What are the costs of having a website?

It’s so easy to get a turnkey website these days. Big names like Wix and Squarespace make it simple to have a presence online in hours, not days. But are there any downsides to these types of websites? What are the costs of having a website and keeping it up to date? Should you weigh your options more carefully? We’ll discuss it in this 5-minute read.

Build

With all-in-one hosting and publishing tools, you may feel like you can skip the build costs altogether. And for some very niche business cases where your website is just window dressing, that’s true. But for most operations, you need a more robust and customised solution that doesn’t look like every other website out there. In fact, there are a fair few common mistakes people make when they try to use templates that cost them sales and brand awareness. So, spending the £1,000-£1,500 it takes to get even a basic custom website design is often worth it.

Hosting

Once you have a design, you need to put it somewhere. All the files and elements associated with your website need to be securely stored on a server that your customers can access remotely. The cost for this storage is known as hosting. And there are lots of different kinds from shared to dedicated web hosting. Make sure to check the host offers SSL and has service-level agreements for KPIs like uptime before making your choice. Costs for this part of website ownership range from £10-£350 monthly – depending on what type of hosting you choose. This is a required cost, but it’s good to shop around every few years to make sure you’re getting the best deals.

Domain

A domain name is the written representation of the location of your website on the internet. It’s easier than using the IP address and it ranges in price based on the ‘desirability’ of the words in the name. According to Google, “Anyone can purchase a domain name. You just go to a domain host or registrar, find a name no one else is using, and pay a small annual fee to own it.” The price for these names starts at £9.99 per year for a .com or £4.99 for .co.uk addresses. This is a mandatory cost and you should put it on automatic renewal to prevent big issues on expiry.

Maintenance

This is one of the forgotten costs of having a website. Sometimes links break, pages need to be updated and content becomes unsupported and you’ll need web developers on hand to help you with that. You can get a support plan with your web design studio or pay hourly for dev assistance at £50-£150 per hour depending on experience.

Marketing

Lastly, when you have a website, you want people to come to it. (Makes sense, you’ve just spent all that money.) SEO is the process of making your website easy for Google and other search engines to read and it results (in the longer term) in organic or free traffic. But, if you have targets to hit, you might want to jump into paid advertising on Google Ads or other online platforms. For even modest budgets of £500-£1000 per month, you can see significant returns on your ads.

Want help optimising your website costs or help with scaling a business? Let’s talk about that.