What a website actually costs.

The build

This is the one-off price for making the thing. For a small business in the UK it realistically runs from a few hundred pounds for a single well-made page to several thousand for a shop or a booking system. My own prices are £450, £950, £1,400 and £1,900 depending on what the site has to do, and they're set out on the pricing page rather than hidden behind a form.

What you want to watch for is the phrase "from". A price that starts at £299 and arrives at £1,200 isn't a price, it's an opening position. Ask for the scope and the total in writing before anyone starts. Any reasonable person will give you that.

The domain name

Your web address. It renews every year, usually for somewhere between ten and thirty pounds depending on the ending. The .co.uk and .com endings are the normal choices, and the difference between them matters less than people think.

The important part isn't the money. It's whose name it's registered in. It should be yours, with you on the account, able to log in. If your designer registers it in their name "to keep things simple", you don't own your own address, and getting it back when you want to move is anywhere between awkward and impossible. This is the single most common way small businesses get stuck.

Hosting

Where the site lives. For a straightforward business site this is often free and genuinely so: several of my own sites, this one included, cost nothing to host. Larger or busier sites need a paid plan, typically a few pounds a month.

If someone quotes you £40 a month for hosting a five-page site, ask what's in it. Sometimes it's support and updates bundled under a confusing name, which is fair enough. Sometimes it isn't.

The extras, if you need them

Business email on your own domain is a few pounds per mailbox per month. Booking systems charge monthly, and the cheap ones are often fine. Selling online adds a fee on each payment: the card processor takes a small percentage plus a few pence per transaction, which is the normal cost of taking money and not something to be alarmed by.

These are only costs if you need them. A joiner who wants a phone number and some photographs of their work needs none of it.

Care plans

A monthly fee for updates, backups and keeping things patched. For a shop or anything with logins, worth having. For a five-page site that says who you are and where to find you, usually not.

I'll say plainly that most small sites don't need one, and I only suggest it where I think it earns its money. If you're being pushed onto a mandatory plan for a simple site, ask what would actually break without it.

The cost nobody quotes

Being locked in. A site built on a platform you can't export, a domain in someone else's name, a design nobody else can edit. You don't feel it on day one. You feel it in year three when you want to change something and the only options are pay the original builder's new price or start again.

Ask three questions before you sign anything. Who owns the domain? Can I get a copy of the site? Can another developer work on it? If the answers are you, yes and yes, the rest is detail.

So what should you budget?

For most small businesses around here: a one-off build in the hundreds to low thousands, plus roughly £10 to £30 a year for the domain, plus nothing much else unless you're taking bookings or payments. That's it.

There's a breakdown of the running costs on the homepage too. If you want a straight answer for your own situation, get in touch and tell me what the business does. I'll tell you what I'd charge and what it'll cost to keep going, and if you only need a Google listing and a phone number I'll tell you that instead.