£7 to £30 a month, or about £82 to £366 a year before VAT, keeps a small UK business website running if you look after it yourself: a domain name, shared hosting at its renewal price, a free security certificate and one business email inbox. Hand the upkeep to someone else and a maintenance plan adds from £50 a month. The website build itself is a separate, one-off cost, and the cheap first-year deals most hosts advertise end after one to four years, so every figure below uses the price you pay once they do.
How much does a website cost per month to run in the UK?
About £7 to £25 a month for the domain and hosting alone, rising to about £12 to £30 a month once you add one business email inbox, before VAT. That is the running cost of a five to fifteen page brochure site on shared hosting where you install your own updates. Managed WordPress hosting, where the host handles more of the technical side, costs £20 to £40 a month instead of the shared hosting line. The bills come from different companies, so they rarely arrive as one monthly figure: the domain is usually billed once a year, hosting monthly or yearly, and email per person per month.
| Running cost | Per year | Per month | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain name (.co.uk or .com) | £10 to £13 | About £1 | Renewal prices at IONOS (£10 .co.uk) and GoDaddy UK (£12.99), from our domain guide |
| Shared hosting at renewal | £72 to £288 | £6 to £24 | IONOS Web Hosting Standard (£6 a month) up to SiteGround GrowBig (£23.99 a month), from our hosting guide |
| SSL security certificate | £0 | £0 | Let’s Encrypt, which most UK hosts install for you |
| One business email inbox | £64.80 | £5.40 | Microsoft 365 Business Basic, paid yearly |
| Total, looking after it yourself | £146.80 to £365.80 | About £12 to £30 | The four lines above added together |
| Optional: a maintenance plan from us | From £600 | From £50 | Our maintenance plans |
All of these prices exclude VAT. If your business is not VAT-registered, add 20% to every line.
How much does a website cost per year?
About £82 to £301 a year for the domain and hosting, or £147 to £366 a year with one email inbox, before VAT, for a small site you maintain yourself. The cheapest realistic pairing we found is a .co.uk at IONOS (£10 a year to renew) with IONOS Web Hosting Standard (£72 a year once its six month deal ends), which comes to £82. At the top of the shared hosting range, SiteGround GrowBig renews at £287.88 a year. Add a maintenance plan from £50 a month and the yearly figure starts at around £750.
The first year almost always costs less. IONOS charged £3 a month for the first 6 months of Web Hosting Standard when we checked on 10 October 2026, then £6 a month. That is why the second year’s bill surprises so many people, and why we budget from the renewal price.
What are the ongoing costs of a website?
4 costs come back every year whatever happens: the domain name, the hosting, business email for each person who needs it, and someone’s time or money to keep the software updated. A fifth, the SSL certificate that puts the padlock in the browser, used to cost money and now usually does not. Everything else is optional: paid plugins, a booking or shop subscription, stock photography, SEO and advertising. Those optional lines are where costs grow, so it is worth listing them before you commit to a platform.
- Domain name: £10 to £13 a year to renew a .co.uk or .com, before VAT.
- Hosting: £6 to £24 a month for shared hosting at renewal, or £20 to £40 a month for managed WordPress hosting.
- Business email: £5.40 a user a month for Microsoft 365 Business Basic on a yearly plan.
- Updates and backups: an hour or two of your own time a month on a small WordPress site, or a paid plan.
- SSL certificate: £0 with Let’s Encrypt.
What is the average cost of a website per month?
About £19 a month, or roughly £225 a year before VAT, for a self-managed small business site with one email inbox, using the middle of the prices we checked. There is no official UK average, so here is the working rather than a borrowed number: £10 for the domain, about £150 a year for hosting (the middle of the ten UK hosting plans in our hosting guide sits near £12.50 a month), and £64.80 for one Microsoft 365 Business Basic inbox. That adds up to £224.80 a year. With a maintenance plan on top, the average monthly cost moves to about £70.
Do you have to pay for a website monthly?
Yes, or yearly: a website always has recurring costs, even after the build is paid for. The domain has to be renewed, normally once a year, and the hosting has to be paid for as long as the site is live. Most hosts let you choose monthly or yearly billing, and yearly is often cheaper. Microsoft charges £5.40 a user a month for Business Basic on a yearly plan, or £6.48 if you pay month to month. What you do not have to pay monthly is the person who built it. With us, the build is one fixed price, and the hosting and domain accounts are set up in your name so you pay the providers directly.
How much does it cost to maintain a website per year?
£0 in cash if you do the updates yourself, or from £600 a year on one of our maintenance plans, which start at £50 a month. On a small WordPress site, maintenance means installing core, theme and plugin updates, checking backups are running and fixing anything an update breaks. Our website maintenance guide breaks down what each level of plan covers. Our Business package includes 90 days of support after launch and Premium includes 12 months, so the maintenance bill starts later on those builds.
Is an SSL certificate an extra cost?
No, not usually. Let’s Encrypt issues trusted certificates at zero cost to anyone who owns a domain name, and most UK hosts install one automatically. Paid certificates still exist and some hosts still sell them, but a small business brochure site or shop does not need one to show the padlock in the browser. If your host is charging you for SSL every year, ask whether it supports Let’s Encrypt before you renew.
How much does business email cost for a website?
£5.40 a user a month on a yearly plan, or £6.48 a user a month on a monthly plan, for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, before VAT. That gives each person an inbox on your own domain, such as hello@yourbusiness.co.uk, plus web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and cloud storage. Google Workspace Business Starter was listed at $7 a user a month on monthly billing when we checked; its pricing page showed us US dollars only, so check the pound price at sign-up. Some hosting plans include basic mailboxes, which can be enough for one or two people.
What is the cheapest way to have a website?
£0 on a website builder’s free plan, or about £82 a year before VAT for a site on your own domain with your own hosting. Wix, GoDaddy, Webflow and Canva all have free plans, each with its own limits, which our website builder cost guide compares. For a business, the cheapest setup we would actually recommend is your own domain and low-cost shared hosting, because you own both and can move them if the provider puts its prices up. The cheapest pairing in our checks was a .co.uk at £10 a year and IONOS Web Hosting Standard at £72 a year once its intro deal ends.
Is a website builder cheaper to run than your own hosting?
Not usually: paid website builder plans cost about £2.99 to £79 a month, against £6 to £24 a month for shared hosting you control. A builder bundles the hosting, the software and the updates into one subscription, which is simpler, and that is what you are paying for. The catch is that you cannot take a Wix site to another host, so the subscription runs for as long as the site does. Our builder versus web designer comparison sets the two side by side over several years.
Does the cost of building the website come on top?
Yes. The build is a one-off cost: £495 for our Starter website, £1,495 for Business and from £3,995 for Premium, each fixed before work starts. In the US the same packages are $625, $1,895 and from $4,995. The running costs on this page are paid to the domain, hosting and email providers, not to us, unless you choose a maintenance or SEO plan. Our UK website cost guide covers what you get at each build price, and the website cost calculator adds up build and running costs over three years.
Tell us what your site needs and we will price the build and the running costs before you commit.
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