Website maintenance costs: what a website costs after launch

After launch, your website keeps costing money for its domain, its hosting, its security certificate and the software it runs on. Those website maintenance costs come back every year your website stays live. The build is different, because it's done once, even if the website builder you use is a subscription. Marketing is a third kind of cost, and how much of it you take on is up to you.

Building your website: the one-off cost

The build gives your website its look and its features. Web design covers the look of your website and how it works on a phone, a tablet or a computer. The build also covers how many pages you have, your text and images, and features such as an online shop or bookings.

If you build it yourself, you pay for a website builder or another tool. If a freelancer or an agency builds it, you pay for their time too. Our guide to what it costs to build a website goes through each route in more detail.

The website maintenance costs you pay every year

After launch, a handful of costs keep coming back, though some come inside a plan rather than as a bill of their own.

• Domain name. Your domain name is registered for a set period, a year at a time with us, where it renews automatically by default. Its price depends on the extension you choose, such as .co.uk or .com.
• Hosting. A web hosting plan keeps your website's files on a server that delivers them to your visitors when they type in your address. Its price depends on the plan you choose.
• Security certificate. An SSL certificate encrypts the connection between your website and its visitors, so information such as passwords can't be read by anyone in between. Our hosting plans include one, so there's no separate bill for it with us.
• Software, themes and plugins. If your website runs on WordPress, you should update it to each new version as part of the upkeep, along with your theme and plugins. Some themes also cost money, or come free and charge for support, on top of your hosting.
• Backups. Our hosting plans include a daily website backup, a copy of your files kept in case something breaks. From the Professional plan up you can restore it yourself, while on Starter you can see your backups but upgrade to restore one.

Your domain and your hosting are the two costs that keep your website online. If you stop renewing a domain registered with us, it eventually goes back on the open market. Visitors can then no longer find your website at that address. Without hosting, your website's files are no longer delivered to anyone who visits.

It's usually simpler to pay for several of these costs in one plan, so you have fewer bills and renewals to keep track of.

Our Aida AI Website Builder plans all include hosting and professional email on your domain, plus a domain that's free for the first year on selected extensions.

What web marketing costs

Web marketing is how people find your website once it's live, and you pay for it in money, in time or both. If your budget is tight, you can leave most of it until your website is up and running.

SEO is about helping search engines understand your pages and helping people find your website. Google doesn't take payment to rank a website higher in its normal results. What SEO costs you is time, or the fee of someone who does it for you.

Pay-per-click advertising, such as Google Ads, can show your ad in the search results, and you pay when someone clicks it. You set an average daily budget for each campaign. Over a month, most campaigns spend no more than 30.4 times that amount, which is roughly one daily budget for each day of the month.

Content marketing covers anything from articles on your website to social media posts and videos that bring people to you. You can write your own content if you have the time, or pay a copywriter to write it for you.

With a new website, don't take on all three at once. Start with the basics of SEO, and add paid ads once you know which customers you want to reach.

What a website costs per month and per year

A domain registered with us renews once a year. Hosting or a website builder plan is a subscription you keep paying while your website is online.

To see what your website costs to run each year, add your domain renewal to a year of your hosting or builder plan. Then add any paid themes, support or marketing. Divide that total by 12 to get your website cost per month. Our domain and hosting pages show the current prices, so you can fill in your own figures.

With us, the price of a domain may include a special offer for the first year, so look at the renewal price before you register. When you compare quotes from freelancers or agencies, check whether they include VAT, since the standard rate is 20%.

Should you maintain your website yourself?

For a small business website, yes, as long as you're happy to install your own updates and your hosting or builder plan looks after the server, the SSL certificate and backups. Doing it yourself then means installing updates when they come out, checking each month that your backups ran and looking over your pages every few months.

Our advice: do the upkeep yourself if you don't mind handling your own updates. Choose a plan that includes hosting, an SSL certificate and daily backups, as our hosting plans do. When your website plays an important role in your business, pay for Managed Hosting for WordPress, Premium WordPress Care or one of the website maintenance packages a freelancer or an agency offers. The same goes when your time is worth more to you than the fee. To compare, ask what a package costs and what it covers, and set that against the time your own updates and checks take.

With your running costs added up, you can pick the route that fits your budget. If one plan with hosting and email included suits you, you can build your website with Aida AI Website Builder and try it free for 14 days.