cannot, or you do not know who can, that is worth resolving this week rather than during a dispute. Our domains and hosting guide explains how to check.
What we do differently, and what it costs
We are not immune to any of this — we just price it in. Hosting, SSL, backups, security, monitoring and your monthly changes are all inside the monthly fee, and we do not build on a plugin stack that needs annual licences. That is why the plans start at £45 rather than £20: the number is the whole number.
You can see exactly what that works out to over one, three and five years in the cost guide.
Questions
How much should I budget a year to run a small business website?
If you own the site and manage it yourself, budget £150 to £500 a year for domain, hosting, SSL and any licences, plus whatever your own time is worth for updates. If you want someone else responsible for it, £180 to £1,440 a year is the normal UK range depending on how much support and change work is included.
Who should own my domain name?
You, in your own name or your company's, in an account you can log into. It is entirely normal for a designer to register it on your behalf, but it should be registered to you as the owner and you should have access. If a supplier will not transfer your domain to you on request, that is a serious warning sign about everything else in the relationship.
Is WordPress more expensive to run than a custom site?
Usually, yes, once you count everything. WordPress itself is free, but a typical small business build adds a commercial theme, several paid plugins, a security service and regular update work — and each of those is an annual cost and a thing that can break. A hand-built site has fewer moving parts, so there is less to license, less to update and less to go wrong. WordPress earns its keep when you genuinely need its ecosystem.
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